Well its back to real life now and I can already feel the buzz from linux.conf.au starting to wear thin. Fortunately it has lasted long enough though for me to get a hell of a lot of things done. I met some terrific people at LCA including Rob Bradford from O-Hand in the UK (Thanks for the stickers) as well as catching up with some old conf friends (Hey Nick!).
On the Gloss side, there’s been plenty of updates, the two most visible being the creation of a sliding image previewer and the stripping out of the menu system from the core code. This means that it is no longer mandatory for Gloss to use a standard menu system for its interface. Whilst writing a new interface module isn’t exactly as stragithforward as writing a new transition, it is now a viable option and to prove the point, I wrote a ‘wheel’ system that (kind of) duplicates the system found on the original version of Frontrow, but is much nicer in my opinion. The great thing about this is that the interface is completely transparent to the modules themselves and the option of which interface to use is simply set in the theme like any other option. A new screencast showing off these two things shouldn’t be too far away now.
Also, I received so much schtick from certain people about it during LCA that I have made the TV functionality my next priority, with channel changing being top of the list. This is something I should have got around to doing a LONG time ago, but the eye candy always seemed to keep getting in the way.
I’ve also updated the setup instructions for Gloss so its now (a little) easier for someone to get it up and running. Thanks to ctudball for being the guinea pig.
I’ve also spent the last week or so trying to give something back to Clutter by porting all the tests to python, discovering some niggly little issues along the way. I should finish these off this weekend and I’ll get back into Gloss properly after that.
Anyway, I’m off to Spamalot tonight with Dad, should be an awesome evening 🙂
Filip says:
Gloss looks very promising. I bet many people use the frontend for playback only, and use the webinterface for recording. For those people, Gloss can be useful as soon as that basic functionality is stable.
Could Gloss drop back to standard mythfrontend if functionality that isn’t available yet is requested?
Anyway: I just wanted you to know that I recently discovered Gloss and will follow its development.
Filip
Christian says:
I am dreaming of such a frontend for a long time! Looks realy promising!
Would it be possible to build Glossy for Mac OSX, too? Clutter works on the iPhone (saw the video on the blog) so clutter should not be the problem. What do you think of porting it to Mac OSX, too?
As said before: very promising … will also follow its development.
noisymime says:
@Filip
Unfortauntely I’m not really aware of anyway I can have Gloss fall back to using standard Myth frontend stuff where required. The differences between the two are simply too great.
@Christian
I planned Gloss from the beginning to work on multiple platforms (eg linux, OSX and Windows) but at this stage I haven’t put much effort into trying them out. All the major components (Clutter, python, gstreamer) are already cross platform, so really it shouldn’t be too hard at all. If you’d like to try it out (I don’t really have suitable dev environments on these platforms) jump onto #gloss on irc.freenode.org and I can try to help out.