Re: About writing new apps from scratch

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

The answer is that different apps are different.

We share code wherever we can. Photos indeed uses code from eog, but it's a different app, so it has a different brand.

Just because Android or Windows ship a photo manager doesn't mean third-party apps can't appear on the market. People use what they want to use. GNOME isn't trying to kill Shotwell or F-Spot by making its own competitor, it's trying to help Shotwell and F-Spot become good apps on their own right without being pushed into the GNOME brand.

In my opinion, a strong app market is what you need to be successful. Make it easy to find and install other photo managers like Shotwell and F-Spot, and then the three aren't fighting over which app is the default, and which app is "shipped in GNOME". That's the goal we're trying to achieve with Software.

If you don't like Photos, you can choose one of the other managers, like Shotwell and F-Spot. And by building a new app, we can experiment more freely with newer technology and a new design without changing Shotwell or F-Spot, which are far out of beta and already have customers happy with their product.

Perhaps basing Photos or Music on technology like Tracker was the wrong choice. That remains to be seen. I'm not an expert in Tracker or its performance characteristics, so I genuinely have no opinion there. Perhaps it's slow and terrible for the use case, and in which case we should change it.

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 4:17 PM, Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 05:57:09PM +0000, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> I hope this answers your question.

Yes, partly.

New apps for GNOME is a good thing, when the existing applications in
the field aren't well integrated with GNOME.

But for Music and Photos I think it is different. It seems that it is
just for the sake of having a new design. Playing music or organizing
photos were already possible with applications that are well integrated
with GNOME (but with a more traditional design).

So for Music, are the common features with Rhythmbox and Banshee
developed as reusable code, in a library or git submodule? I've heard
that Music uses Tracker, and due to that the performances are really
bad. Rhythmbox and Banshee don't suffer by such performance problems, so
it seems that the Music developers reinvent the wheel, and face the same
problems already solved years ago by other developers.

And for Photos, are the common features with eog and Shotwell developed
as reusable code?

Contributors can do what they like obviously, but GNOME can encourage to
work on more useful things.

Sébastien

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--
  Jasper