In what little time I had, I brought together some ideas which were floating around in my head, and started some preliminary work on them:
Introducing Arena...
...which you could best describe as a tracker-based media browser/player. It will look like this:
At the moment, I have no code to show, as I am constructing the bits and pieces which make up a program of this type, for instance, the all-important tree-based menu structure. What I can tell you is the following few facts:
- It is more Front Row than MS Media Center, and therefore has no intended support for TV cards and such (at this time). More likely, however, is a built in Internet TV browsing/viewing.
- I is written in C, using the rock-tastic Clutter.
- Pictures don't do it justice. I have had a past life as a Flash designer (shock! horror!), and I have been getting to grips with Clutters effect-code, and its hard to describe the feeling of seeing album covers flying around on screen :). I will try and do a screen cast of some of my example code soon.
- It will be GNOME-based, as is mostly everything that I do, I'll give you no excuses, it just makes my life easier :).
- I'd like to add support for more media-providers ie. Avahi (zeroconf).
- It will do its darn-best to honor different layouts of media & the corresponding cover-art stuff, such as cover.jpg, album.jpg etc.
- UI is not final, but pretty darn close, unless something drastic happens :). I still need to add some more info in places, but on the whole, I want it as simple as possible.
- I like the look because I don't think its a blind rip-off of any current app, if it is, let me know :).
If you have suggestions/criticisms, leave comments as per usual, and I'll try my best to get back to you. I'll leave you with another mockup (more here):
