Aaron Bockover

The Banshee presentation on Sunday went very well, and I was happily surprised to see so many in attendance. There was much participation, and some great ideas were tossed around and recorded. I’d like to thank Miguel for jumping in and lending a hand to touch buttons on the presentation hardware as its software crashed, rebooted, rolled up the screen, turned on the lights, and shut off the video. After nearly making the screen fall off the roll a few times, we finally got everything back to presentation-mode. It was hilarious.

I have posted the presentation slides to the Banshee Wiki. You will need OpenOffice.org 2.0 to view them.

In related news, Luis introduced me to Nathan Yergler, from Creative Commons. We talked a bit, and I now have code in entagged-sharp to identify Creative Commons licensed media. Banshee will display a CC logo when it is playing CC media, and you will be able to create selections (sorting, searching, etc.) based on CC field data (”Show me all my CC music”). Beagle will be able to use this as well, to show emblems and such in search results. Larry will be doing similar things with F-Spot, but on a more exhaustive scale, since F-Spot can essentially author content.

Oh! So during the first Summit meeting, Owen Williams did a speed talk on PenguinTV, which takes RSS and podcasting to a whole new level in terms of UI. I was pretty floored with the idea, and asked him about refactoring relevant parts of it as a Banshee Source Plugin fairly soon. He seems interested in it, so I’m really looking forward to working with him and seeing PenguinTV functionality in Banshee soon. And great job Owen on PenguinTV itself, especially considering you say it’s your first project!

I’m super-excited to finally see the Tango Project and Better Desktop go public. So much effort from those involved has gone into the specs and design, and the UI testing… it’s good to see it out in the open now. Speaking of Tango, Ryan Collier has done an excellent job this past week and at the Summit on creating Tango SVG icons for every current iPod. These will be in Banshee as soon as I get optimized bitmapped versions from Ryan