Easily Distracted

I haven’t looked at the plugin for a while, but I’ve been meaning to reproduce my “todo” list for it that I wrote on the rb-dev list a while back.

• the gconf keys in gconf-editor say they have no schema. The main plugins’ keys have a schema and don’t give a warning. Definitely not serious, though.
• it currently adds/removes the ui string when the options are toggled in the configure dialog. I have a feeling it might be better to only add/remove them in the activation/deactivation, and just hide/show here. Maybe faster?
• it currently hides the browser button in small display mode. That has nothing to do with the jump-to-playing button. That should be in core, if it was decided that was the desired behaviour.
• to hide the buttons in the small display, it checks the value at activation, and it connects to the View menu’s toggleButton’s “toggled” signal. So whenever it’s toggled, the gconf value for the small display mode is checked, but I think there’s a delay sometimes. Pushing Ctrl D quickly a few times may result in incorrect UI presented. I remember deciding that this is due to a delay set on the gconf callback to overcome some other bug….
• in the context menus, ‘Properties’ should really be the last item. They need a placeholder put in the UI core. UPDATE: I’ve filed a bug with a patch attached here. Jump-to-Playing and other plugins will need to be updated when the patch is applied. I’ve just done it on my local copy w/Rhythmbox HEAD…. Looks like this:
  

  Before (red) and After (green) applying the patch and using an updated plugin

• Show the context menu item in PodcastView and PlaylistView popups, as well. I’ve added this in my local copy, already. Maybe I should just bump the version and release….

I signed up for Twitter. If you ever wanted to know what I had for breakfast, now you can! Yay. I also updated my blog’s sidebar with custom widgets; something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I broke up the standard “Meta” widget into a Subscribe and an Admin/Login widget, and shoved the admin/login right below the Pages. I also made a replacement tag cloud widget that can specify the maximum number of tags to include… I’m not sure why the standard widget (which defaults to 45, and gets quite big) wasn’t created with that option. Also, taking Twitter’s motto to heart, I added my new Twitter feed as “Sutff I’m Doing” using a standard RSS widget. I might have to modify that widget to strip off my username from every post, though… it bothers me. And I should do something with the search….. I just haven’t figured out what. Anyway, I think it looks much nicer now.

I’m sure widgets probably already exist to do what I want, but I wanted to play around with WordPress and PHP a little. ^.^ Being neither a WordPress nor a PHP person, How to Create WordPress Widgets and WordPress Widgets with Control Panels were very helpful.

I’ve updated the Jump-to-Playing plugin for Rhythmbox. The latest version is now 0.2, and it’s a large improvement. Many thanks to Dan Mihai Ile for his work on the configure dialog and the gconf functionality! I’ve been really busy recently, and without his efforts, I wouldn’t have gotten around to working on this.

Screenshots

Changes Since 0.1

• Added preferences dialog based on work from Dan Mihai Ile, allowing either the toolbar button or the context menu item to be displayed.
• Modifed the UI of the preferences dialog (HIG compliance).
• Made the preferences dialog act immediately (HIG compliance).
• Toolbar Jump-to-Playing button hides in small display mode.
• Browser button also hides in small display mode. This should probably be moved into a different plugin, or the core. But I’ve left it here, for now.
• Included QueuePlaylistView’s context menu in addition to the Browser Source popup.
  Moved UI XML into strings within __init__.py.
• Added GPL license to files.
• Updated plugin description.
• Checks if small display is active on activation.

Download

jump-to-playing-0.2.tar.gz (Update: Newer version is available.)

Installation

1. Extract the jump-to-playing folder into your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/ directory. Completely replace any previous versions.
2. (Re)Start Rhythmbox and enable the plugin in Edit : Plugins.

Todo

• Force “Properties” to bottom of browser context menu (may depend on placeholder being added to the context menu)
• Add Configure dialog with checkboxes for toolbar and browser context menu, defaulting to toolbar only (both is a little redundant). Currently, both are added automatically.
  [x] Add button to toolbar
  [_]Add link to browser context menu
• Hide toolbar button in Small Display mode.

The code could definitely be better and there’s still room for features/general improvements. All patches and code-clean-up are welcome!

This plugin will display the View : Jump to Playing Song link as a button in the toolbar and as link in the Browser’s context menu. This is about as simple as a plugin could be (which is partly why I wrote it), but I’ve actually found it quite useful. Maybe you will too.

Download

jump-to-playing-0.1.tar.gz (Update: Newer version is available.)

Installation

1. Extract the jump-to-playing folder into your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins/ directory.
2. (Re)Start Rhythmbox and enable the plugin in Edit : Plugins.

Todo

• Add Configure dialog with checkboxes for toolbar and browser context menu, defaulting to toolbar only (both is a little redundant). Currently, both are added automatically.
  [x] Add button to toolbar
  [_]Add link to browser context menu
• Force “Properties” to bottom of browser context menu (may depend on placeholder being added to the context menu)
• Hide toolbar button in Small Display mode.

