A More Useful Now Playing Source for Banshee

The Project

The Now Playing source is an underutilized component of the Banshee user interface. The goal of this proposal is to extend that interface to be a source for extended information about the currently playing media. After the completion of this project, the Now Playing source will replace (or augment) the current behavior of the Context Pane, but also be extended to account for other types of media such as podcasts, videos, audio books, and internet radio.

The current implementation of the context pane is cool, but its location is awkward. It's in the library, but displays information related to the currently playing media, and is only be relevant for music, not video or podcasts so when you're listening to a podcast it just says "waiting for playback to begin..." Wait what? Playback has begun!

The now playing source as is, is kind of a waste of some really great space. The album art display is beautiful looking, but it's static. If you're listening to an album there's no information there that isn't available elsewhere more conveniently. The text displayed is the same. This area is perfect for displaying extra information about the currently playing song such as lyrics, last.fm similar artist information, or information from wikipedia, as well as OpenVZ visualizations, all of which should be toggleable.

My project will be to add API to the context sources so that they can be viewed for any media type to which they are relevant, add API to the now playing source to allow context sources to display their content there, create a widget to allow changing what context source is being viewed, and tie it all together into an extremely compelling, and immersive user experience.

http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/student_project/show/google/gsoc2010/gnome/t127230759715

A vague description of progress

Context pane content placed in now playing source
Buttons to switch now playing contents
switching sources working
sources are now media-type dependent

Weekly Reports

In the news

Code

Git branch

Contact

E-mail: alex.launi@gmail.com
irc: lamalex @ gimpnet / freenode
jabber: alex.launi@gmail.com

Outreach/SummerOfCode/2010/AlexLauni_Banshee (last edited 2013-12-03 18:33:12 by WilliamJonMcCann)