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!
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