Gabriel Burt's Blog

What's Happening @Banshee

2011-05-03T03:01:00.000Z

@Banshee is finally on twitter, where we'll always keep you up to date and sometimes entertained if you follow us.

We also just released Banshee 2.0.1, a stable, bug-fix-only follow on to 2.0.0!

We've got 2.1.x releases scheduled leading up to 2.2 in September. We'll be porting to Gtk# 3 and dropping a bunch of legacy deps in the process, while still supporting users on older distros. I e-mailed banshee-list more about what that means and how we'll do it.

Banshee 2.0 is here!

2011-04-06T17:13:00.000Z

We are thrilled to announce the release of Banshee 2.0! It's the culmination of six months' work by 36 developers and dozens of translators, documenters, bug reporters, and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 1.8.

New Features:

Artist/Album Browser Track Actions
Play After Queue Options
Sleeker UI, Less Wasted Space
Video Subtitle Support
Lots of new devices supported
Amazon Cloud Player download support
Hundreds (277, to be exact) of bugs fixed, and dozens more minor enhancements!

View the release notes for much more information, or head straight to the download page.

The Banshee community has come a long way in the last six months.

We now support Windows in addition to Linux and OS X. Our Windows installer has been downloaded by 12,729 unique IPs.
We are donating $1,200 USD per month to the GNOME Foundation — that's over $15,000 annually, or 5% of GNOME's 2009 budget.
And Ubuntu decided to make us their default music player, joining the ranks of openSUSE and Foresight Linux.

Congratulations and many thanks to everybody who made all this possible! If you want to learn more about Banshee, how you can contribute, get in touch, get help, etc, head over to our website.

PDF Mod Update

2011-03-03T19:53:00.000Z

I haven't blogged about PDF Mod since Nov, 2009. We've had five releases in the meantime, including 0.9.1 just released today!

We have had tons of improvements and fixes, and one major new feature: bookmark editing!

We're up to 26 translations now, including 11 of our user manual!

As a reminder, PDF Mod can:

pull out (extract) pages from a document into a new PDF
combine two documents, or parts thereof
reorder and rotate pages
extract embedded images
edit basic metadata (title, author, keywords)
edit a document's bookmarks (aka outlines)
and that's it!

Links
tarballs, release notes, git, mailing list, irc, bugzilla, website/wiki

Canonical's New Plan for Banshee

2011-02-24T16:58:00.002Z

This is an update to my previous post. Canonical asked the Banshee maintainers to join a conference call about an hour ago. They announced their new plan, calling past proposals mistakes:

Banshee's Amazon store will remain enabled, with Canonical taking a 75% cut of all affiliate revenue; 25% on Ubuntu will now go to the GNOME Foundation.
The Ubuntu One store for Banshee will remain enabled by default, but now Canonical will donate 25% of its revenue to GNOME. They will now do the same for Rhythmbox.

Banshee Supporting GNOME on Ubuntu

2011-02-15T16:23:00.000Z

Background
The Banshee maintainers and community have been proud to support GNOME by sending 100% of our FOSS Amazon MP3 store's affiliate revenue to the Foundation. We're already on pace to contribute at the same level as a small company on the Advisory Board, $10,000 USD per year, and revenue is increasing every month.

Canonical's Proposals
After choosing Banshee as the next default player in Ubuntu, Canonical approached us, concerned with how our Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store. They proposed two options:

Canonical disables the Amazon store by default (you could enable it in a few easy steps) but leaves the affiliate code alone (100% still to GNOME), or
Canonical leaves the Amazon store enabled, but changes the affiliate code and takes a 75% cut.

Our Response
We are pleased that Canonical is willing to leave the affiliate code unaltered.

As maintainers of the Banshee project, we have opted unanimously to decline Canonical's revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent. The GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors supports this decision.

The Banshee Maintainer Team
Aaron Bockover, Alexander Kojevnikov, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Amazon Affiliate Revenue

2010-12-15T22:24:00.000Z

Since late July Banshee has had AmazonMP3 store integration, earning a 10% affiliate fee. We're proud to send all of that revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Here is the cumulative revenue breakdown per store:

Amazon.com	$1185
Amazon.de	€315
Amazon.co.uk	£80
Amazon.co.jp	¥28
Amazon.fr	€70

That totals to about $1800 USD, all going directly to the GNOME Foundation! This accounts for about half of what GNOME has earned from Amazon in the last six months.

Our revenue has increased every month, too; in December we're on track for another record month! Find out more about Banshee...

Use Bugzilla Like a Champ

2010-08-16T18:22:00.005Z

Things that can eat up way too much time:

Given a bug id #, going to its URL
Searching bugzilla

To save time, frustration, and get more done (since it's no longer time-consuming and frustrating), I added a few, special bookmarks. They contain a keyword, which you can type in the URL bar to go to the bookmark, and a %s, which is replaced by whatever you type after the keyword in the URL bar. In Firefox, you can right click a bookmark and edit its Properties to add a keyword.

Here are the ones I use most, and examples of what you can type in the URL/Awesome bar:

Go to a bug: bgoid
bgoid 585112
Search BGO: bgo
bgo product:banshee os:windows
bgo product:hyena status:needinfo
Other search fields you can use
Search Banshee bugs by summary: bbug
bbug startup crash
bbug metadata

Enjoy!

GUADEC 2010

2010-07-20T15:41:00.006Z

Business
I'm giving a talk on Friday, July 30 at 10:15am. I intend it for people who want to start hacking on FOSS and GNOME projects but haven't found a way in yet, and those of all experience levels who want to learn more about hacking on Banshee in particular. Of course I'll talk a lot about the state of the project, and some of our cool new features too.

Pleasure
If you want to meet up in Amsterdam sometime Wednesday through Saturday, or in The Hague after that, send me an e-mail. I arrive in AMS early Wednesday with no plans.

Finally, a lazyweb request: if you have advice on prepaid data SIM cards in the Netherlands, I'd love to hear it.

Update
After taking the train to Amsterdam Central, I went to this Vodafone store and got a €7.50 sim card, €5 of call/txt credit (incoming is free, outgoing is 30 cents/min and 19 cents/txt) and a 50% off €10 30 days of data — so all told, €17.50. The guy spent 10 min or so fiddling with my G1 (dev phone) to get it activated, and then I goggled the APN info you need to enter manually: live.vodafone.com with username and password 'Vodafone'. Seems to be working great!

Banshee 1.7.0

2010-05-05T21:04:00.001Z

We just released the first of the unstable/beta releases leading up to Banshee 1.8. We are aligning with the GNOME release schedule for 1.8, like we did for 1.6. The Banshee calendar has the full release schedule. Our download page describes how to get beta releases. See the 1.7.0 release notes for more information.

One small new feature is the ability to switch sources quickly via the keyboard. You can type 'g' to activate the switcher, then type a source's name, acroynm, or substring of the name to switch to it — eg g then np to switch to Now Playing.

Busy Busy
There is a lot going on in the Banshee community! For example:

Alex Launi was accepted to Google Summer of Code to work on Banshee's Now Playing source, making it slicker and more useful. Banshee co-maintainer Alexander Kojevnikov will be mentoring him.
Mike Urbanski is working hard to get his podcast-ng branch merged into master, get it tested, and possibly replace the current Podcast extension for 1.8.
Paul Cutler is preparing to ramp up his docs branch work, adding in-app end-user documentation to Banshee.
I'll be speaking about Banshee at GUADEC. More on this later.
We'll be making very frequent 1.7.x releases, quickly getting contributors' fixes and features into users hands.

There will be dozens of other features in 1.8, but they depend on what piques contributors' interest and motivation. You can wait and see what makes it — or get involved and make things happen!

Beautiful Evidence of Committers

2010-04-02T02:09:00.010Z

Background

A couple years ago I got turned on to Edward Tufte's books about visualizing data. It's inspiring work, showing the value and beauty of data-rich visualizations that work at multiple levels. Since then, I have wanted to apply the principles he espouses in my own work, leveraging software for data processing and interactivity.

This is my first attempt. I wanted to visualize who contributes to a given project and how long they've been involved. I knew I had speedy access to the commit logs via git, but the choice of tools or languages to process and generate the display was harder to make. I opted to try using Perl (a language ingrained in my memory from using it at the LJ World) and HTML/CSS (ingrained from numerous projects and jobs).

The Evidence

I'm happy with the result. You can quickly see when people started contributing, and the changing rate at which they joined. And you can see how long any given contributor stayed involved. I generated charts for a few git repos I already had checked out, including Banshee.

This is a scaled screenshot of the rendered HTML output, which I encourage you to click through to since it has tooltips and is zoomable in your browser. The script is available, and barring bugs should work on any git repo.

Banshee 1.6!

2010-03-31T21:50:00.000Z

As scheduled, we just released Banshee 1.6.0! This release has been a long time coming, and we're really proud of it.

A more detailed backstory

We originally intended to release 1.6 last fall, but we got caught short on time, and ended up calling 1.5.1 a stable release so distros would feel comfortable picking it up, but of course the weird versioning has caused quite some confusion.

We continued the 1.5 series with 1.5.2 though 1.5.7 betas, leading up to this release: 1.6.0. The process really started 14 months ago when we branched off 1.4, and master became the workplace for 1.5. It wasn't even until after we branched that Alexander Kojevnikov, now one our most prolific contributors and a maintainer of the project, got involved!

Beautiful numbers

53 programmers contributed to Banshee 1.6 just since 1.5.1, and over Banshee's full history, 142 programmers have contributed. I think these are astounding numbers. And these don't include Banshee Community Extensions, which started two months ago today and already includes 15 extensions and 19 maintainers.

We fixed 265 bugs since 1.5.1 as well (over 500 since 1.4), added dozens of new features and enhancements, and had over 2,000 beta users opt-in to report anonymous usage data that we will use to make Banshee better.

Banshee 1.6

Here are some of the new features in Banshee 1.6. Read the Release Notes for more detail, screenshots, and enhancements not listed here.

