Re: suggestion: unified media player control panel applet

[Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>]

On Thu, 2005-09-15 at 09:56 -0700, Adam Williamson wrote:
> At this point I'm wondering how closely you're reading my emails :)

Not that well by the look of things.  I'm doing way too much at once at
the moment.

> I don't believe the notification area is a good use for media player
> remote controls either. Which is why I'm making this proposal to move
> them OUT of there. Many media apps - Rhythmbox, Sonance / Banshee /
> whatever, Muine, some others - stick non-removable icons in the
> notification area. As you seemingly agree, this is Bad. If we wrote a
> single _PANEL APPLET_ - note, PANEL APPLET, not NOTIFICATION AREA ICON -
> which could be used to control any media player, this would remove
> duplication of effort, get all those annoying icons out of our
> notification areas, give the user more control (you can add, remove and
> move panel applets around at will), and make the interface more
> consistent.

This could be done without buy-in from any of the projects as a
demonstration: Muine and probably the others have a plugin interface so:

1) define a DBus protocol which talks in abstract terms about the
operations (play, pause, next file) and state (am I playing, title of
file)

2) implement a small applet which sends these commands to whatever DBus
client current owns the name org.gnome.MediaPlayer

3) implement a plugin for Muine which on startup tries to register the
name org.gnome.MediaPlayer and if it succeeds, listens for events.

With DBus activation you even get the media player starting when you
press Play if it isn't loaded.  This doesn't look too hard, and can be
written and tested to see how well it works.  It may suck.  It may be
the best new feature in G2.14. 

Note that I'm trying to move house at the moment and will happily code
for money, in the great tradition of media programmers started by
Bastien and myself a few years back. :)

Ross
-- 
Ross Burton                                 mail: ross burtonini com
                                          jabber: ross burtonini com
                                     www: http://www.burtonini.com./
 PGP Fingerprint: 1A21 F5B0 D8D0 CFE3 81D4 E25A 2D09 E447 D0B4 33DF