So I’ve managed to write software that a lot of people are
suddenly interested in. It’s an interesting thing to say the
least. However “becoming famous” was nothing like what I’d
had imagined. Here’s what happened after my initial
blogpost:
- The media picks it up.
The media is interested in new stories. So they post them.
However, they often prefer to give those stories their own spin.
(The really weird stories have luckily already disappeared
from Google, so no links to them.) None of those journalists
contacted me about it, they just wrote something. - The people pick it up.
Lots of people start talking about it. How do I know? I
googled. Only 5 people talked to me about it. Mostly they
just went into obscure forums or chats to discuss it and
complain about missing features. Almost nobody of them
realizes that it’s a really good idea to come to me and ask
questions. It’s highly motivating if someone shows interest
in my product. Even if it’s just complaining that it doesn’t
build on his box. And if you ask, there’s a high chance I
get interested in solving your problem, especially if it’s a
pretty simple problem.
(Side note: The Ubuntu forums are
lucky to have such a high Google ranking, so I could at
least find their questions.) - When there’s a release, the distros pick it up.
Distros are really fast at taking your source code and
sticking it in the unstable branch of their package
repositories. Lots of them, in particular the big ones,
contact you to tell you about it and ask questions. The
process of integrating new software into distros seems to
work really well. Congrats from me to the distro people for
that. Great work you’re doing there. In particular Gentoo. - People start blaming
They seem to read everything I have said in the past and
spin it in their direction. I’m suddenly personally
responsible for not working on Gnash and fragmenting the
Free Flash movement, I sure as hell have to provide
OpenBSD support or my software is crap, stuff like that.
Again, noone comes and asks, that would be far too
complicated. And probably wouldn’t be compatible to their
predetermined opinion. - Hackers don’t show up
I was expecting some interested people to show up and have a
look at the code. In particular because the code is
documented far better than all my previous code (including
GStreamer ;)). I think there have been 2 people so far that
looked at it. But that’s about it. Probably everyone is busy
doing their own project. Or people still think doing Flash
is hard (hint: it’s not).
But then, the few people that have shown up and talked to me
have made a lot of things happen and I guess I’ll cut a new
release soon to make those people happy. In particular:
- People wanted an easy API to embed Flash files. So I
created libswfdec-gtk. You should be able to play Youtube
videos in your Gtk app with 20 lines of C. - Or you could do it in 10 lines of Python with the new Pyswfdec Python
bindings that Gian Mario
Tagliaretti has been working on. - Last but not least I’ve managed to use GStreamer instead
of ffmpeg/mad for video and audio decoding. While that
doesn’t sound to exciting at first, it means you can build
swfdec now without linking to patented multimedia formats
and still be able to enjoy Youtube. I know at least Fedora
was very interested in that.
No new work on Flash features so far, since I’ve been
working on a branch redoing the ActionScript interpreter.
Once that hits (that’ll definitely be after next release),
it’ll make a huge number of Flash files supported. But
that’s still some work.
What I’ve been wondering and like to get some feedback from
people active in this area is if it’s a good idea to export
the script interpreter. ActionScript is
almost the same as Javascript (same syntax), so it offers a
sandboxed execution environment. In this case completely
GObject’ified. So you could use it if you wanted to script
Flash files, or you could even add hooks to it in your own
app and download interesting scripts from the web. Think Get Hot new Stuff
with scripts. To me that’s somewhere between total crack and
really exciting.