Play Queue Auto DJ
Sync Device From Playlist
Grid View
Type-ahead Find in Track, Artist, and Album Lists
Automatic Scoring
New Shuffle Modes
Audiobooks Library
Library-folder Watcher
eMusic Importer/Downloader
Internet Archive Extension
YouTube Extension
Improved Metadata Handling

A community effort

Thanks to everybody who has helped make Banshee such a success! Tremendous thanks go to Bertrand Lortentz and Alexander Kojevnikov, who over the last year in particular have contributed countless hours writing their own patches and reviewing others', triaging bugzilla, being active on IRC and the list, and generally being great maintainers of the project. They have invested in Banshee, and the effect on Banshee's quality and the community's growth is evident.

You can tap into the Banshee community and energy in many ways – read Planet Banshee, follow us on Twitter, lurk in the #banshee chat room, subscribe to banshee-list, monitor bug activity, and keep up with the latest code. We're a friendly, productive bunch, so stop by if you have a question or idea, if you want to contribute or you just want to learn how you can make your own project better.

Banshee 1.5.5

2010-03-11T19:14:00.003Z

We released Banshee 1.5.5 – aka 1.6 RC 1 – yesterday, with a lot of bug fixes, polish, and a couple new features.

Gapless Playback / Playbin2

Banshee now uses the playbin2 GStreamer element. With this comes support for gapless playback, which is the default now for users with GStreamer > 0.10.25.2.

Grid View

We are debuting a new grid mode for our custom list widget, visible in the modified Album browser. It will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.

Album browser, now as a grid

YouTube Extension

This extension shows YouTube videos in the Context Pane related to what you're playing, and lets you watch them within Banshee. You can enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

Contextual YouTube videos

Banshee Community Extensions Update

We also released Banshee Community Extensions 1.5.5, including five new extensions: CoverWallpaper, LiveRadio, Magnatune, Telepathy, and Ubuntu One Music Store (not ready for users yet).

The Mirage shuffle/fill by-similar mode has been greatly improved. It's smarter, now looking for tracks similar to the last several you've played, and dissimilar from ones you've skipped.

Enhancements and Fixes

Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks
Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4
Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
Accept feeds with empty title
Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
Fixes to the OS X build

Plans

We are now string frozen in preparation for our 1.6 release on March 31st - so translators, full steam ahead! We might do a RC 2 in a couple weeks for additional testing and fixes. File bugs for any issues you find, and help us make Banshee 1.6 the best release ever!

Banshee Metrics

2010-03-03T18:18:00.008Z

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.

383	Ubuntu
33	source-tarball
27	openSUSE/SLED
22	git-checkout
20	OS X
16	Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.

223	en-US
51	en-GB
41	de-DE
35	unknown
21	ru-RU
18	it-IT
14	fr-FR
12	en-CA
11	en-AU
11	es-ES
9	pl-PL
8	pt-BR
6	es-CL
5	es-MX
5	nl-NL
5	sv-SE

About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

Banshee 1.5.4

2010-02-25T01:12:00.000Z

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar

Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned!

Other Notable Improvements

Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
Add support for Nokia N900 phones
Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
Fixes to GIO backend
Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Banshee Community Extensions

2010-02-18T05:39:00.015Z

Introduction

Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup.

Its source is hosted on gitorious, dramatically lowering the barrier to committing and sharing your code publicly.

This centralization makes things easier on translators and packagers, too. And users get access (without manually downloading/installing) to the fruits of the extension community's labor.

Creating a Working Extension in Minutes

It's ridiculously easy to make a new extension. Install Banshee 1.5.3 (including the devel package), or build/install the latest from git master instead. Then,

git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions.git
cd banshee-community-extensions
./create-extension Foo
make run

This creates, builds, and runs Banshee with your extension. Go to Edit » Preferences » Extensions to enable it, and see it appear:

We already have seven extensions migrated, and one brand new one!

AlarmClock
Awn
ClutterFlow
LCD
Lyrics
Mirage
RadioStationFetcher
StreamRecorder

And, we have 13 maintainers already!

We have bleeding-edge openSUSE/SLED packages available, and Ubuntu packages should be ready in time for Banshee 1.5.4 next week.

If you've been putting off some extension idea you've had, delay no longer! Read the full Extension Writers Guide, and get started today!

Thanks

Thanks to Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair, our fearless Ubuntu packager) for broaching the idea behind BCE, and to Bertrand Lorentz for teaming with me to get things to this state - in just two weeks!

Banshee 1.5.3

2010-01-27T21:52:00.006Z

We've just released Banshee 1.5.3, containing a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes.

New Features:

Sync device from playlist option
Type-ahead find in track, artist, and album lists
Optional cover art in lower-left corner
Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
Audiobooks library extension
Library-folder watcher extension
eMusic importer/downloader extension
GIO file backend, supports non-local files

Read the 1.5.3 Release Notes for the full scoop and some screenshots of the new features.

This release is what will become Banshee 1.6 and be picked up by distros; your help testing it and filing bugs is important and appreciated!

Try It

You can get packages for your distro, grab the source tarball, or follow the bleeding edge by trying it from git master.

Aaron worked hard to bring back the OS X build this release, too.

Digg It!

Banshee Release Schedule

2010-01-25T22:58:00.004Z

We are aligning Banshee's release schedule with GNOME's, at least for the next few months. Banshee 1.6 will be released the same day as GNOME 2.30, and we'll have three beta releases before then.

1.5.3 - Jan 27 - Wednesday!
1.5.4 - Feb 24
1.5.5 - Mar 10 - String Freeze
1.6.0 - Mar 31

I'm excited to try switching our schedule from feature and whim driven to time-based; I think it will be felt positively by everybody: contributors will know when their work will reach people, translators will have time to translate, and users can stop wondering what mixture of magic and bribes will cause a release to finally happen.

Subscribe to the Banshee development calendar, find out how to help test the latest Banshee, and/or contribute your creativity and sweat!

PDF Mod 0.8

2009-11-13T19:00:00.001Z

Contributors
Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Features

Add * to beginning of window title when unsaved
Can select more than one file in Open dialog
shift-ctrl-z now also works for Redo
Online docs now hosted on library.gnome.org
Add Invert Selection action

Bugs Fixed

Launching with relative filepaths in args works

New Translations
Bengali, Czech, Japanese, Russian

Translators
Alexandre Prokoudine, Daniel Nylander, Jorge González, Kris Thomsen, Łukasz Jernaś, Marek Černocký, Mario Blättermann, Og B. Maciel, Petr Kovar, Runa Bhattacharjee, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Takeshi AIHANA

More Info
See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

Banshee 1.5.1

2009-10-14T18:22:00.004Z

After another 4.5 months development, including contributions from 51 people, we have released Banshee 1.5.1! Shuffle Modes Shuffle by artist or album let you listen to everything by an artist or on an album before jumping to a new random artist or album. Shuffle by rating or score lets you shuffle through your songs, with higher rated or scored tracks being more likely to play. Thanks to Elena Grassi for her patch for the rating shuffle mode that got the ball rolling. Alexander Kojevnikov wrote more about the new shuffle modes on his blog. Auto DJ This new feature gives you the option to keep your Play Queue filled with endless music. It builds on the shuffle modes work, letting you fill the queue randomly in artist, album, song, rating, or score mode. As ever, you can manually add, remove, and reorder songs in the Play Queue — even while in Auto DJ mode. Alexander, the mastermind behind this new feature, wrote more about the Auto DJ on his blog. More Info Other notable new features include keeping the playing song visible, showing tooltips for ellipsized text in the main grid view, and support for WebOS and Samsung Galaxy devices. There were over 130 bugs fixed and 20 other enhancements added since 1.5.0. Read about them on the release notes. Visit our download page to try it out!

The Secret About Amazon's API it Doesn't Want Distributed

2009-10-12T17:16:00.002Z

Amazon's Product Advertising API (PAA) lets you search pretty much everything they offer. But on August 15 they started requiring that all requests to the API be signed with the developer's Private Key. Any client-side software using the PAA directly, including website scripts, Firefox extensions, and desktop applications, would have to distribute their Private Key to all their users to sign the requests. But as you would expect, the license agreement for the API states

a private key...is for your personal use only and you must maintain its secrecy and security.

Others have written about how the PAA license agreement bars its usage on mobile devices. But in fact, it bars it from any client-side software on any device. Or at least from software you want to distribute. You can work around this by hosting a server to sign requests for your users, keeping your Private Key private. But anybody could use your service, pretending to be your client software if necessary. And you could wind up signing requests for half the Internet. The signing requirement benefits nobody. It impedes developers, turning them off from creating applications to serve users and send customers Amazon's way. Amazon should acknowledge its mistake with this policy and reverse it. Thanks to James Vasile for reading drafts of this.

PDF Mod 0.7

2009-09-09T23:04:00.000Z

Contributors Romain Tartière, Bertrand Lorentz, Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca Features

View Fullscreen option
User docs translated into ca

Bugs Fixed

Build fixes for *bsd
Update recent files list after opening a document
libdir expansion issue fixed in Hyena, depends on 0.2

Translations

es (Andreu Correa Casablanca)
pt (Filipe Gomes)
sv (Daniel Nylander)

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more. I'd like to thank Bertrand Lorentz for doing the actual release!

