knocte :: MonoTema

Here we are, at the beginning of a great summer!

This time, Google has given plenty of slots to the GNOME project, so we could accept many participants, including 3 brilliant students to work on the Banshee project. In case they haven't blogged about it, or didn't give much detail, I'll elaborate a bit about what they will be aiming to do these months:

• Nicholas Little will be working on creating a new extension for Bluetooth synchronization, and if time permits, refactoring our MTP support. In regards to the latter, if you have an Android phone you might have experienced some bugs getting it to work with Banshee lately (our MassStorage synchronization support is great, but the latest versions of Android have been deprecating this mode in favour of MTP, which we never supported very well); we have been working hard on fixing them, but Nicholas is going to try to give it that extra push at the end of the summer, which I'm confident he will do very well (he was the developer who brought Symbian support for the masses -or rather, for his Nokia N95 ;) -, on Banshee 2.9.0). And you may be wondering, why do we need Bluetooth sync? Well, we understand that it's much slower than USB or Wifi, but:

1. USB can work for the first sync, but whenever you update your library, I never remember to connect my phone again with my cable, or I'm too lazy to do it. Now imagine that whenever your phone is near your computer (and of course if you have Banshee running), they could negotiate together to update the sync without the need of moving a finger!
2. Wifi could work also for the use case I just explained, but getting Wifi to work, compared to Bluetooth, would involve creating an app for the phone that could talk with Banshee. And we all know what are the problems associated with that: we would need to be cross-platform for at least the 3 main mobile platforms out there (well, iOS wouldn't even work neither with this nor with Bluetooth, because there are no public APIs to integrate with the music database of the OS, sigh iTunes...), and that means a lot of maintenance burden (even if we choose a same-language native platform like Xamarin), and a user experience that is not so seamless (as it would require the user to install an app first).

• Marcin Kolny, which has convinced us that he will do a great job given his great patches and the fact that he's already very involved in opensource (maintainer of C++ bindings to GStreamer if I recall correctly), will be working on integration with AcoustID. To summarize it very bluntly, AcoustID is the open-source alternative to Shazam, so thanks to this, if you have many tracks in your library which didn't get ripped properly with tags, or you got from some friend which is not very metadata-driven ;) then you will be able to fix this situation! We will be likely reusing the MetadataFixer extension that we already have in Banshee, to not reinvent the UI wheel.

• Dmitriy Petukhov, a very motivated Russian student, will be helping us get two extensions in shape, which were developed in the last GSoC (more details about this in my previous blog post), but were not ready for mainstream yet. The FanArt.TV extension, which retrieves artist logos and shows them next to your album icons, needs some caching (we could even violate FanArt.TV service's ToS if we don't do this) and UI polish (our ListView widget doesn't play well with differently-sized images, so we need to modify this custom GTK widget to allow rendering rows with different heights). The SongKick extension works great, but also needs caching, and it especially needs GeoLocation to maybe even work autonomously (imagine, you don't even know what SongKick is, and because you installed the banshee-community-extensions package of your distro, you suddenly get told that one of your favorite bands is soon playing a gig near your city!).

As you can see, most things are work under-the-hood this year, with little UI work. That's good for me because I'm no design expert. However, there is one area which we could do with some help: the new backgound tasks that will be implemented will need a way to notify the user (i.e. SongKick: when a new gig is discovered; AcoustID: when new/better metadata is found). In this respect, maybe Hylke Bons (our chief designer for the last Gnome .NET hackfest) and Garrett LeSage (assistance that Hylke proposed now to avoid getting himself swamped!) will be able to help! (BTW, if you're interested in participating in this year's Gnome .NET hackfest, message David Nielsen, which started to plan it recently.)

I'm very happy about starting the mentoring of these projects this year. And I'm specially jealous about my students... I became mentor of GSoC myself without being GSoC student first! (Maybe I should switch roles in the future?)

Wish them good luck! It was actually just yesterday when GSoC really started! (gotta love mondays)

UPDATE: Fixed embarrassing typo: I meant AcoustID, not OpenID!

Labels: General, Gnome, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre

So let this be a belated report about previous GSoC! sorry for the delay.

In summer 2013, Tomasz Maczynski worked on Banshee as a GSoC student, and he did great work! He developed a SongKick extension, and a FanArt.tv one. Both were worked on in the banshee-community-extensions repository. They work very well but there are a few downsides about this work, which we didn't have time to fix:

• The FanArt.TV extension depended on some Banshee API that hasn't been added yet to mainline. The patch to add it lived in bugzilla for a while, in a bug about a feature request to have images in the artist list. The reason for not committing the patch even if I had already reviewed it was because I was wary about it, since it allowed FanArt.TV to hook its ArtistList widget, but wouldn't be really extension friendly. What I mean is that if there was other extension that wanted to also attach a different ArtistList, it would conflict with FanArt extension when enabled at the same time. The ideal thing would be to expose this functionality as an extension point, so that if more than one extension attached a new kind of ArtistList widget, the user could switch between the two from the UI when both extensions were enabled. When I mentioned this in the bug, awesome Banshee-extension developer Frank Ziegler jumped in and created the extension interface necessary for this. I've been reviewing the patches in the last days (couldn't do it before because I really wanted to release 2.9.1 and 2.6.2 versions before landing this work) and I'll likely commit them this week.

