[Goodies-dev] Announcing xfce4-playercontrol-plugin

[Kemal Ilgar Eroglu]

Hi everyone, and happy new year to you all,

I'm happy to announce the first beta release (version 0.2.0) of xfce4-playercontrol-plugin, the successor to the xfce4-xmms-plugin.

As you may know already, xmms-plugin used the XMMS API which worked for XMMS, Audacious < 1.4 and the old BMP. Quite a few people have asked me to add support for the new Audacious but it required a rewrite of the plugin since it was strictly dependent on the XMMS API.

So, I did the rewrite and the new plugin supports a somewhat modular structure. It currently supports XMMS, Audacious (old & new) and MPD. It should be easy to extend it to other players. The available functionality in the new modular API imitates a subset of the old XMMS API but they should be quite sufficient for the tasks expected from a panel plugin anyway.

Since it's unlikely that I will have much time in the new year, I'm rolling this out so that the interested people can test it. I'll put a link to the xmms plugin page for now, maybe later we can make a separate page for the new one.

Some other issues and thoughts:

* For an actual release we should add translation support for some strings. I'm a rather amateur programmer who can't even handle gettext :), so I didn't do anything about the gettext suport.

* I realized that there already is an MPD plugin by Landry Breuil. It has better features and is better coded. I don't know libmpdclient well, so although my code works as it is, it should be improved. I don't intend to spend much time on MPD. Landry, would you be interested in joining efforts?

* I have a KDE 3 system with Amarok using DCOP but I don't know how to code the DCOP interface. There is also the not-so-neat option to use the DCOP CLI methods (by exec'ing commands) but I was too lazy to do that.

* I don't have and I don't intend to use a KDE 4 system. The new Amarok uses D-Bus, so it should be trivial to add support for it. Maybe someone with KDE4 can help here.

* I didn't actually test the Audacious < 1.4 support, but it should work, as it's identical to XMMS and XMMS works.

Suggestions for supporting other players are welcome.

You can find the link to the 0.2.0 package on the xmms plugin page:

http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/panel-plugins/xfce4-xmms-plugin

Cheers,

Ilgar