PDF Mod 0.6

2009-08-18T22:04:00.001Z

Contributors Łukasz Jernaś, Sandy Armstrong, Igor Vatavuk, Bertrand Lorentz Features

Open in Viewer action that launches the default app (usually Evince)
Remembers last folder a doc was opened from
Remembers if the toolbar was hidden
Remember accelerator customizations

Bugs Fixed

Uses the XDG cache dir for storing tmp files
Does a better job of cleaning up tmp files
Fix bug with installing to custom prefix
Fix some zoom inconsistencies
Got rid of bundled binaries; Hyena is needed at build-time

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.5

2009-08-07T20:46:00.001Z

In the spirit of releasing early and often, here is PDF Mod 0.5, a quick three days after 0.4. Contributors Bertrand Lorentz, Michael McKinley Features

Password-protected PDFs can be opened
Page labels shown in tooltip, eg A-10, or iii
Undo/redo have descriptions, eg "Undo Move 5 Pages"

Bugs Fixed

Loading document doesn't block GUI thread
Desktop file validates
Process name set to pdfmod
Parallel make (-jN) works
make distcheck passes
icon-theme-installer included in tarball

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.4

2009-08-04T17:58:00.000Z

Patch Contributors Julien Rebetez, Igor Vatavuk Features

Insert external documents via menu/toolbar
Drag pages between open documents
Export images (jpg/png) working
Beautiful new icon from Kalle Persson
UI translated into 10 languages: da de es fr hr lt pl pt_BR sv ta
User docs translated into 5 langauges: de es hr pl sv

Bugs Fixed

No longer jumps to top on zoom or delete
Error messages are shown to user in popup
Scroll when dragging near the top or bottom
Clicking on select matching button works

See the wiki for information on the mailing list, IRC, downloading, git, filing bugs, etc.

PDF Mod Community

2009-07-31T22:07:00.002Z

PDF Mod is now taking advantage of the fabulous GNOME infrastructure:

We already have six translations of the app (da de fr lt pt_BR sv), and even some translations of our user manual (sv de). Oh, and we have this beautiful new icon created by Kalle Persson: If you want to translate the app or user manual, fix a bug, or implement a feature, please join us on the list or IRC and jump right in! We have a TODO if you're looking for something to do.

PDF Mod 0.3

2009-07-28T00:53:00.000Z

I just released PDF Mod 0.3, with quite a few new features and bug fixes. Sandy Armstrong, Aaron Bockover, and Olivier Le Thanh Duong contributed to this release. New Features

Convenience keybindings for zoom/quit
Open document by dragging from nautilus
Insert external PDF into current doc by dragging from nautilus
Properties (title, author, etc) editor
Recent Documents menu
User guide (F1)
French translation

Bugs Fixed

Opening files with spaces in the filename fixed
Page background rendering glitch fixed
Reordering and undo bug fixed
Reordering now only allows dropping left/right of a page
Desktop file now has pdf mimetype
Dispose some cairo contexts we were missing

Links

PDF Mod

2009-07-24T20:52:00.001Z

On Monday I started working on a new app, PDF Mod, for doing simple manipulations to PDF files. Five days later, I'm proud to present it to you: It can rotate, extract, and remove pages, and supports reordering pages via drag and drop. Visit the project wiki for links to the git repo, tarball and package downloading, user guides, bugzilla, the mailing list, irc, and more. There are likely some bugs, but in my testing it is quite useful and slick already. It's built on top of libpoppler/poppler-sharp, PdfSharp, Gtk#/Cairo, and Banshee's Hyena library. The app itself is a paltry 2009 lines of .cs files. It is super easy to build and run uninstalled from the tarball if you want to give it a spin: ./configure && make && make run Looking forward to your feedback, either in the comments, @gabaug on twitter, or find my e-mail address in the code or on my blog. Is this something that should have a presence on GNOME git/bugzilla/wiki? Update: PDF Mod is now fully hosted on GNOME's infrastructure. See our wiki for links to download, source repo, mailing list, bugzilla, etc.

Banshee 1.5.0 released!

2009-06-01T23:17:00.001Z

Intro After six months of work by more than 30 contributors, we have released Banshee 1.5.0 (aka 1.6 beta 1)! We have an astounding 95 people listed in our developer credits now! As I recently tweeted, we are also lighting up bugzilla. So far in 2009, # bugs: 950 commented on, 501 closed, 428 filed, 171 with new patches attached! Release Information This is a beta release, debuting a lot of big underlying changes. It also has tons of fixes, polish, and performance improvements. Some feature highlights:

BPM Support With Banshee 1.5.0, you can autodetect the BPM of songs in your library, or you can manually set it by tapping the beat. Then, you can sort, search, or make smart playlists based on BPM.
Automatic Scoring As you play songs in Banshee 1.5.0, it will automatically assign them scores (0 - 100) based on if/when you press skip.
BPM and Score columns
Rhythmbox Migrator Banshee 1.5.0 can import your Rhythmbox collection, including ratings, play counts, and playlists.
Separate Library Locations You can now specify separate library locations for your music, video, and podcast libraries.
Creative Commons Integration A new column displays Creative Commons licensing info where applicable (and properly tagged). The license can be edited in the track editor (see below). There is also a new default Last.fm station for songs tagged 'Creative Commons'.
Track editor, showing BPM and License URI

See the 1.5.0 release notes to read about and see screenshots of the dozens of enhancements and fixes! Get It! Since this is a beta release, we are not distributing this through the same channels as our stable releases. Visit our download page or talk to your distro to see if they have a beta channel for Banshee.

openSUSE and SLED
Ubuntu (may not be built yet, be patient)
Mac OS X
Source tarball
Directly from GNOME git

Digg It!

Putting Banshee to Work

2009-04-15T03:21:00.002Z

Recently I have spent some time creating a smart job scheduler for Banshee. Some jobs we have include

Importing
Saving metadata to file
BPM analysis

BPM analysis and saving metadata to file jobs should be paused while doing speed sensitive jobs like importing. To achieve this, each job has priority hints and a list of resources it heavily uses. The priority hints are

SpeedSensitive, for jobs the user is actively waiting on, such as importing
LongRunning, for things like BPM or Mirage analysis of the entire library

And the resources are customizable, but currently I'm using

CPU
Disk
Database

If two jobs use the same resource

SpeedSensitive jobs run immediately (more than one ok)
Normal jobs (not SpeedSensitive or LongRunning) then follow, one at a time
LongRunning jobs then follow, one at a time

It is a bit of pretty low-level polish and a pretty simple idea, but it will give better performance and a better experience. The code is in a git branch for the moment, hopefully to be merged into trunk before 1.6.

Hack Banshee all Summer for Fun and Profit

2009-03-25T20:37:00.001Z

As I mentioned the other day, now is a great time to get involved with Banshee, and the deal is even sweeter if you want to work on it full-time this summer and get paid $4,500 through Google's Summer of Code. We have four developers (Bertrand, Eoin, Scott, and myself) willing to mentor, and we have some rocking project ideas we'd love you to tackle:

Banshee Web Content Make it easy to browse, search, view, and subscribe to content from one or more of archive.org, miroguide.com, spokenword.org, npr.org
Telepathic Banshee Let users share files and information (recommendations/ratings, current playing info, BPM analysis) with other users on their IM buddy list(s) via the Telepathy communications library and, likely, its Tubes data-transport mechanism. There is already a submitted proposal for this project.
Recommendations-based Play Queue Modify the Play Queue to have an option to automatically add songs recommended by Last.fm, Mirage, etc.
Banshee UPnP Add a UPnP extension to Banshee. More info.
Banshee in Context Show contextually relevant concert info, flickr photos, wikipedia info, etc.

Your application is focused around a particular project proposal, but you can apply multiple times. And you are not limited to the above ideas if you have your own. Feel free to e-mail me personally, e-mail the banshee-list, or chat us up on IRC if you have any questions or want feedback on your application. Make sure you apply with GNOME as the mentoring organization and read the GSoC FAQs. You have a week and two days (until Friday, April 3rd) to apply, so get on it!

An Update on Banshee

2009-03-24T00:29:00.000Z

A Stable Release Banshee 1.4.3 was released on March 4th. It's a stable release fixing several freezes and MTP device support bugs. Leaping Forward Things are moving ahead at an awesome pace in trunk! Our community members are consistently in the lists of top GNOME bug filers, closers, patch contributors, and patch reviewers. You can keep informed about all their fixes and features landing in trunk in the ChangeLog. I hope we'll have a release from trunk – called 1.5.0, aka 1.6 beta 1 – very soon. We have over two months of awesome fixes and new features to unleash. If you want to hack on Banshee, there has never been a better time. There are more than four of us actively reviewing Banshee patches from long-time regulars and out-of-the-blue newcomers, and we're waiting to hear from you! Bug Reduction Effort A few weeks ago we had over 200 bugs with no response. Today, due to the efforts of our bug triaging team, we have 110. Anybody can help us out by reviewing the list of Banshee bugs, correcting the metadata fields, asking for more information, providing insights, confirming they can reproduce the bug, letting the reporter know somebody is out there and cares! etc. To get started, do a bit of reading, find a bug that looks lonely, and update or comment on it with your thoughts on how to move it forward. Join us in #banshee to get pointers and assurance.

Parasite Packages

2009-02-12T18:19:00.001Z

Last night I built packages for Parasite in my OBS home repository, available for openSUSE 11.0, 11.1, and Factory. To use Parasite with Banshee, for example, just run:

$ GTK_MODULES=gtkparasite banshee-1

Then you can inspect widgets, and even edit their properties in real-time — a great way to get a widget tweaked just right without having to restart the app. Using Parasite with Banshee - "Hello Planets!" Thanks to Christian Hammond and David Trowbridge for such a cool tool!

Banshee 1.4.2

2009-01-21T16:03:00.004Z

Yesterday we released Banshee 1.4.2, a stable release full of two months of bug fixes and polish. Fixed and improved are RSS feed parsing, library rescanning, occasional startup freezes, launching on device insertion, several crashers, improved playback on OS X (still a technology preview/alpha release), and much much more - 62 bugs fixed in total. Check out the full release notes for details of other bugs fixed and how to upgrade! Digg It!