• The FanART.TV extension uses Hyena's ListView widget to show images. This is the main widget that Banshee uses for showing the tracks in the main view. It's a great custom widget because it allows very fast rendering of data coming from an SQLite database, but it wasn't optimized for rendering images. The main disadvantage of it is in the case that images have different heights, because the ListView will just allocate a height for each row equal to the tallest of the images used. This means that the widget shown could be a bit ugly if you have many artists in your library and some of them have very differently sized images. Tomasz worked on this a bit, but couldn't finish it because of lack of time (we have a WIP patch). But fortunately this will be fixed this summer!

• Both SongKick and FanArt.TV don't implement caching yet. This is not only important to save bandwidth from the point of view of the client, but also from the point of view of the server! (We could even violate their ToS if we didn't implement this, IIRC.) Fortunately this will be fixed this summer!

• SongKick extension provides several ways to discover gigs: searching by city, by artist, etc. It even suggests you artists extracted from your library that composed songs which you marked with a high rating! But IMO this is not enough, SongKick extension should even be smarter and query ahead of time looking for your favorite artists *and* near your area (doing the latter via GeoLocation). Fortunately this will be fixed this summer! (and we will use Gnome infrastructure for it)

That is all folks! Stay tuned for the next blog post, which will explain the plan for GSoC 2014 (this year I get to mentor three students!).

Labels: CSharp, General, Gnome, Programacion, SoftwareLibre

OMG, I should feel embarrassed about posting such a belated blog post (yes, the hackfest was more than 6 months ago), but oh well, at least I can say I have enough excuses:

• I got my house refurbished in the last months, which has been such a long planning endeavour, and a real stressful PITA while it was being done.
• Before the above started, and after it was finished, I had to move, so that's 2 moves! (I hate moving)
• I've been kind of busy in regards to Gnome-related contributions: we released Banshee 2.6.2, GStreamer-Sharp 0.99.0, Banshee 2.9.1, and a big etcetera (including pre-mentoring for GSoC! more about that in a subsequent post).

So this doesn't leave enough room for blogging, which is a necessary but a less appealing task. But I have to say it somewhere: the hackfest that David Nielsen organized was amazing, the best kind I have attended so far, as I came to meet for the first time some awesome hackers such as him, and:

• Hylke Bons, sparkleshare creator, Red Hat designer.
• Mirco Bauer, smuxi creator and debian developer (mono packager).
• Jo Shields, debian developer (mono packager), Collabora sysadmin.
• Robert Nordan, Pinta contributor.
• Jared Jennings, Tomboy contributor.
• Stephen Shaw, ex-Novell coworker (build developer), and currently at Xamarin. (Yes, I was Stephen's team-mate when at Novell, but had never met him in person!)
• Stefan Hammer, Tomboy contributor and hackfest local-host.
• Timo Dörr, Tomboy and Banshee contributor, GSoC student.
• Stephan Sundermann, GSoC student for GStreamerSharp and Bindinator.

(BTW I didn't include the awesome Bertrand Lorentz, fellow Banshee co-maintainer and GtkSharp gatekeeper, in the list, because I had already met him before, it wasn't my first time!).

And it was with the latter Stephan (not Stefan) the one I ended up spending more time with, because we decided to work on the new GStreamerSharp bindings since the 2nd day of the hackfest (the 1st day I mainly worked with Bertrand to release Banshee 2.9.0, our first Gtk3 compatible release, which he already blogged about).

So what was special about this work?

• GStreamerSharp 0.10.x releases were not compatible with GStreamer 1.x releases, so this had to be fixed soon. However, much of the architecture of this old version of the bindings used many manually crafted binding code.
• Stephan, by using the new Bindinator (a GObjectIntrospection metadata parser that outputs GAPI metadata, that allows generating .NET bindings, created by Andreia Gaita) in his GSoC, created a better foundation for the new bindings.
• He targetted GI metadata from GStreamer 1.0 and 1.2 versions (the jump from 0.10 to 1.0 was a big and not easy leap, since lots of APIs were modified and deprecated).
• We needed to polish them enough to make Banshee be able to consume them without glitches.

"Polish" sounds like easy work, but it wasn't. We fixed lots of crashes, and we contributed fixes to GObject-Introspection metadata upstream. And we proposed big patches for the gtk-sharp GAPI generator. And of course we updated our Banshee managed playback backend to the new GStreamerSharp API.

Main kudos should go to him though. I mainly added Banshee expertise, gtk-sharp contributing expertise, and lots of motivation (or at least I thought).

We had a big success: a Banshee playing audio with GStreamerSharp. Unfortunately video playback was freezing. But some months later after the hackfest we fixed it, and we released first GStreamerSharp 1.0 preview, which we called "0.99.0", and we released the first Banshee release that depends on this work: 2.9.1.

And it was my first time in Austria (and in Vienna). Overall a great experience, and I need to mention our awesome sponsors:

Labels: General, Gnome, Mono, Programacion, SoftwareLibre