Rhythmbox: Improved Last.fm Plugin - Weekly Report 4

[Jamie Nicol <jamie thenicols net>]

Hey guys,

* Here's what I've been up to this week *

I implemented a mechanism for requesting data and parsing responses from
last.fm, and I implemented the source object to view this data from.
Here's a little pic to show you what my profile looks like:
http://img194.imageshack.us/img194/4585/lastfmprofile.png

That picture only shows a few list of tracks, but top artists and
recommended artists are also implemented. And it should be quite easy to
add albums, events, friends, etc.

Unfortunately I'm not particularly happy with the user interface here.
It looks too cluttered to me. I'll need to sort this out. I think icons
would help, but maybe the problem is using vertical lists. Banshee uses
a grid to do a similar thing and it works very well IMO... 

I also need to work out how to handle resizes. I'd like to try and avoid
horizontal scrollbars, so I want to try to rearrange the lists when
there isn't enough horizontal space so that they scroll vertically.

* Next Week *

My plan for next week is to work out what to do with the UI, then
implement it. I also want to add icons to each item in the list, and add
context menus for when they are clicked.

Then if there's time I want to spend the latter part of the week
planning how I'm going to tackle radio playback -- looking at the
existing RB code, banshee and other program's code and reading docs.

I also want to add support for storing the last.fm data persistently in
the user's cache dir. So when Rhythmbox is opened the next time, data
will be available instantly instead of having to wait for a response
from last.fm. Hopefully I should even be able to get this done tonight
though.

* How did I do compared to my plans? *

Not as good as I would have liked. I hoped I would be almost completely
done with the profile view, but as you can see it's still very rough
around the edges and needs a lot of work. I think I simply
underestimated how much effort it would be to implement. I also do not
think I'm a particularly good UI designer (any suggestions on how this
should look would be appreciated very very much). Being away for the
extended weekend at the start of the week probably didn't help too much
either.

Enough excuses, next week I'm going to be back on track!

* What have I learned? *

I am totally incapable of writing software whilst also watching the
world cup! So when I'm working, the TV must be off. :)

And more seriously, I came across a conflict when merging master into my
branch. So i googled how to handle conflicts, I handled the conflict,
then I wrote it down on my git cheat sheet.

Cheers for listening.