Catching Up

2009-01-14T18:06:00.003Z

Patch Reviews In the last 24 hours or so I reviewed all 62 unreviewed patches for Banshee. The oldest was over 800 days old – very sad. But now that we are caught up, patches will not slip through like that again. It's thrilling to be reviewing patches and within hours get comments and updated versions from the contributors - pumping fresh blood into the project! TagLib# Banshee uses TagLib# for metadata (artist name, track title, disc number, etc) reading and writing, and we recently took over maintaining the project. You can file bugs and patches against it in BGO. The source is still in Mono SVN. Releases and a new website will probably soon be hosted on banshee-project.org. Banshee Status We are very close to releasing Banshee 1.4.2 with a lot of good bug fixes and polish since 1.4.1. After that will come developer releases, and then Banshee 1.6 with awesome new features. I love working on new features; I've already been playing with some in my temporary (yay GNOME going to git!) git branch: Creative Commons licensing column BPM automatic detection and manual tapability Fix metadata dialog (not finished) We have a handful of really polished patches from various contributors that have been reviewed, iterated on, and are ready to commit after 1.4.2 is released, including:

Rhythmbox migrator
Option to read/write ratings and playcounts to files
Torrent support for podcasts (like Miro has)
Scoring of tracks based on number of plays/skips (similar to Amarok)
Smooth scrolling

In addition to these nearly-finished features, I'm sure there will be many other cool things that make it into 1.6. If you want to help out by translating, testing, triaging bugs, or writing code, please do! Join us on our mailing list/forum or in IRC for advice on getting started.

OLPC RetroScope

2008-12-08T18:44:00.002Z

I have created a new OLPC XO activity called the RetroScope. It shows you live video, but with a zero to 10 second delay. It is super simple, but can be a lot of fun! Tech Summary This activity builds on the experimentation I did a year ago with the XO's camera, and is inspired by Nat's original idea for the RetroScope. The source is 109 lines of python, and is released under the MIT license:

git clone http://banshee-project.org/~gburt/retroscope.git

Installation

Go to the Control Panel then Software update,

expand Modify activity groups,
enter this Group URL: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Activities/Joyride
and click Add and then Refresh.

When that's finished, you should see the RetroScope activity (and several others) available to be installed. RetroScoping After installation, you can launch RetroScope from Home: Enjoy!

A Talkative Banshee

2008-10-08T19:42:00.007Z

I gave a talk about Banshee to the Chicago LUG a couple weeks ago. It went great – a good crowd, lots of questions and interest – and was a pleasure to communicate what Banshee is and how we're rocking. I started my presentation by running through the major features (the vertical list on the left), verbally going into detail about niceties, fun things, and usability features as I went. I then talked about project organization, history, measurements of our progress and growth, and how to learn more and get involved. And finally I spent some time alternating taking questions and demoing – an interactive process that generated more questions and demo opportunities. The time I spent putting together my slide deck was a good chance for introspection about the project and thinking about how to effectively convey my excitement to a diverse group of people. I'm quite happy with the resulting content and design, but look forward to tweaking it for new talks to different audiences, like a talk to a class at IIT I'll give next week.

Muinshee

2008-08-28T06:25:00.001Z

I'm enjoying being in Provo, Utah this week at the beautiful Novell campus, with coworkers from all over, hacking away on projects of our choosing. I'm grateful to Novell for having the foresight to give us Hack Week, a time to explore and experiment - above and beyond our weekly ITO and official responsibilities. The amazing Brad Taylor, who just joined Novell last week, joined me in creating a Muine-like interface for Banshee. People love Muine's simple interface for queueing and playing songs. Our goal is to replicate that experience leveraging Banshee. In a day's work, we got things working well. The code will land in trunk soon, and therefore will be in Banshee 1.4. We've already started on our next Hack Week project, adding support for AirTunes to Banshee. We will be at the Utah Open Source Conference on Thursday and Friday doing it live. On Friday Aaron and Sandy are giving talks on Banshee and a11y.

A Thing of Beauty

2008-08-16T03:50:00.003Z

Aaron improved the cover art display in Now Playing, adding a reflection, basic song info, and cross fading between cover art. It's gorgeous. We're heads-down working on all the features for Banshee 1.4, planned for mid-September. We have a lot on our plates, but features are starting to land, and we have quite a crew working around the clock and around the world to make 1.4 happen.

Alan McGovern's patches to support RSS feeds that contain .torrent enclosures were committed.
Chris Howie's patch adding awesome visualization support to Banshee via his OpenVP project is nearly ready.
I committed some important building blocks for fast, slick device synchronization.
Aaron committed Replay Gain playback support (analysis still to come).
Scott Peterson and Aaron are working on directory watching.
Bertrand Lorentz has Mirage, the really nifty accoustical analysis playlist generator, working for Banshee 1.2. He's also been doing a great job as Patch Master, making sure patches get the attention they need. He's also been fixing tons of bugs.
Ruben Vermeersch has a patch nearly ready for optionally keeping filenames and folders synchronized with metadata.
Andrew Conkling, our Bug Master, has been doing a super-human job of helping others with their bug reports and patches.
Sandy Armstrong has been hacking on adding interactivity to the playing track info, so you'll be able to click the artist name, album, etc and do cool stuff.
Alex Hixon, who previously did a ton of work with Audioscrobbler and DAAP, has been fixing some bugs.
Bob Copeland's Rio Karma device support patch was committed.
Félix Velasco, Peter de Kraker, and Christopher Halse Rogers have contributed a lot to the recent releases.

Banshee would not be what it is today without 64+ code contributors, 60+ translators, and countless others who have filed bugs, given support on IRC and the mailing list, and helped in other ways. If you want to get involved, please do!

Banshee 1.2.1 Planned for Tuesday

2008-08-07T19:19:00.004Z

We're planning a Banshee 1.2.1 release for next Tuesday, primarily to ship updated translations. We have quite a few languages with good coverage, but it could be a lot better. Translators, please make sure Banshee is available in your language!

Banshee 1.2 Released

2008-07-30T17:20:00.001Z

A month and a half after 1.0, we are happy to announce the release of Banshee 1.2, packed with new features and tons of bug fixes and improvements. Several of these features were things we had in Banshee 0.13.2 or before, but are new to the Banshee 1.x series. Big new features and fixes:

10-band Equalizer
Internet Radio
Music Recommendations
DAAP Client
Playlist Importing (.pls, .m3u)
Multi-Artist (Compilation) Album Support
Manual Reordering of Playlists and Play Queue
Amarok migration (including ratings, playcounts, and podcasts)

Recommendations based on what's playing on internet radio station And a host of smaller features and fixes, including:

More robust parsing of podcast (RSS) files
Find and use cover art from the album folder (cover.jpg, etc)
Add Last.fm as a cover art provider
The last playback source is used when the Play Queue is empty
Better performance (start up time, memory usage, searching, etc)
Disable the screensaver when in fullscreen mode
Much improved performance and UI for automatic cover art fetching
Fix issues with importing and playing files in folders named Music*
Over 80 bugs were fixed since 1.0

We had been hoping to get library folder watching in for 1.2, but wasn't finished in time. Read the release notes for the full scoop! Digg It!

New York's Finest?

2008-07-29T04:53:00.000Z

A NYPD officer intentionally, violently battered a random, non-aggresive bicylist to the ground in front of a crowd of onlookers last Friday. This makes me incredibly angry. Is this the kind of bicycle-friendly city Mayor Bloomberg is trying to create? One where innocent cyclists are threatened not only by dangerous roads and traffic, piston-produced pollution, but by the police? Watch the entire video on YouTube to see it for yourself. Even if you aren't a fan of bicycling, critical mass, young people, etc - nobody deserves to be treated like this. Digg It!

Freedom and Autonomy for Network Services

2008-07-15T15:11:00.000Z

Nearly a year ago I posted some thoughts on freedom for network services. In March the FSF invited a group to Boston to explore this topic. The meeting was at once a brain storming session and a cognitive map-reduce on the ideas generated. Today we have launched a site called autonomo.us, and a draft statement, the Franklin Street Statement on Freedom and Network Services. It reads in part:

Developers of network service software are encouraged to:
Use the GNU Affero GPL, a license designed specifically for network service software, to ensure that users of services have the ability to examine the source or implement their own service.

Develop freely-licensed alternatives to existing popular but non-Free network services.

Develop software that can replace centralized services and data storage with distributed software and data deployment, giving control back to users.

The notes from the original meeting (collaboratively taken with Gobby) are quite interesting, and go into much more detail on many things. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this effort, and I hope we can help move the discussion and mainstream thought on network services to be freedom and principle focused, learning from and leveraging the free software and free culture movements. Thanks to the FSF and Mako for starting this process!

More Humor

2008-07-13T22:07:00.003Z

On Politics Discussing the madness here in Turkey - youtube is completely blocked - with Aaron and Miguel tonight, finally put to words, in the dialect of our times, what I'd been thinking all week: On Tabs The tab meme on pgo is pretty hilarious. Very surprised how many people are horrified, and I feel it's my duty to share a sampling of the 21 comments from my post:

I want to die

this is great stuff. you can really feel how the gnome 3 announcement creates an incentive for innovation. rock on guys.

This is literally a NIGHTWARE, thhe usability of Gnome applications (Totem, Nautilus, etc) being plain slaughtered within a few days :-( I seriously wish they removed the whole tab widget from GTK+ to prevent this sort of bullshit from happening.

I wish GNOME wasn't becoming so KDE-ish.

A couple people even commented in horror after I'd commented about the reality of it all.

Tabtastic Banshee

2008-07-12T11:56:00.003Z

By outrageous amounts of popular demand (and feature pressure from Totem), we are pleased to announce tab support in Banshee! You can open your Music Library in one tab, your yummy Apple device in another, and be watching a video in another, all at the same time! I'm really excited about this new direction that GNOME is taking. I can't wait for tab support in Gnometris.

Banshee BoF

2008-07-08T09:51:00.003Z

Upon arriving at the conference today, we were told we'd missed our Birds of a Feather session. Turns out they changed the schedule, and the printed ones they gave everybody are out of date. BUT, we talked them into giving us back our spot, so: The Banshee BoF is on for 2:30pm in the x-large room!

