An era comes to an end

I'm not changing jobs, or getting married, it's all a bit more important than that.

Totem's xine-lib backend is now gone in git master, for GNOME 2.28.

The GStreamer boys have come forward, fixed a lot of bugs, and implemented new features, which means that the GStreamer backend was getting held back by the features of the xine-lib backend.

Oh, and before people start complaining:

• this is only in the development branch for now
• if you haven't filed a bug about whatever problem the GStreamer backend caused for you, you're not allowed to complain

Because I suck at glade

To port apps that don't use libglade to GtkBuilder, the easiest way is to start from scratch in a glade-3 window. But because I suck at glade, I posted a patch to gtk-parasite to dump a whole widget tree into a GtkBuilder UI file.

It works well enough for me to do half the work of porting the bluetooth-properties to GtkBuilder.

No excuses now.

Our new volume feature

The feature was some time in coming, but Jon bit the bullet, and created the new gnome-volume-control. I came in afterwards, and did bug fixing and small new features.

Compared to the old volume control, we're already winning in terms of ease of use: no more weirdly named ALSA mixers we need to work-around, easy selection of input and output devices, microphone level bar.

Even the applet (as well as the gnome-settings-daemon media keys plugin) is now simpler because it doesn't need to work-around weird sound cards, with weirdly named channels.

PulseAudio 0.9.15 brings a few new features that we'll be able to use in the near future, such as back/front fade, sound card profiles selection (one click to setup multi-speaker output), and probably even Bluetooth headsets integration. Speaker testing is also on the cards.

I haz 5.1!

Yay for the desktop with a modern sound system.

Contributing translations

In a comment to my last post, somebody mentioned that the translations would be better on Launchpad than in GNOME. Adi Roiban posted two articles on his blog showing how to contribute to GNOME translations:
Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations and Contribute to GNOME as a translator

I'm pretty sure I'll leave the GNOME translations as a feature in that list :)

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 :)

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.

NB: It doesn't actually look like that

If you read the Phoronix article about the new gnome-volume-control (also seen linked from OSNews), don't worry, the upstream (and Fedora) applet doesn't look like that.


It looks like that.



Ubuntu's mixer applet is a different UI on the old mixer applet in gnome-applets, and not the PulseAudio-powered volume applet now in gnome-media.

In addition to the article being outdated (the treeview with the one-by-one sound event customisation is already gone), it also invents new features such as «the ability to adjust the alert volume on a per-alert basis». God knows where they got that from.

/The guy who did the last gnome-media release