Recent blog entries for jorn

Wow, I am finally back online. The last month or so I spent moving to my new apt here in Tartu, Estonia, and fixing the place up (making taking a shower not flood the floor, and throwing away the "best before 1993" tins of herring we found in the cupboards, to name just a few things). The rooms we got around to decorating look really nice now, and taking a shower is the pleasure it ought to be. Just yesterday we got online- with a wonderful line from our kind neighbours, the Tartu physics institute. Studying Estonian here at the university is eating a lot of my time (god, this language is complicated- but it's great fun!), but I hope to be able to get some Muine work done in my weekends. Wrote a tiny-tiny patch to gweather-applet to include some more Estonian towns, so that I can get more accurate forecasts into my panel rather than just Tallinn. Hope somebody will get around to looking at it soon. Wonder whether any fellow gnomes will be reading this, or whether everybody is only reading pgo now.. hmm..

thomasvs, mpesenti: I whipped up a small document adressing the problems I have run into in more detail, it is here.

GStreamer

thomasvs: being a good open source citizen I always check bugzilla and the list archives whether the issue has already been reported before reporting it .. which is why you hear so little of me. I should probably find a way to make it clearer what probs I bump into, though. I thought of blogging more- mentioning the things I run into. Started doing that yesterday..

As for my switch - it's really just temporarily. This is just me being a very impatient person- I want my software to work, and I want it to work right now, and not in n months time. I agree the GStreamer project would benefit from it if I left the default backend at GStreamer, so that it would get more testing. Very true. However, debugging audio backends is not my focus with Muine - my focus is the interface, and the interface should work well. If that involves temporarily switching to xine-lib as default backend, even though not the ideal choice from a cooperation perspective, so be it ...

Muine 0.6

I expect 0.6 to be released soon, which is gonna be our best release to date. It seems to be very stable and is extremely fast: a *lot* of optimization has been done since 0.5.3.

I am very pleased to see the interface work out as expected: the use cases I targetted with the first iteration of the interface are perfectly covered, and our new interface proposals addressing the biggest remaining problems will hopefully, once implemented, fill in the remaining cases. I wish MArk was still here to see it, we spent a lot of time trying to puzzle the "ideal music player" together ..

GStreamer

I have recently changed Muine's default backend from GStreamer to xine-lib. I am a big fan of the whole GStreamer project and I intend to switch back as soon as I think it is ready- however, I don't think it is quite there yet. I hope better performance (especially when opening a new stream), reliable seeking, and a more responsive, non-crackly pause are on the agenda for GNOME 2.8.

TagLib

TagLib, from the KDE camp, truly rocks. Small, fast, no external dependencies, proper unicode support, and extensible. I intend to use this in Muine once a few issues I pointed out have been resolved. Using it will allow us to get rid of a bunch of ugly code and their dependencies- and we'd get much more solid ID3 and FLAC support.

Gtk#

I can't wait till it supports Gtk 2.4. I'd love to use the new file selector, and the new combo box in Muine. :)

Distributions

I've been trying to find a distro to install on my gf's pc, next to Win XP. I need the installer to support NTFS resizing, so I decided to give SuSE a shot, also seen the Novell/Ximian stuff etc. I was extremely disappointed to find that I could not find any ISOs. Then I heard Mandrake supports NTFS resizing too, so I tried to find Mandrake 10.0 ISOs - no luck either. I find this a bit disturbing, it means I have to go to the store to buy a copy of SuSE, even though I am spending a lot of my free time doing development on software they ship ....

Working on Muine is loads of fun. Gathered a small group of people helping out already, getting lots of patches, suggestions, etc. Very motivating. The project itself is coming along damn well.. it's stable, speedy, and the UI is working perfectly well for me at least. This is the first time I'm feeling total satisfaction about my work.. it's awesome. Yay. Released version 0.2 today, too.

Muine is coming along real nice. Got the library working, still some rough edges that need polish .. but I'm using it as my full-time player now. Screenshot. Imported it into GNOME CVS as well.

MArk

Shocked to hear about sisob having passed away. I knew he was ill, but I was under the impression he was living through it. I remember discussing the Rhythmbox UI with him many times, and of course it is only now I realize I have never thanked him for all his work and enthusiasm there. He was also the only other Gnome dude my age that I knew of. He will be missed.

Muine

Just released version 0.0.2 of Muine. The main playlist window is finished. I will now be concentrating on getting the library done.

Released a very first little preview release of muine.

[link]

Been working on my new music player. Some details and a screenshot:

• Written in C#, using Gtk#
• Uses GStreamer for playback, Gst# not required.
• Gets metadata using libid3tag and libvorbis over gnome-vfs
• Support for multiple artists and albums per song
• Supports album cover images
• Screenshot

It actually has a music library and proper random playback support, but those are not fully implemented yet (and not yet integrated into the main UI just yet, but I have mockups ready). And they are totally different from what you're used to. But the idea seems to work much, much better than for example Rhythmbox for me.

Also been working on a dictionary app in C#, supporting any dictionary site that has a backend written for it. (Maybe I'll manage to do description files at some point)

Currently the only dictionary supported is Estonian-English from http://aare.pri.ee/dictionary.html :P