Banshee Momentum

2008-06-18T19:20:00.001Z

We're planning a Banshee 1.2 release for early July, before GUADEC. It should be a really great release, including multi-artist album fixes, internet radio, library directory watching, recommendations, and probably a couple other big items. You can grab Banshee from svn trunk to test the latest changes - internet radio and multi-artist support are already committed - and to contribute by reporting and fixing bugs, translating Banshee, or writing some new code. If you haven't tried Banshee 1.0 yet, you should!

Banshee 1.0 Released!

2008-06-10T21:07:00.001Z

We have released Banshee 1.0, with all the great features we've blogged about in Alpha 1 through RC1. And we have an awesome new website! I'm loving using Banshee 1.0 every day, rediscovering my music library (and album art!), discovering new music on Last.fm, and enjoying podcasts and video podcasts I never knew existed. Don't forget to come to our BoF, lightning talk, and main talk at GUADEC 2008! Digg It!

Some Banshee Bragging Rights

2008-06-03T19:45:00.003Z

According to Pulse, Banshee is currently the #2 GNOME project "kicking ass and taking names", and Aaron is one of the top 12 GNOME hackers you should buy a drink. We're both currently in the top 15 bug closers. Our Ohloh page says we have a "large, active development team", "increasing year-over-year development activity", are valued at $3,782,339 USD, and our commit activity is off the charts. We've been on the front page of digg twice in the last months, getting over 530 and 670 diggs. And having a little over 50 people in #banshee was a good day not long ago, but we're at 79 right now. Thanks to our contributors, community, and Novell for being so supportive. Look out for Banshee 1.0!

Banshee 1.0 Release Candidate 1

2008-06-01T04:13:00.005Z

We have released Banshee 1.0 Release Candidate 1 just over a week after Beta 2, and with over 24 bugs fixed and a few last minute features.

View the release notes
Banshee 1.0 RC 1 Source (bz2)
openSUSE 10.3 users can
Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1
Ubuntu users should go to the Banshee team's PPA
Note: you might get Beta 2 until RC 1 packages are up

Banshee 1.0 is right around the corner. We are now string and feature frozen until its release, so translators, please update your translations! Digg It!

Two Weeks in Istanbul

2008-05-30T20:32:00.002Z

Just confirmed my flight to Istanbul to attend GUADEC! I'm arriving a day early and staying almost a week afterward, so if there are any adventurers or locals who want to hang out, share accommodations, show me around, or take a mini beach vacation, I'd love to hear from you! I'm really looking forward to veggie moussaka, hummus, coffee, seeing friends, and making new ones. Aaron and I missed the call-for-papers so we aren't booked for a normal speaking slot. Does anybody know what we can do at this point to either speak or hold one or more Banshee sessions? Is there a waiting list for speaker cancellations, or a BoF signup, etc? Thanks! (BTW, you can follow me on twitter! I know, I'm just making your day!)

Improved Podcasting

2008-05-25T19:50:00.006Z

I just committed a patch to Banshee's podcasting that lets you filter on new items with a single click. By default, the New Items filter will be selected. Items are marked old after being played, or manually by pressing y. This functionality will be in the next release, but you can run it today and help us test for 1.0 by building Banshee from svn. Since this patch has what I consider an aweseomly slick keybinding, I'll remind you of some of our other useful (and awesome) key bindings:

/       focus/select text in search bar
q       queue the selected tracks (works for podcasts!)
y       mark the selected podcast tracks as old
j/k     scroll selection down/up in the filter or track lists
space   pause/play
enter   play
ctrl-d  bookmark playing item at current position
F2      rename the selected source

Future podcast features will include playlist and smart playlist support, and some awesome ideas we have for an integrated podcast directory. Stay tuned!

Guadec Videos in Banshee

2008-05-23T18:14:00.004Z

Building on the work Thomas and others have done getting the GUADEC 2007 videos online, I have created a RSS feed of the videos. Here is Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 subscribed to the feed and downloading two talks and streaming James' talk at the same time: RSS Video Podcast:

Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 Released

2008-05-23T05:49:00.003Z

We just released Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, with a ton of bug fixes and some sweet new features! This is hot on the heels of Beta 1, released just over two weeks ago, and is the fifth release in the series leading up to 1.0.

View the release notes
Banshee 1.0 Beta 2 Source (bz2)
openSUSE 10.3 users can
Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1
Ubuntu users should go to the Banshee team's PPA
Note: you might get Beta 1 until Beta 2 packages are up

You can now use Banshee to subscribe to, browse, and search your favorite audio and video podcasts.
Banshee displaying, streaming, and downloading podcasts You don't even have to wait for episodes to download to enjoy them; Banshee will happily stream the audio or video. And of course, your podcasts and subscriptions from Banshee 0.13.2 and before are migrated for you, and any podcast files in your Music Library moved into the Podcast source. Also new in this release is Auto Rip. After enabling it in Preferences, CDs will be automatically imported as soon as metadata is loaded for them and it's confirmed they're not already in your Library. The last big feature is we have integrated with Brasero, the powerful disc burning application, for audio CD burning. Check out the release notes for download info, more screenshots, updated dependency list, and the list of contributors. As always, you can chat with us in #banshee, e-mail us at banshee-list, and learn more about Banshee on our wiki. Digg It!

Down and Out in Chicago

2008-05-16T03:45:00.001Z

I'm a big fan of Cory Doctorow, the person, the advocate, and the author. He's extremely eloquent, funny, and grounded. I got the chance to meet Cory tonight at a reading of his latest book, Little Brother — which is fantastic; I couldn't put it down. I gave Cory a Banshee shirt and told him about our upcoming 1.0, since he's a GNU/Linux user (his words and his actions speak volumes) and he popped into #banshee a while back. Anyway, if you haven't seen Cory speak, he's able to explain difficult, technical issues to non-techies in a way that they can understand and makes geeks proud. I'm happy to have finally met him.

F-Spot Summer of Code

2008-05-12T15:23:00.002Z

I am excited to be mentoring Andrew Wytyczak-Partyka this summer as part of GSoC. Andrew will create a library implementing the Digital Photo Access Protocol (DPAP) and integrate it into F-Spot. I'm not familiar with DPAP, so any experts please feel free to give us pointers. Andrew previously did work on face recognition for F-Spot/GSoC. I see he's already been added to Planet GNOME, so you should be hearing from him before too long. Work officially starts on May 26. F-Spot was lucky enough to get three SoC students this year. The other two are Ruben Vermeersch working on the sidebar and possibly GEGL integration, and Vasiliy Kirilichev working on color profile support. It's great to see F-Spot getting this much attention. I'm also looking forward to seeing the results of Cosimo Cecchi's work on GNOME media integration. Thanks to Google for creating and sponsoring the SoC, and to Novell for giving many of its engineers, including me, time to participate.

Banshee Podcast Support Coming in Beta 2

2008-05-08T17:32:00.007Z

First, a quick note to people using the Ubuntu Banshee 1.0 PPA packages. Unfortunately, the packager messed up and at first released packages without iPod or MTP support. And now it has come to my attention (via comments and bugs from disappointed users) that the packages include the podcast extension, when it is pre-alpha and should not have been included. Hopefully the Ubuntu guys will get fixed packages out soon, and be more careful with packaging in the future. Jorge is working to make things right. We do expect to have the podcast extension ready by Beta 2. And Beta 2 will have auto-rip support which I just committed last night. After enabling it in your Preferences, whenever you insert a CD it will automatically begin importing it, if it's not already in your library and if MusicBrainz information can be found for it. Very useful if you are ripping many CDs.

Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Released

2008-05-06T23:11:00.003Z

We have just released Banshee 1.0 Beta 1, aka 0.99.1! This release adds some major features and lots of polish.

View the release notes
Banshee 1.0 Beta 1 Source (bz2)
openSUSE 10.3 users can
Foresight 2.0 users: Use PackageKit or Conary to install banshee-1

MTP and iPod device support have landed! Both MTP and iPod support album artwork, on-the-fly transcoding (converting between file formats), and video support! Banshee playing music, showing cover art, and transferring to an MTP device Other features and fixes include:

Fullscreen video playback (go to Now Playing and press f or hit the Fullscreen button)
Extensions can be enabled and disabled in the new Mange Extensions tab within your Preferences.
Banshee can be scripted using Boo
Improved gstreamer error handling (for missing files, codecs, etc)
A bug with play counts, introduced in Alpha 3, has been fixed
Writing metadata to file was not working in the Alphas, is fixed
Issues with the play queue should all be resolved
Limiting smart playlists by file size or duration works
Shuffle and repeat are automatically disabled while playing Last.fm

Default Smart Playlists

This release also features default smart playlists, created for new users and users with zero smart playlists. There is a more extensive list of predefined smart playlists, including the defaults, available in the New Smart Playlist dialog. Thanks to Aaron Bockover, Alexander Hixon, Bertrand Lorentz, Christopher Rogers, Scott Peterson, Sebastian Dröge, and Wouter Bolsterlee for code contributions for this release, and to Daniel Nylander (sv), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Jordi Mas (ca), and Wouter Bolsterlee (nl) for updated translations! And to Jorge Castro for testing and release notes help, and Michael Monreal and Andrew Conkling for testing and bugzilla work! You can follow the posts of Banshee contributors on Planet Banshee. We are a friendly, vibrant community and always glad to have people join us! If you have been wanting to contribute back to free software and GNOME, I think you'll find Banshee's code and C# a pleasure to work in, and a healthy amount of support and encouragement from a very active community. Join us on our mailing list, in our IRC chatroom, and on our wiki! Digg It!

Banshee at LugRadio Live

2008-04-16T16:08:00.003Z

Aaron and I gave a 30 minute talk on Banshee to a packed room at LugRadio Live last Saturday. Media Archive did a great job of filming the talks and getting them on DVD by the end of the conference. I ripped the DVD and posted the video on Google Video and as a 114MB Ogg/Theora file. I really enjoyed hanging out with Chris Toshok, Dave Camp, Erinn Clark, Sandy Armstrong, Ryan Paul, Zonker, Steve and Ian from Songbird, and tons of other cool people. Our community is full of friendly, social people. Zonker and Aaron did a great job getting hundreds of awesome Banshee shirts for us: Photo CC-BY-SA by Ian McKellar I'm hoping to make it to Penguicon in Detroit this weekend, though I think I'm getting sick, so at this point I think it's not happening. Jorge says he can give my Banshee talk for me, and hopefully we can get some shirts there.

