Colin Walters and the Rhythmbox team have been hard at work and now the long-awaited Rhythmbox 0.8.0 is here! The new stable branch makes use of the new GTK+ FileSelector, has iPod support, has numerous speed and database fixes, makes use of GStreamer 0.8.0's new metadata reading, has ReplayGain support, has Ogg radio support and better automatic playlists. The Rhythmbox team is already looking towards the 0.9 development branch with some cool features including File monitoring, an SQLite backend and Icecast source exporting.
Also in the world of GNOME music players, Muine is maturing rapidly. With the 0.5.3 release, Muine has improved Amazon.com album fetching. Muine also has a new Xine backend, as well as an alternative backend making use of GStreamer 0.8 and the new GstPlay element. Muine supports custom album cover images through Drag'n'Drop. Muine fans are in for a couple of treats. Discussion has begun to add a much desired feature to Muine, randomization. Jorn and crew have some innovative ideas they call "playlist filling", allowing users to group albums, and have the player randomly add songs from within selected groups. This prevents the genre clashing that occurs with traditional randomization implementations. Second on the table for Muine fans is the Infodialog proposal. This will add tag editing to Muine, using a series of dialogs. Jorn plans on using TagLib for this, since it abstracts tag writing for ID3, Vorbis & FLAC.
http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/proposal.html
http://huizen.dds.nl/~jbaayen/infodialog-proposal.html
http://ktown.kde.org/~wheeler/taglib.html
In the past 6 months we've had added many features, especially to components like gnome-vfs and nautilus, that allows people to access any number of services like webdav, sftp and samba. But there has been a gap in applications that do not fully integrate themselves completely into the desktop.
For example, gnome-vfs has support for samba, but if you don't use gnome-vfs, your application will not be able to access files over samba. There is an added danger that a new user might consider the application broken if it does not interact with the samba share as it does with the rest of the desktop.
The solution is not to bug your friendly neighborhood application writer and demand gnome-vfs integration. The reason gnome-vfs has not been used is that there is no compelling need to use it. This can be mitigated by helping to provide better API documentation of gnome-vfs and writing a tutorial on how to integrate gnome-vfs into your application. This would be a great volunteer project for someone to take up. Write me an email (sri AT aracnet.com.) if you're interested!
The GNOME 2.6 Desktop User Guide, System Administration Guide, and Accessibility Guide are now available. Even though GNOME is very easy to use, it's still not as useful without the hard work of the documentation team writing documentation on how to effectively use GNOME. Please check it out and if you have feedback, let the documentation team know.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2004-April/msg00013.html
Right on time, Murray and the Platform Bindings team have released the bindings for the GNOME Development platform. These bindings include C++, Java, and Perl.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-April/msg00000.html
I decided to write something on Alexandria. As an avid book reader, this sounds like a great application to manage my book collection. Particurly, with the application showing covers, it's easy to browse using this than wondering around your library peeking behind books looking to find that one book that I want to read over again. Good stuff!
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/alexandria_icons.png
http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/alexandria_list.png
Publisher "No Starch Press" has published "The Official GNOME 2 Developer's Guide" by Matthius Warkus. Matthius Warkus is a dedicated GNOME person who has organized a lot of the talks and presentations at German conferences, worked on German translations, and has vigorously participated in the GNOME mailing list. He's always been helpful on IRC to newbies as "mawa". If you see him, please congratulate him!
For you folks that are interested in GNOME development and would like a good guide, please check out this book. If you already purchased the book, we're interested in a review!
One final note is that a part of the cost of the book will be donated to the GNOME Foundation! So when you buy the book, you're really helping out the community too!
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/1593270305/
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