So I've managed to write software that a lot of people are suddenly interested in. It's an interesting thing to say the least. However "becoming famous" was nothing like what I'd had imagined. Here's what happened after my initial blogpost:
- The media picks it up.
The media is interested in new stories. So they post them. However, they often prefer to give those stories their own spin. (The really weird stories have luckily already disappeared from Google, so no links to them.) None of those journalists contacted me about it, they just wrote something. - The people pick it up.
Lots of people start talking about it. How do I know? I googled. Only 5 people talked to me about it. Mostly they just went into obscure forums or chats to discuss it and complain about missing features. Almost nobody of them realizes that it's a really good idea to come to me and ask questions. It's highly motivating if someone shows interest in my product. Even if it's just complaining that it doesn't build on his box. And if you ask, there's a high chance I get interested in solving your problem, especially if it's a pretty simple problem.
(Side note: The Ubuntu forums are lucky to have such a high Google ranking, so I could at least find their questions.) - When there's a release, the distros pick it up.
Distros are really fast at taking your source code and sticking it in the unstable branch of their package repositories. Lots of them, in particular the big ones, contact you to tell you about it and ask questions. The process of integrating new software into distros seems to work really well. Congrats from me to the distro people for that. Great work you're doing there. In particular Gentoo. - People start blaming
They seem to read everything I have said in the past and spin it in their direction. I'm suddenly personally responsible for not working on Gnash and fragmenting the Free Flash movement, I sure as hell have to provide OpenBSD support or my software is crap, stuff like that. Again, noone comes and asks, that would be far too complicated. And probably wouldn't be compatible to their predetermined opinion. - Hackers don't show up
I was expecting some interested people to show up and have a look at the code. In particular because the code is documented far better than all my previous code (including GStreamer ;)). I think there have been 2 people so far that looked at it. But that's about it. Probably everyone is busy doing their own project. Or people still think doing Flash is hard (hint: it's not).
- People wanted an easy API to embed Flash files. So I created libswfdec-gtk. You should be able to play Youtube videos in your Gtk app with 20 lines of C.
- Or you could do it in 10 lines of Python with the new Pyswfdec Python bindings that Gian Mario Tagliaretti has been working on.
- Last but not least I've managed to use GStreamer instead of ffmpeg/mad for video and audio decoding. While that doesn't sound to exciting at first, it means you can build swfdec now without linking to patented multimedia formats and still be able to enjoy Youtube. I know at least Fedora was very interested in that.
What I've been wondering and like to get some feedback from people active in this area is if it's a good idea to export the script interpreter. ActionScript is almost the same as Javascript (same syntax), so it offers a sandboxed execution environment. In this case completely GObject'ified. So you could use it if you wanted to script Flash files, or you could even add hooks to it in your own app and download interesting scripts from the web. Think Get Hot new Stuff with scripts. To me that's somewhere between total crack and really exciting.