Finally, after over a year of closed development (much to our chagrin), we've finally released what we've been working on! Unfortunately, this release has caveats - in the form of not having a name (some unresolved legal gubbins). We've referred to it internally as Sofatron, and though this is not a name endorsed by my employer, I'll call it that for convenience.
So, what is Sofatron? In short, it's a local and network video and picture browser. It also has some search ability. The whole thing is backed by Clutter, Mx, Grilo and Tracker, the latter three of which it requires bleeding-edge versions of (you'll also need Tumbler if you want thumbnails). A picture speaks a thousand words, so a video must be even more valuable. So, a couple follow, along with the repository address:
Download video
Watch on YouTube
Alternative video
Download the source!
While there's still a lot missing and there are still bugs (in all levels of the stack, I'm afraid to say), I think it's a pretty good example of what you can do, harnessing some of the best open-source libraries around. It's released under the LGPL2.1, and we don't have copyright assignment, so please do feel free to contribute back, to fork it, to do what you like, with respect to the licences involved. I notice that Gnome doesn't really have an app equivalent to this, maybe it could be a good candidate for a later version of Gnome?
If you'd like to contribute, there are several good projects to take on. Of course, there's general bug-fixing, polishing and optimisation work. We could also use a music plugin. If you're looking for something even bigger, maybe a TV-centric web-browser? (I hear there's even a Clutter back-end of WebKit these days!) If you'd like to help and you don't know where to start, my e-mail address is on the side of this page (click through if you're reading this via RSS/an aggregator). I'd love to hear what you think in the comments!
Ross Burton says:
You'll also need a patch to Tumbler if you are not running on MeeGo...
https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7294
Jason D. Clinton says:
> I notice that Gnome doesn't really have an app equivalent to this, maybe it could be a good candidate for a later version of Gnome?
Outside of Core and Platform, there are no longer "official" Apps. But the Marketing Team could certainly promote this once you feel that it is ready to get end-user attention.
korbe says:
Great job. ;)
« I notice that Gnome doesn't really have an app equivalent to this, maybe it could be a good candidate for a later version of Gnome?»
Yes, this app can be a good "Gnome-Media-Shell". It would be cool if we can have, in parallel of Gnome Desktop, a Gnome Media Center. Simply install it on a eeeBox and have fun with a 100% integration with your computer using Gnome. No? :D
But I see it's a GSoC 2011 idea of Gnome Project: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2011/Ideas#Media
korbe says:
Great job. ;)
« I notice that Gnome doesn't really have an app equivalent to this, maybe it could be a good candidate for a later version of Gnome?»
Yes, this app can be a good "Gnome-Media-Shell". It would be cool if we can have, in parallel of Gnome Desktop, a Gnome Media Center. Simply install it on a eeeBox and have fun with a 100% integration with your computer using Gnome. No? :D
But I see it's a GSoC 2011 idea of Gnome Project: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2011/Ideas#Media
Aidan Delaney says:
Umm...wow! This looks fantastic, and it looks touch friendly too. Was your demo done on a released netbook/tablet platform or is the smoothness due to running on a beefier machine?
Chris Lord says:
@Jason: Great, I'll bear that in mind - it's probably not ready yet, but it'd be great if it were adopted by the Gnome developer community to bring it that last little way
@korbe: Thanks! That would be great, though I see it more as a 'Front Row' sort of application, that goes with the gnome-desktop and activates when you start using the remote control or something like that.
It was frustrating to see that GSoC project go up and not be able to say anything about this - I hope that whatever students work on that can base their work on top of this, if it's suitable.
@Aidan: Thanks! In fairness, this is running on my reasonably beefy laptop, though running recordmydesktop was having a serious effect on frame-rate - I'd be confident in saying that it should run reasonably well on a netbook, though I've not tried it myself.
It's not often CPU-bound, so if you have decent graphics drivers, you'll find it performs pretty well (runs great on the old Mac Mini, for example). It's not really doing a whole lot technically, so if it doesn't run well on a netbook, it's a bug. We've not spent much time optimising, so there's plenty of headroom too.
anon says:
Looking hot! Any chance of supporting the mouse? And touch/multitouch?
Jan Jokela says:
That's quite awesome =)
But there's just this one thing. It looks more complicated to use than lets say, front row. It probably doesn't take more steps (than front row) to play a movie, but the way things are presented makes it look like it does.
Nicolas Trangez says:
This looks really promising! I've been looking for a media-center-style application with good (GNOME) desktop integration (both local and remote, think Rygel and GUPnP Control Point and/or Renderer integration) myself for quite a while, thought about launching some project myself, but never really got to it, so this is great news.
Keep up the good work!
Chris Lord says:
@anon: I may be looking at this next, we'll see :) Certainly mouse support wouldn't be too hard, but I'd really like proper touch support...
@Jan: I agree, it looks more complicated than it is sometimes - and would you believe earlier designs were even more cluttered (though they looked really cool in different ways)! Do you have any suggestions to simplify things, without sacrificing functionality?
@Nicolas: Thanks :) Perhaps you'd like to contribute? Ideas and documentation are good entry points, code would be great too!
Jan Jokela says:
@Chris: The navigation goes by in a way items arrange themselves depending on where focus is. Menus slide sideways to make room to new stuff, grid items change size depending on which item is focused, etc. My gut feeling is the human eye gets confused by that. I have no idea how to (in this type of interface) beat the simple item list where you go up or down, select and boom to the next screen.
Iago Toral says:
Nice work! I'd love to see this in Gnome and I am very happy that you guys are making good use of Grilo here :)
BTW, how do you handle views with tons of items? From the video it looks as if you show all the elements available under each category in just one go, but I wonder if you actually page results, load items on demand (when you scroll down), etc
Chris Lord says:
@Jan: I think it's worth trying it out before making this assumption - you're right on the whole, but I don't think we overdo it and the transitions and impression of space help give you an idea of where you 'are' in the interface.
While a list is certainly functional, sometimes how you feel using an interface can be important (while we may not have necessarily gotten this right, I think this general idea is evidenced in Apple products, where look and feel have a lot more polish than in most other products).
@Iago: Grilo did just what we needed and you guys were super-responsive with features/bug-fixes - was a pleasure using it :) We don't page results at the moment (though we probably ought to), but we load them in asynchronously.
I wrote MxActorManager to help with this, it allows us to time-slice creation/addition/removal of actors, so we don't spend too much time on it per frame. Also, items aren't fully completed until they're shown on screen (with respect to thumbnail loading/fetching of extra metadata)
Any comments?
