Re: suggestion: unified media player control panel applet

[Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <uraeus linuxrising org>]

Hi Ross,
You are overdesigning :) All the applet would need to do is send out the
same X keycodes that multimedia keys on laptops and modern keyboards do
and you are set (as all apps important applications support those).

Adam, why don't you get Frederic to hack on this, it shouldn't be more
than maybe a days worth of hacking.

Christian


On Fri, 2005-09-16 at 08:53 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> 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