Hello GNOME, Hello GSoC!

This is my first post in a series of posts about my Google Summer of Code project. I was accepted by the GNOME Project to spend this summer coding on the famous banshee media player. I’ll focus on the Mac OS X port of Banshee, which needs quite some love and polish to shine as much as it’s linux port.

But first, a brief little introduction of myself: My Name is Timo Dörr, I am currently enrolled as a student at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (fomer University of Karlsruhe) and  will soon finish my studies in the field of computer science. I’ve used linux since more than a decade as my one-and-only operating system until I bought myself a Macbook and played a little with Mac OS X. Since then, I would call myself a “dual-user”  hopping between both universes. I therefore am really excited about the GSoC assignment, which not only allows me to work with the banshee team and improve one of the best media players out there, but also enables me to get a closer insight into developing in C# with Mono on OS X – which I’ve already learned to love in the Linux world.

I’ll work on different parts to (hopefully) bring banshee’s OS X up on pace to its linux port, but to shortly sum up my proposal (which eventually got accepted by GNOME & Google), here is my TODO list:

•  Integrate the Banshee Community Extensions (BCE)  into bockbuild (the OS X buildsystem currently used to build banshee on OS X) so OS X users can enjoy existing plugins, too
• Select and propably adjust native code parts within the plugins to work with OS X
• Work on simple hardware detection support of mobile devices, which is currently not working at all on OS X
• Make lots of smaller improvements that make banshee feel more “native” on OS X, like usage of the media keys, native file dialogs and more.

I will regularly post about my work and the problems I faced, and am always open for tips and suggestions. Though I’ve made a reasonable schedule of what to complete when to successfully finish the assignmet, I think there is quite some room for further small tasks. So if you ever wanted to use banshee on OS X (or other platform) but found anything weird, quirky or missing feel free to email me: timo (at) latecrew (dot) de – I might end up working on it during or after the GSoC period 😉

Hello world!

It’s been fourteen years since I plugged my first 56k Modem and went online, and yet I managed to get around  creating my own Blog. Until now.

Now that I am accepted as a GSoC student, I actually do have something to blog about – so here it is. Prepare to be bored by postings about computer programming & science, and of course my GSoC project, which I’ll blog about in another posting.