Banshee Media Player

2008-03-27T00:21:00.005Z

Banshee is now the Banshee Media Player. With the release of 1.0 Alpha 2 we've added support for video management and playback! It works, looks, and feels great. Our goal with trunk has always been to fix fundamental design issues and create a well-organized, flexible, and powerful code base. And video support has proven to us that we've been successful. We were able to add video management with very little code and playlists, smart playlists, searching, queuing, and bookmarks all just work. We also have a wonderful new source called Now Playing. It sits at the top of your source list and is where video playback happens. And the idea, coming in Alpha 3, is when you're playing audio you'll find visualizations, Last.fm recommendations, and other contextual information there. Aaron goes into more detail about features, running the latest from svn, and more on his blog.

Subvocalization

2008-03-14T17:59:00.006Z

My friend Michael Callahan (no, really, he is my close friend) and his team have been working hard for years on the Audeo, a device that sits on your neck and understands the electrical signals it can pick up from your nerve/vocal cord activity - even if you're subvocalizing. From the start, it's been a project to improve the quality of life for people with ALS and similar health issues, but they're expanding their vision in all sorts of awesome ways - including demonstrating the first subvocalized telephone call. Michael is a fantastic person doing amazing work, and he's getting recognition, from winning big grants to doing the Tour de Web - on BoingBoing, TechCrunch, and Netscape-creator Marc Andreessen's blog just in the last two days. That's got to be over a million viewers. Says Marc:

I have a feeling that someday, this may be up there with "Come here, Watson, I need you."

I wonder if Marc knows that Michael is doing his work at his alma mater. If you have read Cory Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" (it's free, CC-BYNDNC), or have seen Michael's demonstrations, you can't help but be excited by this.

Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1

2008-03-14T02:21:00.002Z

Aaron and I are tremendously excited to announce the release of Banshee 1.0 Alpha 1. User Focused We have a ton of new features - a slick artist/album browser, a play queue, powerful search, better Last.fm radio, an equalizer, and continuous playback from a given playlist or source, even if you browse another playlist or check what's on Last.fm. And things are faster - much faster - thanks to using SQLite to do the heavy lifting. Visit the release notes for more pretty pictures and details about this release, including missing features and running it alongside Banshee 0.13.2 or earlier. Developer Friendly Banshee's source tree is better organized than ever. And with tools like MonoDevelop, working on Banshee is fun. Two of MonoDevelop's many features, autocompletion and jump to class/method-declaration, are especially valuable to people new to Banshee development. If you want to tweak Banshee, fix a bug, write an extension, or just explore the code, I encourage you to install MonoDevelop and get started building trunk. We have a vibrant community ready to help you on our mailing list and on IRC in #banshee. For those running openSUSE 10.3: Digg it

A Reason to Hope

2008-02-13T17:30:00.010Z

I'm thrilled that my close friend Barack Obama is inspiring others like he has inspired me. I'm thrilled to have a president

who leads with hope and unity, not fear and divisions,
who improves on JFK's "ask not" line with "we invest in you, you invest in your country",
who is as consistent with his positions and demeanor as he is with his beautiful website and branding.
who finds the time to vote against giving the telecoms immunity for spying on us, unlike Senator Clinton.

I call him my close friend because you can't read the honest, heartfelt story of his pre-political life (Dreams From my Father) without feeling like he's your brother, your friend.

Howling Queries

2008-01-18T20:15:00.001Z

Banshee's search code is getting revamped. Before getting into the technical discussion, I want to note that simple queries that you can perform in stable today will most of the time produce the same results in trunk. In trunk, the default operator in user-queries is AND, so a query dave matthews is parsed as dave AND mathews. Filtering is done in real-time as you type, and mal-formed queries are handled gracefully. You can also specify fields (by:dave, album:"under the table", rating=4). Trunk is well organized into assemblies that break along logical boundaries. One of these assemblies is called Hyena, and contains reusable data-oriented classes. I want to highlight one namespace in it that has come a long way in the last few weeks. Hyena.Data.Query The fundamental data structure in Hyena.Data.Query is the QueryNode tree, made up of QueryTermNodes (literal values, field queries) and QueryListNodes (and, or, not). We have two parsers, UserQueryParser and XmlQueryParser, as well as methods to take a tree and produce user or XML queries. This means we can go from a user query to XML and back, or vice-versa. Given a list of queryable fields and their mapping to Banshee's database (a QueryFieldSet), we can also take a tree and produce SQL for actually carrying out the search. You can see all this in action if you run trunk from a terminal: All this work makes searching much faster (straight against the database), unifies our search infrastructure, and makes it trivial to implement features like dragging a smart playlist onto the search entry and turning a search into a smart playlist. Both our user-query language and XML are extremely close to the XESAM spec, and we want to be compliant. We're working with the XESAM team to make sure it meets our needs.

Bansheescoped

2008-01-09T19:51:00.000Z

I'm in Boston this week working with Aaron and hanging out with Miguel and others. In between amazing people with the XO retroscope, we've been busy getting Banshee 0.13.2 out - and it's here! Support for new iPods, a Last.fm plugin (see below), updated TagLib#, and lots of other fixes and features got in during this long release cycle. Over 10 people contributed to this release - thanks to everybody! Aaron has blogged about the release too. Screencast demoing the new Last.fm radio plugin. Ogg/Theora, 69 seconds, 4.1 MB. Besides Last.fm server errors, which cause some songs to be skipped, and a bug where new stations don't show songs on the first run, the plugin works great. I discovered five new artists with it and already bought their CDs. We will do one more release off the stable branch within the next couple weeks to fix the Last.fm new station bug and make the new MTP support rock solid before we focus 100% on trunk.

Pacing Progress

2008-01-02T22:55:00.000Z

I got Karl Fogel's excellent Producing Open Source Software for Christmas and have been enjoying reading and learning from it. One suggestion he has is to have a svn-commits list that includes full diffs to allow for fast, easy code reviews. I brought this up on the GNOME infrastructure list, where Olav Vitters raised some concerns and asked me to solicit planet-wide opinion. As a project leader and/or svn-commits subscriber, would you like to see full diffs? By e3000, used under the CC BY-SA license. I think this simple idea could help projects (like Banshee) add more committers and increase the pace of progress since every commit is reviewed by many eyes, most commits will be good, and you can always revert ones that aren't. Assuming there is enough support for the idea, the next step will be modifying the script to pull configuration data from some yet-to-be-implemented DOAP setup.

47.8% Turnout

2007-12-11T23:14:00.000Z

Noticed that out of 370 GNOME foundation members only 177 voted in the recent Board election - a worse turnout than the last 12 US presidential elections. By sadprofessor, used under the CC BY-SA license. Any way, congratulations to the new board members!

One Laptop Per Photographer

2007-11-13T23:24:00.000Z

Jon Trowbridge gave me a B4 OLPC XO the other day, and I'm absolutely loving it. It is so much faster than my old B2, and with the latest softare it is rocking. Harper and I were chatting and collaboratively editing a document from across Chicago with zero setup. There is a relatively new activity called Pippy that includes many Python scripts that are simple (hello world, etc), fun (random pitch/sound generator), and educational. Coupled with a Run button it is a simple interactive console. It doesn't have anything for using the XO's built in camera, so I dove in to figure out what I could do. I looked at the Record activity but found its gstreamer/picture taking code very tied to how it did stuff, dependent on Gtk, etc. So using it as an example I wrote a simple Camera class that returns the raw RGB buffer, and a PixbufCamera subclass that has the exact same interface but returns a Gdk.Pixbuf. With these two classes we can write awesome, Pippy-ish scripts, like a time-lapse photography program:

from pixbuf_camera import PixbufCamera

time_lapse = 60 * 60 * 4 # Take pictures over a 4 hour period
freq = 120 # Take them every 2 minutes
camera = PixbufCamera ()

for i in range(0, time_lapse/freq):
  pixbuf = camera.takePicture ()
  pixbuf.save ("series/test_%04i.jpg" % i, 'jpeg')
  time.sleep (freq)

Using this program on the XO I captured this outside my window today (and scp'd it to my computer): I'd like to add video support and expose a bunch of gstreamer properties so you could create a time-lapse Ogg Theora video instead of JPGs. Perhaps eventually this camera API could be used by the Record activity itself. I really need to buy some mirror fragments and build a clip-on device for XOs so you can photograph things in front of it (meaning you can film something and use the computer simultaneously).

Working on Banshee

2007-11-13T20:50:00.000Z

Not long ago Novell offered me the opportunity to do my hobby full-time, an offer I couldn't refuse. I loved working with Ruby and Rails and my Chicago-based team for IBM, but making Free Software multimedia apps and making the success of the Free Desktop my professional goal as well as personal, not to mention working from home, made the decision to move on less difficult. Aaron and I are working on two branches of Banshee, the stable branch, from which we will have one more release, and trunk, where we are wreaking havoc (+28268/-32325 lines in the last few weeks) and reorganizing, refactoring, and rewriting Banshee. Not all the excitement these days is from the huge changes in trunk. Over the last couple weeks I've created a Last.fm radio plugin for Banshee that is now working quite well and will ship (disabled by default) in the next release. Playing Last.fm radio in Banshee With Banshee's mini-mode plugin on Unfortunately it will only run on the latest from the stable branch, so either check that out or wait for the next release. Feel free to join us on #banshee on irc.gnome.org, our mailing list, or our forums. Update: Wanted to thanked Iain and the rest of the Last Exit team for inspiring me and giving me an example to work from.

