Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

[Emmanuele Bassi <ebassi gmail com>]

hi;

On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:22 +0000, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:56 +0100, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
> > As for a shared database this might be a good idea, but I will leave
> > that up to application writers to decide, for me a good start would be
> > that all Music applications for instance tried hard to get people to
> > save their Music under $HOME/Music for instance. That way when you
> > start
> > another Music application or Elisa you don't need to specify which
> > directory to look for Music inn. Similar conventions would be good for
> > pictures and movies and album/dvd cover art. 
> 
> Just last week I got a bug report and a patch for this in Sound Juicer.
> It hard-codes the default location to save files as ~/Music/.  Now, my
> question is this: do I commit this, or do we need a more powerful system
> that handles i18n?  I'm sure a Persian GNOME user would not like their
> music in ~/Music/.  One quick solution is to translate the string
> "Music"... is that enough?

translating is fine for new users; old users will have a hard time
moving stuff from their default directories which may or may not already
be set to the translation of "Music".

for instance, my music folder is $HOME/Music, and it's been like that
even when my desktop was localised in italian (for a while now it's been
moved to en_GB).

there was a proposal for the "desktop places" on the wiki:

  http://live.gnome.org/DesktopPlaces

which is entirely doable now that we have an API to access local
bookmarks (GBookmarkFile in GLib).  applications can install a bookmark
for their folder, which has a "title" that can be translated like we
localise schemas for GConf and desktop entries for the menu, and point
it to the unlocalised directory on disk:

  Music -> file:///home/ebassi/Music
  Photos -> file:///home/ebassi/Photos

this bookmark could be picked up by the file chooser[1] and nautilus; if
rhythmbox installed its own "desktop place" for its collection, sound
juicer could access it and use it as its own target directory; f-spot
and gthumb could share the same directory for my photos collection.
since the API for accessing the bookmarks is public we could have a
small "places editor" like we have a menu editor, and let the user move
around the desktop places the way he wants in a centralised fashion.

it's just a matter of making all these pieces fit, but it's not a great
deal.

+++

[1] GtkFileChooser should move to the semi-private format it uses to the
bookmark file format (while retaining backward comapibility); I'm
working on a patch for this to happen.

ciao,
 Emmanuele.

-- 
Emmanuele Bassi,  E: ebassi gmail com
W: http://www.emmanuelebassi.net
B: http://log.emmanuelebassi.net