So I haven’t been working too much on PhotoFile, like wanted to, but I haven’t really been unproductive, either. Giving in to my friend’s incessant nagging to play (and thus, set up) UFO2000 on my computer, I updated the Ubuntu set-up guide I wrote on the forums after doing it again with the latest version on both my laptop (Gutsy beta) and my desktop (Feisty). I’ve played a couple games, so far, and they’ve been fun. But it still doesn’t work flawlessly. On my laptop, with default Gutsy settings, ALSA is used to access the audio. UFO2K uses the Allegro game programming library, and it accurately detects and plays sound on my laptop. However, there is a huge memory leak somewhere when running on my laptop (known issue, I think). Luckily, the game is saved on the server, so if you crash, you can log back in and you have the option of resuming the game. Cool.

On the Desktop side of things, there’s no memory leak, but it doesn’t work with the PulseAudio sound server. This irritated me last time I was looking at UFO2K and put me off of it, but this time, I was determined to figure out what the problem was, exactly. First of all, the problem can be resolved by killing the pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k) daemon before launching the game. But that may mess with your existing applications a little and it’s annoying. Good news: I think I found what the problem was. Bad news: I’m not sure when or if it will be fixed, but the developers are at least aware of it and started talking about it.

I don’t normally do much low-level stuff, so I actually learned quite a bit from the debugging. Unfortunately, I don’t have massive amounts of code to show for my efforts, but I’ve learned a lot and a potentially important bug has been well-documented. So it was well worth it. These are some of the things I did when debugging this problem:

• Communicated with both PulseAudio and Allegro developers on bug trackers, mailing lists, and IRC.
• Built the Allegro source and used my own custom (debug-enabled) version without disrupting the installed stable version.
• Attempted to debug using ‘gdb’ mode in emacs, but I was never able to jump into the ALSA specific functions. I think the debugger wasn’t able to trace the threads as they were mapped with pre-processor statements according to the sound driver. I was able to switch to the thread, but the debugger couldn’t find the associated source, which made stepping rather pointless.
• Eventually giving up on the fancy way, (but content I had learned something) I resorted to good ‘ol printf statements, and was eventually able to find the values (I think) are causing the problems. (Allegro uses unsigned sample formats, and PulseAudio doesn’t support those.)

I must say, using gdb in emacs is much easier than on the command line (but then, maybe ddd or another graphical debugger is nicer still, depending on how often you debug things). Okay, directing my attention back over to PhotoFile…. Or maybe upgrading WordPress…. or maybe….

Screenshot update! Still no version… as it’s still just a husk of a UI… mostly.

I’ve changed the GUI quite a bit. Actually, what it is now took a surprisingly long time to arrive at. I spent time going through some ideas on paper, and I even did a huge amount of refactoring to make coding easier. It’s at the point where a GUI in another API could easily be thrown in…. it just requires me separating the PhotoFile class into PhotoFile and PhotoFileGTK… but I’m not going to bother, at this point, because I don’t think there’s much point in offering it in another kit. GUI and no-GUI could be useful, though. Anyway, there’s still quite a few problems remaining, including:

1. Supported File Types: I need a list of file types (extensions) that are common in Cameras and that people would be interested in transferring. So far, I’ve got what my camera supports: JPG, THM, AVI, and WAV. Some cameras allow for sound recordings to be created (WAVs on mine) but I’m not sure what I should do with these… rename to have the same name as the image, I guess (if it’s a memo). Post your camera’s formats and how they’re used in the comments! Example of my Camera: WAV files with a filename the same as an image are a sound memo for that image. AVIs are movies and have and accompanying THM file (same filename) which is a small Jpeg containing a thumbnail of the movie.
2. Empty Source Directories: When moving files from the source, should I automatically remove any empty source directories? Maybe add an advanced property for this? I certainly don’t want to add it to the main dialog. KISS.
3. Separate Operations: I’m not sure if each file should save it’s own set of operations for the session. For example, user selects manual rotation for two files, and auto-rotation for the rest. Should Process All Files remember those two files’ manual rotation, or should it apply the visible operations to ALL files. If I should save settings for each file, then I feel like I’d need another button, Process All Files Using These Operations, just to be clear… maybe a “Reset to defaults” somewhere… sounds like too much clutter, but it could be useful for people whose camera’s don’t store EXIF. Suggestions?
4. Manual Rotation: Need a dropdown or something for Manual rotation! Probably: {Left, Right, 180} or… a button Rotate 90 CW that when clicking, rotates the preview 90 degrees, clockwise. I kind of like that idea… super simple. To rotate “left”, the user would quickly learn that 3 quick clicks is quite fast.
5. White Space: I think I need a little more white-space between the different sections.
6. Functionality!
7. Camera’s dying? Oh noes! I love my Canon IXY 400, but I’ve recently been getting a very ominous Memory Card Error message, more frequently. It worries me.

Aside from these things, I think I’m pretty satisfied with the current UI.

Still a tiny app, and still lots of things to do!


$ cat photofile.py | wc -l
792
$ cat photofile.py | grep FIXME | wc -l
25