Funky Green Chicago

2007-11-08T07:56:00.000Z

Erica and I went to the Funky Buddha Lounge tonight for a party in connection with Green Build, happening this week in Chicago. The place is indeed funky - especially because we arrived before the party started, the venue appeared abandoned, and it was sub 40F outside. Once the party began, however, the place came alive with great ambiance, music, organic beer, and people. I had a wonderful discussion about many topics including Free Software computer aided design with a partner at a leading green architecture firm. Need to look at Open Architecture Network and FOSS CAD efforts and see where we can take the idea. In related news, the book Erica helped author, produce, and finish, Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design With Nature, is now out and selling well (already #48 in Urban Planning on Amazon).

F-Spot's Tag TreeView

2007-09-22T22:12:00.000Z

I recently fixed up F-Spot's tag TreeView. Right clicking on or dragging several tags used to be practically impossible, and there was no way to make a tag toplevel (having no parent tags) with DnD.
Reparenting two tags to Banff I put the code for the right click/dragging fixes (most of which came straight out of the nautilus code, thanks!) into a reusable TreeView subclass in case others are in need. If you haven't used F-Spot for a while (or haven't yet discovered this feature), you might notice you can make the icons next to your tags smaller now (or even turn them off). That feature has been in since early March, courtesy of Stephane.

Cracken Beagle

2007-08-07T16:31:00.000Z

I am sick of Jamie justifying his attacks and negativity toward Beagle with the juvenile "they started it."

"Beagle devs still have big problems with stablity and memory usage and they admit themselves its no where near ready....Tracker also has much more support from Gnome devs with a greater willingness to integrate so its inevitable that tracker will become mandatory anyhow in Gnome sooner or later." -- Jamie McCracken, Nov 2006

I am a GNOME developer who disagrees. As I mentioned during Jamie's talk at GUADEC, I do not see how using Tracker as a replacement store for applications like Banshee is plausible. Tracker stores its data in a set of tables with three columns, URI, key, value. So for Banshee, you would have one row for each attribute (key) of metadata for each audio file. Such a store is going to be much larger on disk (since it has to store the URI and key for each attribute) and take impossibly longer to run useful queries. Jamie estimated it would take roughly 5 seconds to return the information for 10,000 songs - something that takes an optimized, specialized database a fraction of the time. I'm sure there are cases where a centralized triple-store could be useful (tagging), but Jamie's promise of "a synergy of technologies that are designed to provide a highly sophisticated, innovative and integrated desktop", this all-singing, all-dancing bear, is unrealistic and distracting. Lastly, when F-Spot was proposed for inclusion in the default Ubuntu install, there was much discussion. I have found little discussion regarding the recent decision to include and turn on Tracker in the default Ubuntu install, and this concerns me.

Defining Free Services

2007-07-19T14:56:00.000Z

With Mako's blessing, I have started a wiki page hosted on Freedom Defined for working on the Free Service Definition. Please create an account and help us work out what it means for a service to be free, respecting users' freedom and privacy.

Free Service License

2007-07-17T18:53:00.000Z

State of Thought I've been thinking about, discussing, and exploring the issue of what I'm calling Free Service Licensing. The core idea is to protect users' freedom when they use services (gmail, flickr, todocue, etc) — to standardize Terms of Service/Privacy Policies so users know how a service will respect their freedom and data. I started brainstorming ideas for what a Free Service License (FSL) could look like/contain. Here's what I have so far: 0. Uses all Free Software 1. Uses free/standard data formats if possible 2. Provides trivial and costless data export for backup/transferability 3. Keeps information private except with explicit permission. 4. Deletes all of user's records within N hours/days of closing account 5. Doesn't log personally identifiable information 6. Limits liability for provider 7. Protects trademark/naming rights of provider Perhaps two versions, a FSL and LFSL, could exist, with the LFSL not containing requirement 0. When I made TodoCue public, I wanted people to know that I respect their freedom. For many reasons, the best I could come up with was this paragraph. Having a standardized FSL would make the decision to become a freedom-respecting service provider simpler and less risky. Naturally, one requirement of FSL services would be that they do not incorporate/contain non-FSL services (like many third-party advertising or statistics providers). Given a critical mass of FSL services or at least mindshare, we might even see FSL versions of Google AdSense, Analytics etc. State of Freedom After I wrote most of the above, I was pointed to work being done by others. The Affero GPL is GPL plus a requirement that service providers must provide source of modified network applications, even if there isn't a transfer of code in the normal desktop-application sense. I am not releasing TodoCue as open source until I figure out what makes more sense: the AGPL, or a different license that goes beyond AGPL, requiring any services that use it to be under the FSL. OSCON, coming up on July 24th, includes Eben Moglen talking about Licensing in the Web 2.0 Era and Tim O'Reilly talking about The Cathedral AND the Bazaar and the "six axes of open source". Alex Barnett posted a good summary of related discussion over the last several months. Update: Havoc just finished his keynote at GUADEC related to this. It provoked a lot of good discussion that I hope will lead to the creation of a Free Service License (or Open Service Definition as Havoc called it), not to mention the Gnome Online Desktop.

Tribune Corrections & BBC Picture Feeds

2007-07-13T21:27:00.000Z

I created a dapp (here in RSS) of the Chicago Tribune's Corrections page. Next I want a feed with the BBC's pictures inline so I don't miss shots like this (see #2). Update: Announcing the BBC Picture Feed, brought to you by the BBC, dapper, Yahoo! Pipes, and me!

OpenMoko Neo1973 and iPhone

2007-07-12T19:56:00.000Z

I shot these while at dinner last night with an awesome group of Chicago techies: iPhone and Neo1973 iPhone showing TodoCue The idea of a simple todo app for the Neo1973 was the original inspiration for TodoCue's creation and design. It doesn't render as well on the Neo as the iPhone, but that will change. I need to read up on how to support double clicking and DnD on these devices. I bought a prepaid sim card off eBay for $6 at Harper's suggestion. I'm psyched about the applications we can create on the mass-market Neo1973 coming in October, with it's GPS, accelerometers, 802.11, accelerated graphics, and free platform.

TodoCue Action

2007-06-15T04:14:00.000Z

With some strategic caching, TodoCue processing times are down from the 200ms range to less than 1ms for many (repeat) requests. New features include embeddeding in iGoogle by using this gadget, cancelling editing with Esc, and saving by clicking away from an item. The app is now translated into Español, Français, Slovensky, and Svenska. I'm looking forward to seeing what snazzy styles people customize their TodoCue with (via the custom CSS field under Account). Send them to me and I'll make them options for all users. As a side note, I plan to release the code under a FOSS license; stay tuned. Digg TodoCue

Embedded TodoCue

2007-06-10T04:31:00.000Z

I created a Firefox extension that puts TodoCue on the sidebar in GMail and Google Calendar. (With the extension's preferences you can actually pull in any URL). Also, you can now drag and drop todos between lists. If anyone wants to help, the app is ready to be translated. For an idea of the response so far, there have been 79 new users and 1k visitors since I first blogged about todocue. It's a simple project with a simple goal, and I'm thrilled if it's been useful to people. Note: if you have an addons.mozilla.org account you can help get the extension onto the public site. Update: TodoCue is now translated into Swedish by Daniel Nylander and Slovak by Michal Harakal!

Kickin it Standards Style

2007-06-05T05:07:00.000Z

I added iCal and XML feeds to TodoCue today. Here is an iCal feed configured as a web todo list via Evolution and put onto my desktop calendar:

Chicago: Pot of Gold

2007-06-04T00:29:00.000Z

The most amazing rainbow was over Lake Michigan an hour ago. I ran to the roof and snapped some pretty pictures, though they do the experience little justice. Update: Not sure how this disappeared from the web; sorry for the repost.

Cue the Action

2007-06-03T19:42:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I wrote a small webapp in Rails that I've dubbed TodoCue. It is a simple, slick todo list program. Feel free to sign up.

Inspiration by Media

2007-05-31T03:50:00.000Z

William McDonough I've read Cradle to Cradle, but McDonough is a brilliant speaker. He is pushing the edge in ecological design, and has the ear of the Chinese government. Cory Doctorow Cory spoke very well at the Red Hat Summit a few years ago. Google has an amazing number of videos of him, plus there are his lectures from the course he taught at USC this year. Lawrence Lessig I think I got to this via Miguel's blog a few years ago, but Lessig's amazing free culture talk/slideshow is still outstanding and educational. Others I've recently enjoyed talks by Burt Rutan and Jane Goodall. The quality of the speakers you can watch at TED, Authors@Google Talks, and others blows my mind. Who inspires you?

Stop Illegal Spying

2007-05-01T04:22:00.000Z

The EFF has put out a call to action to stop President Bush from giving corporations immunity for helping with illegal spying.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's hearing on the bill is now set for tomorrow [May 1] and only the Administration will be allowed to testify.

The hearing is also closed to the public. Sign the petition and make sure your representatives know where you stand. In other news, big surprise, Facebook is a bunch of sellouts willing to censor and marginalize communities that don't meet the approval of certain countries. Hard to believe they're not censored anyway.

Banshee, OLPC, Flourishing

2007-04-03T06:50:00.000Z

Banshee Bookmarks If you use Banshee to listen to audio books, lectures, or similar, you'll enjoy the new Bookmarks plugin I committed tonight. It will ship with Banshee, but be disabled by default. OLPC The latest build (368) is much faster, more responsive. I finally really played around with TamTam and eToys; what a blast! I also submitted my first patch to Sugar. Flourish There is a Linux conference called Flourish being held this weekend, April 6 and 7th, at UIC in Chicago. The conference is free if you register in advance. There will be speakers from Google, IBM, Red Hat, FSF, and Drupal. I'll be attending a couple of talks and the mixer (held at my office), and I'll bring my XO and Neo1973.

