Rhythmbox: Improved Last.fm Plugin Weekly Report 8

[Jamie Nicol <jamie thenicols net>]

Hi,

This week I pretty much finished implementing radio playback. My
planning last week wasn't too ambitious, and I had no problems in
achieving what I intended to.

I implemented a custom station creator user interface.
I added the ability to rename and delete stations you have created.
I saved and loaded the list of stations the user has, so that each time
rhythmbox is started you don't have to create your stations all over
again. As a bonus, rhythmbox will create a few default stations for you
if you do not have any saved.
I also reorganised and tidied up some code that I'd written previously.
This pretty much wraps up the implementation of radio streaming. And
from a user's perspective I think it works really well!

Since this is the midterm, now is probably a good time to evaluate where
I am in regards to the overall project and compared to my proposed
schedule. I'm actually scarily on track: in my proposal I said I planned
to have radio streaming done by the midterm and that's exactly where I
am now. My dad says it isn't normal for planning to be so accurate--I'm
taking that to be a good thing!

If you are a Last.fm subscriber and are not interested in using Libre.fm
or other compatible services I very much encourage you to download and
run my code! For people in this situation, my project is basically
finished (I'm sure it will require some tidying up before it's complete,
and there's a few bonus features I'd like to add if there's time).
However, some (many) people are not paid subscribers or do want to use
Libre.fm, and during the next few weeks I plan to add support for such
people.

This coming week specifically I'm not too sure what I hope to achieve. I
need to work out how best to handle the different authentication methods
that different users will need (username + password, web auth, or both).
The actual scrobbling and streaming code is only ever so slightly
different, it's the logging in code where the big challenges will lie.

With that in mind, I think that my goals for this week should be:
1. Implement the different scrobbling and radio streaming code.
2. Have a good long think, and hopefully some discussions, about how to
best handle differences in the login process. Possibly even start to
work on this, but I think it's important I know what I'm doing first.

I'm also planning to go up north to Aberdeen for a couple days to visit
some friends, should be a nice wee break from coding :)

Thanks,

Jamie