Comments for insomnia bytes

Comment on XMMS2 GUI clients all sort of suck by Waterlaz

Waterlaz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 17:27:56 +0000

Well… when I first looked at mpd I thought “wow, how easy it is to write a client”. When I first saw xmms2 the feeling was the opposite. (Though you are right about the rich semantics.)

The other problem is that everything breaks with every new release. Even the user has to juggle clients and servers versions to make them work together.

Comment on XMMS2 GUI clients all sort of suck by theefer

theefer — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:41:22 +0000

Is it because of the lack of good tutorials about how to use the bindings? Because I still believe they are very easy to use, you can do anything in just a few lines with much richer semantics than MPD (e.g. querying, listening to updates, etc).

Comment on XMMS2 GUI clients all sort of suck by Waterlaz

Waterlaz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:34:46 +0000

s/In fact in many/In fact in many languages/

Comment on XMMS2 GUI clients all sort of suck by Waterlaz

Waterlaz — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:27:35 +0000

IMHO the reason xmms2 lacks good clients is that xmmsclient lib is just painfull to use. In fact in many it is easier to write a parser for some text format like MPD than to use the xmms client lib. Sorry…

Comment on “Music Player” session at the GSoC Mentor Summit 2009 by Joel Pitt

Joel Pitt — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:35:20 +0000

Hi there, I believe I was the guy sitting next to you who was interested and tags and other such things (from a personal interest as a DJ).

Recently I moved to OSX and have failed to find a music player that can manage 100k tracks without slowing to a crawl (tried iTunes and Songbird) and thought I’d investigate xmms2. I’ll start playing around with nycli and see what I think.

My frustration at no client being good enough got me to the stage of thinking about implementing my own, but you guys seem on to it and so it’d probably make sense to work with you then to implement yet another GUI client!

Comment on XMMS2 GUI clients all sort of suck by Anil

Anil — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 21:37:36 +0000

I think it would be very important to define the actual user needs, it should be the basis for developers to start working on a usable interface.

How could this be achieved?

Comment on dot-emacs: smarter indentation with tabs and spaces by Marius Andersen

Marius Andersen — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 13:42:11 +0000

A more general method is to temporarily change the “tab width” and the “indentation offset” to a very large value while indenting (e.g., via advice). This works because (1) setting the tab width and indentation offset to the same value ensures that all “instances” of the offset are encoded as tabs, (2) using a value that is larger than any amount of alignment forces spaces to be used for the rest.

As the example code below shows, the method doesn’t require us to know very much about the language itself.

(defadvice c-indent-line (around smart-tabs activate)
(setq tab-width tab-width)
(let ((indent-tabs-mode t)
(tab-width fill-column)
(c-basic-offset fill-column))
ad-do-it))

For a different language, say Perl, just replace “c-indent-line” with “cperl-indent-line” and “c-basic-offset” with “cperl-indent-level”. See http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/SmartTabs for more languages.

Comment 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.

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

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