I'm sending this again to the Gnome SOC list because the other one had an attachment and was held for moderation.
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Hey guys,
This week I finished the background music feature. This was actually pretty cool to implement and I loved the end result. I first wrote a playlist editor in the settings dialog last week and this week I started writing some code to save and load the playlist, when I had the idea to integrate with Banshee playlists. After a few UI iterations, I ended up with the one from the screenshot attached (for the Shotwell list, here is a link: http://img121.imageshack.us/i/settings003.png/). So now it supports a custom playlist that can be edited by the user and several sources of music, which right now only Banshee is implemented.
The whole system is quite simple and can be easily extended to other players. In fact, the custom playlist is just another source which saves and loads from a XSPF playlist in the user's directory.
This also opens up the possibility to a few more refinement features, like playing the slideshow for the time of the playlist.
What is missing is to save which playlist was selected, so right now you
need to open the settings dialog and close it again to be able to play
music in the slideshow.
And what I found really cool to implement, because you can't really change a Banshee playlist in the UI, you have to do it from Banshee itself, you can drag and drop songs from a Banshee playlist to your custom playlist, so you can then add, remove and rearrange songs.
Also talking to my mentor it seems the effects API is not available in the
Maverick version of Clutter, so I must take it into consideration when
writing the transition effects, which I plan to extend it a bit more
this week.
Next week tasks: iron out a few more missing things in the background music feature and extend the transitions available.
