Comments on: Embrace the community (Ep. I: The Fandom Menace)

By: woodsmoke

woodsmoke — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:09:17 +0000

Hi
I’m a big fan of XMMS and now XMMS2. I’m not a “coder” but I can useabilitytest stuff to a fare thee well and I can write understandable user manuals and instructions. I would like to become involved in testing the new GUIs for XMMS2 (I presently use the ones provided in Synaptic and they are somewhat less than acceptable). If this is desirable, please contact me I can provide bona fides about testing thing(from a user standpoint) through three different Linux distros.

By: theefer

theefer — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 20:23:32 +0000

@Alex: Wanted to reply earlier but forgot. We have discussed your comment on the IRC channel, and it appeared that it wasn’t judged a horrible idea per se, but rafl shared his experience with trying to build XMMS2 bindings for XulRunner and failing, in spite of his knowledge of XMMS2 and the help of a mozilla dev (or whoever it was who knew XulRunner well). Something to do with hooking up XMMS2 in the main loop.

Also, Songbird is only half-convincing as an example, since everybody considers it such a heavy app (me included). Granted, maybe it’s not XulRunner’s fault, but it’s definitely not the best example..

I don’t think any of Gnome, Win or Mac are “Qt-less”; they all can run Qt apps with very good integration (better than GTK+), and whining about Qt-based apps because one uses Gnome is really getting old tbh.

Still an interesting suggestion, especially as it gives access to CSS3/HTML5/SVG. But in a sense, so does a WebKit widget in Qt. And If our QtScript integrations becomes a reality, it could allow the use of the wide and optimized library of widgets Qt offers.

I’ll keep your idea in a corner of your mind depending on how the project goes, thanks for sharing!

By: Alex

Alex — Sun, 24 May 2009 10:45:18 +0000

While reading the post I was thinking about one thing that can fit all three axes very well. The Mozilla XulRunner.

It provides almost boundless extensibility. Has pretty rich scripting possibilities. And counting latest css3/html5/svg works has tools for reach interactive GUI.

It may look like a big overhead. But I’m pretty much confident that it won’t differ too much in Qt-less environments (like GNOME or Win, or Mac) where Qt-based XMMS2 GUI may be the only app that uses all bunch of Qt libs.

BTW, XulRunner is cross-platform and still has some nice tools to integrate nicely in different DEs.

You can look at the success of Songbird project. Though they don’t use the latest XulRunner code because the have a bunch of patches they need to maintain because of their media player back-ends. XMMS2 GUI most certainly will not need to maintain its own version of XulRunner and can use all the features of the latest release.