Paul Cutler's Blog

Keep On Rockin’ Me Baby

Posted on by Paul Cutler

Well, I`ve been looking real hard
And I`m trying to find a job
But it just keeps getting
Tougher every day

But I got to do my part
Cause I know in my heart
I got to please my
Sweet baby, yeah

Steve Miller

I’ve been using Banshee for years now and I don’t know how I’d manage my (too) large music collection without it. The Banshee team released 1.7.5 on Tuesday. Banshee 1.7.5 has two new big features:

Trying to do my part, I’ve been working on all new documentation for Banshee written as topic based help using Mallard. The first release of user help was last month in Banshee 1.7.4 and with 1.7.5 I’d call it functionally complete.

banshee-help

(Click through to see a bigger version)

Now is when the fun starts! My process is to write and write some more, and then come back and edit. I think I have most of the major help topics covered. Or do I? I need your help! Take a look through the docs. Have I missed any topics? Can you find mistakes I’ve made in how Banshee works? (I don’t pretend to be a Banshee expert or even use half of it’s features!) Typos? Grammar errors? (I wish I was a machine and could type perfectly, but sometimes I type like Aaron on a Thinkpad T410).

Lastly, I need to add content for common problems and advanced help, such as adding an is_audio file to some MP3 players to have Banshee recognize the player.

How can you help after doing one of the tasks above? File a bug! Drop me an email! Ping me in IRC in #banshee on GIMPNet! I want your feedback and ways I can make the help better, especially with the advanced topics and common problems that users may see.

And a big thank you to Aaron, Gabriel, Bertrand, Alex and all the developers who keep Banshee rockin’.

GNOME Journal Issue 21 is out!

Posted on by Paul Cutler

The GNOME Journal team has released the latest issue, featuring five brand new articles.

We have three articles based on talks and experiences at GUADEC 2010 in The Hague and two interviews.

What are you waiting for? Go read it!

GNOME Journal is licensed under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Translate it, podcast it, share it!

Taking Snowy for a Walk – Issue #1

Posted on by Paul Cutler

“I steal from every movie ever made.” – Quentin Tarantino

Like Quentin, I’m stealing from Frederic Peters’ recent “Shell Yes!” blog post and am going to try and bring you, our loyal reader, semi-regular updates on what’s going on in the world of Snowy development as we work towards launching Tomboy Online.

Jeff Schroeder patched Snowy this week using, as he puts it, “Shiney django admin stuff” to not allow users who are not in the upcoming alpha and beta to sync their notes. Users will instead see something similar to this:

Snowy Sad Face

Snowy could use some design love, so we blogged about that and created a Designer Playground on the wiki. Add your mockups and we’re looking for help if you can make those mockups come to life!

We created a mailing list that users can opt-in to for Tomboy Online news, release announcements and non-development type stuff.

OpenID support for creating accounts and logging in received some love. When completed, it will look similar to what bitbucket uses from a UI perspective.

We’re also working on creating a proposal to send to the GNOME Board to have a Snowy hackfest. We are discussing the goals of what we want to accomplish, who can come, where to have it and when. If you’re interested, join the mailing list, now is a great time to get involved!

Lastly, we’re hoping to launch the Snowy alpha test with a handful (and I really mean a handful) of testers on September 13th. For more information, we wrote a FAQ on the upcoming alpha test, which is required reading – there will be a test next time! After the first invites go out, we hope to add more participants weekly as we work towards an open beta. Alpha testers will be expected to file bugs, give feedback and pay to be in the beta.

Did you know? TinTin was Tomboy’s first icon / logo in GNOME on the panel.

Wanted: Rocking Web Design

Posted on by Paul Cutler

The Tomboy Online / Snowy team needs your help! We have an alpha instance of Tomboy Online up and running thanks to the wonderful GNOME Sysadmin team and we even have some new contributors helping with Snowy’s code (hi Jeff!).

But we need help! We need help with the web design for Tomboy Online and we’ll need help implementing it.

First, the design. Here’s what we have today:

tomboy-online

(Click through to see a larger screenshot).

And that’s just the home page after you log in. We need help with how to display a note, your list of notes, and editing notes. (Hope I’m not scaring you away yet!) And that’s just off the top of my head – I’m sure there’s more that I’m missing. (Update: Sandy’s blog post shows some more screenshots, including a page with a list of notes).

Do you have wicked web design skills? Have some time to put together some mockups? Are you able to take feedback well? Then we’re looking for YOU. I don’t even care about workflow right now. You can join the Snowy mailing list, you can email me with questions, you can join us in IRC in #snowy on irc.gimpnet.org, you can blog it about it and let us know – we’d just love to see some mockups so we can then go hunting for a sucker looking for a volunteer to bring your design to life.

Manuel started work on this potential design last year and we’re looking for help to build on that or for something new. But we need help in building iterations of it and moving forward.

Tomboy Online, powered by Snowy, will be one of GNOME‘s first web services with application integration. Get the code here, learn more about our upcoming alpha here or join our mailing list here. You will be able to sync your Tomboy notes to the web using GNOME’s Tomboy Online service or your own server running Snowy. Snowy is free software licensed under the AGPL.

And thank you in advance for your help!

Help Needed

Posted on by Paul Cutler

I need some help! I’m looking for pictures from last year’s Boston Summit. They can be anything – hallway conversations, speakers, shooting pool after the talks. Anyone have any links or photos they can share? Flickr and Google didn’t turn up a lot of results.

Thanks!

Make a smart playlist to see your Amazon purchases in Banshee

Posted on by Paul Cutler

Jorge Castro and I were talking this morning in #banshee as Jorge asked if it was possible to create a smart playlist to see your music purchases.

And it is!

Jorge’s idea was for the UbuntuOne music store from 7digital.com. I don’t use Ubuntu, but I do buy (too many) songs from Amazon.

Amazon adds a comment in the metadata of each song you buy, such as: Amazon.com Song ID: 216030141 (If you’re curious, it’s the song Drunk Girls by LCD Soundsystem that I bought this morning for only $5!)

Create a smart playlist in Banshee by choosing from the menu Media -> New Smart Playlist.

Name your playlist (I used “Amazon”) and select “Match all of the following” and

“Comment” “contains” and enter “Amazon.com Song ID:” and press “Save“.

Voila! One smart playlist is created that shows all of your Amazon purchases. And since it’s so smart, when you buy new music it automatically updates the playlist (Yes, I bought another album this morning, don’t tell my wife). You can do the same for the UbuntuOne store using “Purchased from 7digital.com” instead of the Amazon Song ID: in the smart playlist comment.

Amazon Smart Playlist Screenshot in Banshee

Write for GNOME Journal!

Posted on by Paul Cutler

With GUADEC having just ended, we’re looking for some GUADEC related stories for GNOME Journal.

Here’s a few examples:

  • Was it your first time at GUADEC? Share some thoughts about what you liked, saw or who you met.
  • Did you give a talk at GUADEC? Write it up as an article! Or, we’re happy to do an interview with you about your talk. Here’s a great example with J5 after last year’s GUADEC.
  • Did you see a new application or new technology that gets you excited? We’re always looking for app reviews. Write it up and we’ll include it!

If any of these interest you, please drop me an email at pcutler at gnome dot org. Don’t be shy – if you want a member of the GJ team to interview you, just ask!

At GUADEC

Posted on by Paul Cutler

I’m a bad blogger – for the last two weeks I’ve been telling myself to write a nice “I’m going to GUADEC” post on my blog, but here I am already at GUADEC with only excuses why I didn’t. I blame Vincent!

But I’m here at GUADEC and we had a good Board meeting – it was good to see some faces I haven’t seen in a while and meet new ones. I spent most of today (had to leave a bit early to fix my phone) in the Open Desktop Day learning about large deployments of GNOME around the world.

Last year was my first GUADEC, which still is mostly a blur. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone again and would love to chat – just grab me (assuming I’m not already talking to somebody!) and I’d love to hear your thoughts about how GNOME is doing, what you’re working (or I’m working on!), GNOME 3.0 or anything that else comes to mind.