Fer's blog
fer, ferulo, that crazy man

After I released yesterday the muine lyrics plugin my friend Eru told me that today eina, the other cool GNOME music player, has just got a lyrics plugin:

It is cooler than mine, because it implents selection of right lyrics when various results are available. Damm! and better UI. So I need to update/improve the muine one :). Now, following the "one day, one feature" sentence, I proposed them a little contest: a karaoke plugin, using EvilLyrics files. I'm very tired now to code anything, and tomorrow I have a busy day (Opera with Juan Diego Florez included!), but maybe Miguel would be able to sing his favourite songs in some days (and his neighbours will hate us).

Oh, I think that eina should be included in FC4 because is a really good player and has no the mono dependency (that seems that Red Hat doesn't want to add to Fedora)

I got more and interesting feedback about how GNOME applications should handle devices:

• Luke Hutchison suggested adding a system to .desktop files for an app that allows for the app to be activated when a specific D-BUS signal was raised. e.g. in gnome-cd.desktop :
  

  Capability[0]=/org/freedesktop/hw-events/insert-cdda-cd
  Capability_Exec[0]=gnome-cd --unique --play --device %d

• Jerry Haltom pointed to two more threads about using MIME types:
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/utopia-list/2004-August/msg00066.html
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-August/msg00123.html
• David Zeuthen blogged about extending .desktop files with sections things like [System Action MediaAudioDiscInserted]
• Luca Ferretti pointed me to
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-November/msg00187.html
  • http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164991
  and also sent me his unfinished answer to Thomas mail, proposing also a way to extend .desktop file to handle events, like X-GNOME-HANDLE-BLANKCD=true
• hadess also agrees on extending .desktop file for handling events.

So it seems that there is some agrement on extending .desktop files, and that it should be proposed/done at fd.org level.

My friend arc posted a list of the worst things in GNOME 2.8 (in Spanish). These are my comments (in italic):

• Non homogeneus and outdated developer docs. BIG CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS!
• Applets consume too many system resources:
  

  arc       5635  0.0  2.5 16844 6416 ?        S    Dec08   0:01 /usr/libexec/clock-applet

• Lack of integrated and official multimedia player.It will be fixed on next releases with Totem, rb and sound-juicer aditions
• Non high quality pdf support. Dude, have you tried Evince?
• Printer configutarion is not solid neither stable.I hadn't have a printer anytime before, buf configuring at work the SMB ones with my FC2 "just worked" (tm)
• Where is no easy way to change between users and having simultaneus sessions.Have you tried Jimbob's User Selector Applet?. Maybe it should be included on GNOME 2.12 :)
• Cannot manage user account. Revelation?
• Lack of an IDE/RAD tool. 100% agree
• Lack of "whole" theme file format.
• File-roller needs to extract the full archive to /tmp when droping a single file

The new and fancy Muine plugin system plus the C# and Gtk# combination allow you to do things like this in 100 lines of code:

a plugin to show the lyrics of the song you are listening. I'm using http://lyrc.com.ar/because they have lot of Spanish lyrics.Here is the code: Lyrics.cs. To compile, use the following command:

mcs -target:library -out:Lyrics.dll Lyrics.cs -pkg:muine-plugin

and copy the .dll to you plugin dir. Some improvements that can be done:

• Better UI: now it's only a window+scrollview+textview
• Use a local cache for lyrics
• Instead of retrieving from the server the first match, if there are more than one, allow the user to select it

I also updated my burn patch for Muine, making it a plugin. I'll import it to GNOME CVS when I get rid of some weirness on it (like don't wrapping burn-drive-selection widget, because when I wrote it, muine used Gtk# 1.0 without the combo box. Here is the pre-alpha version if you want to try it:muine-burn-0.0.0.tar.bz2.
I got a lot of possitive feedback about the default applications to handle devices. I'll try to summarize it tomorrow.

I wrote a patch (already in eel CVS HEAD) for the add application for mime type dialog. Now you can select it from a list of know applications instead of writing an obscure command:

Also wrote a patch for prettify the select app page, showing icons from the apps:

Two tips for gnome-lovers:

• Fix the the first code (eel/eel-open-with-dialog.c) to load correctly every icon using the code in the second patch.
• Fix the obvious bug in the second patch :)

More work helping users to use "Application" concept instead of "command" concept:

with this work in progress patch for gnome-volume-manager it presents a ComboBox with the know applications that can handle CDs. For knowing that I'm adding a new gnome-cd-play.desktop that handles mime type: "audio/x-cd-cdda", has the NoDisplay=true, and the Exec is "gnome-cd --device=%d". Now we need to discuss some open points:

• What's the right UI for this?. I don't like the combo with an "Custom" entry
• Should we use special mime types for devices? Should we propose to fd.org?
• Totem and camera programs should support a "--device=/dev/XXX" or HAL UDI stuff

Update:I've received some feedback. This mockup from Stefan Ihringer:

and these two threads about these special mime types (From Kristof Vansant):

• http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-August/004461.html
• http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2005-January/005686.html

Tonigh I implemented one of the most requested features of MSN gaim users (or at least of my friends using gaim): previews for transfered images:

I'm not putting the patch here yet, because I'm not really sure about the UI (comments welcome) and because last time I did it the patch was directly committed with my really horrible icons:

Finally my friend Fidel cooked up better icons:

. Maybe a icon like the "no parking" sign would be better for the blocked users.

Ah, tomorrow I'm going back to work after Xmas holydays, and it's 4:45am here... dam!