Saturday 28 February 2009

We have a fork

After careful consideration, and a lot of discussions, bluez-gnome has its own fork in the shape of a revived gnome-bluetooth.

If you ever used bluez-gnome (and you probably have if you ever used Bluetooth on Linux), you'll be familiar with the solutions offered. Let me tell you about a few differences between bluez-gnome and gnome-bluetooth:
  • No analyzers (or analysers) in gnome-bluetooth. Not really an end-user tool.
  • We has widgets! We have a BluetoothChooser, and a BluetoothChooserButton exported in libgnome-bluetooth. Use libgnome-bluetooth-1.0.pc in your apps, and you're half-way to setting up Bluetooth in your app.
  • We are stetic! UI problem? File a bug in the GNOME Bugzilla. You have GtkBuilder-fu? Help us move away from hard-coded widgets.
  • Translators! Help! bluez-gnome was translated using Launchpad's Rosetta. While it was good for getting translations in the first place, it doesn't quite have the same level of community support the GNOME translations team(s) have.
  • Integration! bluez-gnome had to cater for people that didn't want to use GNOME, or people that didn't like our approaches. Hopefully no silly options, or duplicated functionality in gnome-bluetooth.
We still have a bit of work to be done before the first release, but it won't be too far off.

Try: gnome-bluetooth in GNOME SVN, file bugs against gnome-bluetooth, help out fix some of the gnome-love bugs. Mailing-lists is still the old one, hosted by Edd.

PS: I need to update the Wiki page. Feel free to help :)

Wednesday 4 February 2009

Things you shouldn't do

Things you shouldn't ever be doing.
  • Transform a filename into a URI like that:
uri = g_strdup_printf ("file:///%s", filename);

Use g_filename_to_uri() instead. Same goes for the opposite direction, where stripping "file://" isn't good enough to transform a URI into a local filename. Use g_filename_from_uri(), or g_file_get_path() if you're actually going to be opening the files.

  • Use GStreamer to play a single small pop sound:
Use libcanberra instead. It's portable, might use GStreamer in some cases, and very certainly requires less code for a simple use like this.

Bruno, you should get a Bugzilla component for Garfunkel.