Emissions Sensing

2007-03-11T22:09:00.000Z

I just finished putting together the first three prototypes of the emissions sensing device I'm helping design for Engineers Without Borders. The idea is to sense CO, CO₂, and particulate matter levels near indoor cook stoves so the stoves can be modified to be safe and efficient. Around two billion people live in households that use solid fuels with poor combustion and ventilation. A year ago Professor Tami Bond gave a great presentation explaining the history of efforts to prevent the health and environmental problems caused by wood stoves and how the problem is being approached today (including our effort). Top prototype showing the menu in Spanish, middle showing the language selection dialog, and bottom showing the data screen. There is still a lot to do, including finalizing our choices for sensors, getting the device running on batteries, and getting PCBs made. Our entire effort (firmware, hardware, documentation) is open-source, released under the MIT license. Unfortunately we are currently using a proprietary C compiler as no FOSS compiler for our microprocessor (PIC18F4455) seems to exist.

Relative Scale

2007-03-08T16:20:00.000Z

The XO has surpassed my expectations. Sugar is intuitive, and the activities show a ton of promise. On the Neo1973, I tried the dialer with a Cingular SIM card, but as warned, it is unstable and crashed.

OLPC XO B2, Lenovo T60p, and Neo1973

Open Devices

2007-03-07T00:16:00.000Z

I'm thrilled to have received my Neo1973 today. Thank you to FIC and the people behind it! I am excited to contribute to such an important project. The developing world is bypassing PCs in favor of cell phones and the XO. OLPC and OpenMoko rock for bringing freedom to the only computing most of the world will ever know.
The goods: Neo1973 and accessories. Note GPL printout. The phone feels wonderful and is slimmer than I expected. The black and silver design is gorgeous.
Phase0 Neo1973 phone and the author. The world is changing and fast, and as if to impress this upon me further, my XO B2 machine arrives at the office tomorrow.

Medsphere Opens

2007-02-26T20:57:00.000Z

Congratulations to Brad, Peter, and all of Medsphere for releasing OpenVista. Better health care is a very noble mission, and that Medsphere seem to realize the importance of free software and open standards (open access, longevity, avoiding vendor lock-in) is superb. Related links:

Interesting open letter to Medsphere employees from their CEO regarding the company's open source policy.
Either really inspiring or really creepy video of the "Dawn of the Revolution"
Announcement on Digg

Introductions All Around

2007-02-14T05:53:00.000Z

Hello Planet Gnome! About Me I work for IBM, currently on the SME Toolkit project. I live in Chicago. In my free time I hack on F-Spot (new query functionality, hjkl navigation, window size/position preferences, etc) and Banshee (smart playlists and USB audio device support). I also work on a project with Engineers Without Borders developing an embedded system for sensing air quality to improve cookstove design and construction in the developing world. Preparing to fly in December Gegl# GEGL is a library for serializing and evaluating sets (actually graphs) of manipulations on images. We hope to use it for F-Spot to allow users to make changes to images and later tweak those changes and/or apply them to other images. To this end, I committed a first, rough version of Gegl# to Gnome SVN.

F-Spot Power

2007-01-11T06:03:00.000Z

I've been using F-Spot quite a bit since putting my photos on an external drive and using F-Spot's ability to store it's database where I choose (with -b dir). While tagging my 3,235 photos I found myself using the mouse or arrow keys to select photos to tag using Nat's awesome tag bar. To make this process smoother and avoid fingers leaving the home row, I committed support for using hjkl as left, down, up, and right respectively (like vim does). Now the process is smooth as butter: hjkl to move the focus combined with shift, ctrl-shift, and spacebar to change the selection; t opens and focuses the tag bar; tab completes; enter and esc return focus to the photo selection. Now all I need is GEGL-powered reusable, adjustable image manipulations and p2p album sharing.

Compounding Smartness

2006-12-16T06:37:00.000Z

Banshee's smart playlists can now be derived from other smart playlists. Since each one allows you to AND or OR a set of conditions, by compounding them you can create the full range of boolean queries. You can create playlists that match against songs' metadata (including rating, when last played, number of plays, etc) and whether a song is (or isn't) in a normal or smart playlist, and then cap the playlist at some number of songs, minutes/hours, or MB, with preference to higher ratings, or whatever you want. I also added a predefined smart playlist for "Unheard Podcasts".

Lively Banshee

2006-12-07T06:36:00.000Z

Performance One of the long standing complaints people have about Banshee is the main view of your songs. Some people want the iTunes artist/album/tracks split view, but others just want switching between their Library and other sources (playlists, devices, etc) to take less than five minutes. Previously I whittled that down to more like one minute, but obviously something was still wrong. Banshee has one TreeView and one ListStore. When you switch sources, it clears itself and loads the new songs. The problem is if you had sorted your view, the ListStore would be resorted after each and every new addition. The fix was to turn off sorting until all the songs were loaded. Net result? Switching takes on the order of one second now. Smart Playlists Also in the patch committed tonight were some changes for Smart Playlists, including fixing a crasher, improving performance and reliability, and fixing the very annoying bug that caused songs to be duplicated or not removed. Aaron also committed a nice little fix so you can right click and 'Edit Smart Playlist' instead of getting there through the obscure 'Source Properties' menu item. He's also roping Jakub into redoing my hastily Gimped smart playlist icon. Audio Players USB mass storage audio player support got some much needed attention a week ago. Fixes included actually working with the new, managed DBus, ignoring iPods to avoid confusion, and providing the ability to override HAL's metadata (if any) for the device by putting key=value pairs in the magic .is_audio_player file. See the new new guide for more details. I've actually been using Banshee recently to sync my iPod, enjoying lots of podcast (thanks Mike!) and cover art (thanks snorp!) goodness. Around the Banshee tromping grounds, Łukasz Wiśniewski announced his work on an OpenGL album browser plugin. There have been a ton of other fixes and new features recently. Aaron has a lot of blogging to do. Look for the next release, 0.11.3, in the next few days. It's going to rock!

Smartly Importing Banshee

2006-11-04T07:35:00.000Z

Importing 2,200 songs into Banshee took 97 seconds before if you had the four predefined smart playlists active. Three of those four look for favorites, so they don't match newly imported songs at all. If you change them from Rating > 3 to Rating < 3, they will match all the new songs, and importing is impossibly slow. I just committed rate limiting for the smart playlists; if more than a certain number of update events come in per second it ignores them and refreshes everything when the rate decreases. Importing now takes 55 seconds for both cases - one second more than if you have no smart playlists.

Tag Crazy

2006-10-11T02:47:00.000Z

If you are tag crazy, then managing and getting useful stuff done with your tags in F-Spot can be a bear. Jakub tells me he doesn't use the sidebar tag view at all because of how many tags he has, which means the graphical aspect of the new search functionality isn't useful for him. I added a filter entry above the tag view sidebar, so you can set any tag as the toplevel one, so only its children will be shown. It autocompletes, has a drop down, is reachable at any time via Ctrl-L, clears the filter with a button push or by pressing escape, is hidden by default, remembers if you hide/unhide it, etc: You can also see a somewhat more complicated query here. Even if you don't have an icon set for a tag, you can query it with full DND hotness. The tag filtering patch is solid and should land soon.

F-Spot Searching

2006-10-06T04:23:00.000Z

New search functionality has finally landed in F-Spot. You can now search your photos using your tags with full boolean goodness in drag-n-drop and text-entry varieties. This closes the two oldest F-Spot bugs, and several others. More details and screenshots on this older post.

Blossoms in the Fall

2006-10-02T02:49:00.000Z

The sunflowers we planted in the previously barren flower boxes on our roof have bloomed! They beautifully complement the view of Lake Michigan and downtown Chicago:

I installed the Foxmarks extension to Firefox today. It helps you keep your bookmarks in sync across multiple computers, using XML and DAV. You can use their hosting service, or you can specify your own host (which I did). It does an awesome job merging bookmarks in; I combined/unified/rediscovered my bookmarks from five different Firefox installations. Excellent!

Wild Banshee

2006-09-26T04:50:00.000Z

I caught a nice bug tonight in Banshee. Every time you switch between sources (Library, playlists, devices, etc) in Banshee, it reloads the ListStore model three times. Reloading is a linear-time operation, so the results below will scale according to how many songs you have. Here are the seconds it takes to execute everything that's triggered when the ActiveSourceChanged event is raised. I switched fairly quickly between my Library (with 2015 songs) and a Smart Playlist (with 409 songs) before and after my patch:

Before  After
1.08  0.04
0.94  0.06
3.96  0.04
0.87  0.06
0.96  0.05
4.23  0.05
8.14  0.05
1.12  0.06
1.01  0.08
4.79  0.06
10.08  0.05
17.75  0.05

Ouch! I was probably trying to switch faster than Banshee could keep up with toward the end, hence the drastically increasing times. But even in the more typical case, it goes from about 1 second to 1/20 of a second. Fix committed! I've been looking into automated testing for F-Spot and Banshee (using Dogtail and Gendarme) for a while. It would be great to track performance regressions and improvements over time, as well as test importing, exporting, code compliance, and more. Looking forward to seeing and meeting people at the Summit in less than two weeks!

Atlantis

2006-09-09T21:28:00.000Z

STS-115 launched this morning with Mission Specialist Joe Tanner. Joe was kind enough to take me flying in a Boeing Stearman open-cockpit biplane, cruising the Gulf from 500 ft and pulling a few aerobatics, when I was in Houston working for NASA/USA. I'll never forget that flight. Best of luck for another successful mission, Joe!

Tag Searching in F-Spot

2006-09-07T01:22:00.000Z

Back in mid-August I resuscitated the F-Spot query branch, fixed some things, and added some new features. In particular, I added a type-to-find bar where you can enter arbitrary and/or boolean queries (using parenthesis as needed). The not operator is not supported yet, but shouldn't be hard. I also created an animated GIF of the type-to-find bar in action. More recently I changed the menu options - in the context menus and the Find menu. They are now more functional yet simpler. Larry says he wants to get this in soon. You can follow along at home by CC'ing yourself to the infamous bug.

Smart Playlists in Banshee Core

2006-09-06T23:26:00.000Z

Aaron has moved the Smart Playlist plugin from Banshee SVN into Banshee itself. Two nights ago I added some pre-defined smart playlists: