Re: [Banshee-List] Fwd: ipod support

[Aaron Bockover <abockover novell com>]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the wonderful detailed feedback. I'm going to reply inline to
your summary points. Let me know if I've left something unanswered!

> 
> In summary.
> 
> Banshee is a great podcast client, extremely simple, yet does exactly
> what i need it to do.  It interfaces well with podcast websites, and
> allows for flexible aggregation and listening habits.  It has only the
> following issues that I can see
> 
> 1) needs a minor update to work with iPods that have been updated by iTunes 7.2

I forget which iTunes release versions correspond to months of a year,
but I think the last major update we did was to fix whatever iTunes was
released a few months ago. I thought this was 7.2, but maybe it was just
7.1. Either way, we have to constantly stay on top of Apple who, without
fail, in every release, manages to change something with the iTunes/iPod
database formats. Rest assured, we'll have updates out usually within a
few weeks after iTunes releases. 

If in fact we did update to reflect the 7.2 changes, then we may have
missed something, which is also common given that we have nothing to go
when fixing our stack (like a spec to follow). Yay proprietary software!
If we did miss something, it would be helpful to figure out exactly what
is failing so we can address it.

> 2) needs OPML import/export to allow iTunes user to switch easily to Banshee

The author of the podcast plugin has been working on OPML support. It
should land within the next couple of months.

> 3) the grey text for non-downloaded podcast episodes is to light and
> thus hard to read in the podcast pane of banshee.

This really depends on your GTK+ theme, but perhaps we could do
something different here entirely. Mind posting a screenshot of what is
"too light"? I don't have a problem viewing it. 

> Also this is not something I personally am interested in, but I've
> followed the popularity of Last.fm, and more recently a great
> newcommer called iLike.com.  Perhaps I've overlooked it but i haven't
> seen any plugins for these services in Banshee.

There are no official plugins for either of these services regarding
streaming. We are debating adding a simple last.fm streaming client in
the future, but honestly I am somewhat against the idea as I think the
last-exit client is really superb. I would recommend trying that.
Perhaps just some tighter integration between our two applications is in
order.

Again, thanks for the great feedback! 

Best,
Aaron