Wowzers, what a great time! Was intending to write about each day individually, but that’s certainly out of the question now. GUADEC was a great experience and I’m hooked on the community! A big thanks to everyone who helped put GUADEC ‘07 together.
My favorite bits:
- Staying at the hostel. It was a helluva long walk and really sucked on the rainy days, but it was a new experience. Forced random strangers to hang out and I met some cool people. Wish I would’ve gotten the names of the two guys running the hostel; they were very laid back.
- There were some killer keynotes; most importantly:
- Alex’s presentation of PyroDesktop. I don’t take much stock in the comments of folks who don’t like this technology. It’s something we’ve never seen before, and I think the coolest part is the potential to draw a new crowd of developers to the desktop! Alex, Chris & company: keep up the good work!
- Havoc and Bryan’s presentation of the Gnome Online Desktop. Super sweet guys. Everyone loves integration. Now, lets see it happen!
- Doc Searls’ closing keynote. Doc is a funny man. “Now bend over and give me some content!”
- And my favorite sessions:
- Larry’s presentation of F-Spot and the next wave of development. F-Spot rocks!
- Telepathy and Tubes. You’ve heard the raves of others; I don’t need to spell it out here.
- Joe’s presentation on Beagle and metadata joyfulness. Joe is a funny man.
- Kudos to Jimmy K for holding his own during his talk on the new main menu development.
- The Geodata standards project — creating a totally free database of mapping information. Cool!
- The Walkabout. What a great bar.
Many thanks to all the folks who made going out and drinking absolutely hilarious, including Gabriel, Aaron, Michael, Aiden, Rodney, Toms, any anyone else I’ve missed!
Howdy folks,
The guide that used to be at http://tricky.vanstaveren.us/Projects/Open_Source/Banshee/MTP has now been moved to the Banshee wiki at http://www.banshee-project.org/Guide/DAPs/MTP. All the subpages have been moved accordingly. My site has all the pages set to forward to the Banshee site, so update your bookmarks now :)
MTP progress has been busy as of late and with the recent release of libgphoto2-sharp 2.3.0, I’ve seen quite a few people trying to get their MTP devices working with Banshee and I’ve also been busy writing a lot of code. Hopefully in the next few days I can tie up a few things and commit my local changes which include playlist support - yes folks, full playlist support. It’s still a bit buggy tho, so I need a few more days to hack at it :)
libgphoto2-2.3.1 was released this past weekend, be sure to grab it for optimal MTP use! It has a new hack to increase initialization times by factors between 10 and 100 times because of sped up metadata reading. Naturally, this is hella-good :)
After an age or two of waiting, pondering over licensing issues, and doing bits of maintenance here and there, the Mono/.NET bindings for libgphoto2 have now been released!
One can now play with libgphoto2 compatible devices out of a Mono application. Why is this important? Because Banshee likes DAP’s (Digital Audio Players), and uses this library to access MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) compatible devices. It brings us one step closer to having good, clean, easy-to-use MTP access on your open-source box.
If you have one of these MTP devices and want to know more about how to access your device with Banshee, read my guide!
A big thanks to Larry Ewing of the excellent F-Spot project for licensing the original copy of libgphoto2-sharp under the LGPL; without this, I’d be lost.