Re: Media Sharing Feature extension proposal: "Play To"

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-05-25 at 18:08 +0200, Johannes Schmid wrote:
> Hi!
>  
> > >    I talked to the designers who had shown interest in the past on
> > > designs for "Sharing" feature and it seems that none of them have any
> > > time to do any designs for this any time soon. I'm just afraid that if
> > > we wait on our designers, these features may not make it into 3.2
> > > either.
> > 
> > If it's not designed, it won't go in GNOME, 3.2 or later. So no point in
> > trying to work around the problem.
> 
> That sounds dangerous to me! First, someone has to come up with *some*
> initial design and that person doesn't have to be a designer in the
> first place but can be the person doing the implementation.
> 
> Put design + patch in bugzilla, CC designers. They can object now, they
> can tell you to tweak things, etc. About the research mentioned above,
> Jens already said that Windows 7 has one design and the other important
> OS probably be MacOS X might be checked. I think that should be enough
> research for now.
> 
> I think if we always wait for the designers to do an initial design we
> will not have many new features unless we can attract a bunch of new
> designers.

That's not quite what I said. I mentioned that you should start by
looking at similar features on other platforms. In this particular case,
you'd probably want to compare with Windows 7's "Play To", with iOS'
AirPlay, with OSX' AirTunes, as a first pass.

Once you've done the competitive assessment, you'd check what features
you'd want implement, what the caveats are with the various
implementations, etc. Finally, you'd probably start making a few
mockups, to give as much fuel (and data) as possible to the designers.

>From the above, it looks like this could/should be integrated in the
file manager through nautilus-sendto, and possibly in applications as
well. And you'd want to implement it in such a way that it was easy
enough to add similar technologies in the same interface. That would
require quite a bit of work on the backend code, which Jens is of course
free to start on already.

Cheers