The GNOME release masters have released GNOME 2.5.5. It is a development release, intended for bug-busting and testing. Due to popular demand, a Changelog has also been put up.
http://gnomedesktop.org/release/2.5.5-changes.txt
Another release of the GNOME Platform Bindings. This is the last release before the API freeze on March 1st. So developers if you have any API changes you need to make, you must make them soon. As the time is fast approaching. One thing of note for those of you have developed a passion for C# that in this release beta version fo the C# bindings on track for full release in the GNOME 2.7/2.8 Release schedule.
The GNOME Platforms Binding release GNOME Development Platform for programming languages other than C.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-February/msg00089.html
Garnome 0.30.1 is out for those of you who like to compile from tarballs. Jdub has released some new goodies including an embedded environment called Matchbox. Matchbox is an environment for hardware like handhelds and mobile devices. The ChangeLog includes new packages, and removal of some older ones. Check out his announcement!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2004-February/msg00084.html
http://matchbox.handhelds.org/
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/garnome/
Sorry folks, not an original Gnome Summary interview! However, Open Magazine has an interesting interview with Jody Goldberg, the maintainer of Gnumeric, an awesome spreadsheet program. Lots of interesting things about how Jody started, and questions on Gnumeric proper.
http://www.open-mag.com/7843483279.shtml
1. Please identify yourself, what project you work on, and what your role is in it.
Hi, I'm Colin Walters. I like to hack on a variety of things, like SELinux and GNU Arch, but Rhythmbox is probably what you're interested in :)
Right now in Rhythmbox I mostly take on the role of cat-herder. There's been a number of really awesome patches coming in from other people, like Christophe Fergeau's iPod support, and Michael Terry's automatic rating work. So right now I personally am mostly squishing those little annoying bugs and reviewing patches until I have time to get back to really serious hacking on Rhythmbox.
2. Can you provide a history of how Rhythmbox got started and how you ended up being its maintainer?
Rhythmbox is a pretty old project actually, with a lot of interesting history. I believe it was first started by Bastien Nocera:
http://www.hadess.net/files/shots/rhythmbox_notabs.jpg
After him, Jorn Baayen picked it up, and did an amazing job:
http://www.gnome.org/~kenneth/cd-afspilning.png
Jorn rewrote almost the whole thing, and added a really strong focus on usability, which is something we try to keep going now.
I heard of Rhythmbox from when I was helping Bastien become a Debian maintainer, and the first time I saw it I was very impressed. I thought it had a lot of potential. So I decided to work on Internet Radio support, which is something that eventually caused some design disagreement between Jorn and me, so for a while I maintained "netRhythmbox" as a separate codebase. However, neither of us really wanted a fork, and after a little while we were able to come to an agreement, so we sat down and merged Rhythmbox and netRhythmbox back together, and designed a new UI in the process. That was around a year ago if I remember correctly.
Not too long after that, Jorn decided to take a break from hacking, and so maintainership passed to me, and I've been doing it since then. The code has evolved substantially in that time.
Not directly related to Rhythmbox, but it's worth mentioning that when Jorn came back from his break, he started hacking on an entirely new music player named Muine:
http://people.nl.linux.org/~jorn/Muine/
It's a very cool project too, with a lot of fresh UI ideas, and worth checking out.
3. What is your main design objective for Rhythmbox and do you see the current version heading towards that goal?
I want a music player that's really easy to use and intuitive, and I think we're actually doing pretty well on that now. Mostly what we're doing now is fleshing the project out with features such as iPod support, better automatic playlists, and using GStreamer's awesome new features.
4. Rhythmbox is typically referred to as an iTunes clone. Is that true and if so, is it your goal to exactly clone iTunes or only utilize its best features?
I wouldn't call it a clone personally, but Rhythmbox is without a doubt inspired by iTunes. Our goal is definitely not to clone iTunes exactly - Rhythmbox has always had its own style.
5. In your opinion, what are the neatest features that are currently being implemented in Rhythmbox?
I would say elegance and usability is our neatest feature :) But again probably the neatest things coming along are things like the iPod support and better GStreamer integration.
6. As a GNOME user, what is the one thing that you absolutely love about the GNOME desktop environment?
I like the community a lot. There's a ton of cool GNOME hackers and users out there, and it's really fun to be a part of it.
If I had to name one thing about the environment in general though, it would definitely be the simple elegance of it. If you look at applications like Epiphany and Gossip, you can tell that someone really *cared* and thought about how they look and feel, and it really shows.
7. Likewise, what is the one thing that you absolutely hate about GNOME and wish you could see it changed before anything else?
This isn't so much GNOME's fault per se, but from a usability standpoint I think the lack of "system level" tools like for configuring a network interface, adding users, etc are a big lack. Of course some distributors like Red Hat have solved this with their own tools, and there is also the GNOME System Tools project. I just hope that all of this work can be folded back into the core GNOME desktop at some point so that all GNOME users benefit.