Re: [Rhythmbox-devel] Rhythmbox Applet 0.1.0 Released

[Michael Messmore <lists clearcreeksupport com>]

To me I have trouble seeing its relevance to the rhythmbox applet.  I
guess it may be because I see the rhythmbox applet as being a
rhythmbox-playback applet, and I think the alarm idea could make a very
good rhythmbox-alarm applet.  There is a lot of code related to the
bonobo interface that could and should be reused across these, but I
think they are two different ideas with two separate (although
intersecting) target audiences.

--Mike

On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 15:22, Peter Colijn wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Fri, 23 Jul 2004 01:10:49 -0500, Paul Kuliniewicz
> <kuliniew purdue edu> wrote:
> > My first thought for setting up an alarm would be to make an at or cron
> > job that runs "rhythmbox --play-pause" at a certain time.
> > Unfortunately, if Rhythmbox isn't already running, all it does is start
> > Rhythmbox like you would normally.  (Would it be considered a bug that
> > Rhythmbox doesn't start playing right away if you specify --play-pause
> > when starting it?)  I don't see an obvious way to start Rhythmbox if
> > necessary and have it start playing without the risk of a race condition
> > or unwanted delay.  Plus, of course, with this method if Rhythmbox is
> > already playing and the alarm goes off, you end up pausing playback.
> > But if you were sleeping through the music already, I don't think the
> > alarm will help you no matter how you handle that case. <g>
> 
> Right, well the thing I don't like about using cron is there's no good
> UI (or maybe there is a cron UI I don't know about, but still not very
> specific to the task). I think the xmms-alarm UI, with a default alarm
> time and then exceptions on certain days, is pretty good, for example.
> You can do that with cron, more or less, but it's not very friendly.
> 
> > If you don't mind not using Rhythmbox and have a particular song you
> > want to play, you could run a command-line player out of an at or cron
> > job for your alarm.  But then there wouldn't be any easy way of shutting
> > it off, which could be a problem.
> 
> Yeah, that's the other thing; I was thinking of having a window pop up
> when the alarm goes off that takes focus, and have spacebar act as a
> snooze button. When you hit spacebar, the window goes away. Could also
> be set up to work with a remote control of some kind, I suppose.
> 
> > But even if you make an alarm via the Bonobo interface (whether through
> > this applet or something else), there's the problem of not being able to
> > specify which song to play or which playlist to choose it from.  Well,
> > you can specify the filename to play through Bonobo, but you're left
> > with the question of how to let the user select one, since there's no
> > way to look at the music library through Bonobo.  The only thing I can
> > think of would be to drag-and-drop a song from Rhythmbox into the alarm,
> > if that would even work.
> 
> That would be cool. I don't know if the Bonobo interface supports it,
> but another idea would be to use a playlist. So from the applet you
> choose the playlist you want to use to wake up. Like I say, I don't
> know if the Bonobo interface supports playlists...
> 
> > If you don't care what song gets played when the alarm goes off, I
> > suppose the above isn't a problem, unless the song Rhythmbox picks to
> > start playing is John Cage's 4'33". <g>
> 
> Heh, yeah, the other thing about using xmms-alarm like I currently do
> is that I also use xmms-imms. So now it's a really long time before a
> song gets played that I hate. You'd think that'd be a good thing, but
> when you're trying to wake up, hearing a song you *despise* can be
> good motivation to get out of bed :)
> 
> > In my code, rb-proxy.c implements a wrapper around the Bonobo interface
> > that makes it a lot easier for the GUI to use.  It could certainly come
> > in handy for writing a separate alarm program or applet, which might be
> > the right way to go.  I think I'd like the idea of building the current
> > applet and an alarm as two separate applets better than trying to put it
> > all into one.
> 
> Hmm, I guess.. but this now means that I'm going to have *three*
> rhythmbox-related things in my panel; the notification icon, your
> applet, and my alarm applet. Seems like a lot of stuff just for a
> music player :)
> 
> Have fun,
> 
> Peter
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