GNOME – Patryk Zawadzki

To git or not to git

These days most of the buzz is around choosing an appropriate DVCS for GNOME. Like, dude, what the hell?

It’s not like we’re choosing between CVS and SVN where one is the other plus cool features minus broken design. Today we should concentrate on using the most widely adopted DVCS, not on one with the cutest syntax. Features across the board are actually pretty much the same, the rest is just sugar coating.

Just take git and wrap it, add plugins, make it look like Bizarre or Peculiar. We certainly don’t want to tell new contributors to download and build 20+ source control tools just to build a single GNOME app from trunk. I can tell you for sure most of the devs want to get stuff done and they don’t give a poo about repository storage formats. We want to be able to easily commit changes and generate diffs, having a bunch of PostIt notes with various DVCS incantations is far from desired.

Muxing with gstreamer

Last week I tried to build a little GNOME application to convert movies and videos to formats supported by our PS3 and PSP consoles. I started by playing with the command line. Sounded simple enough. The only problem I has was subtitle support but the nice guys at #gstreamer answered all my questions and I was ready to go. The first thing I tried was this:

gst-launch filesrc location=test.txt ! \
subparse subtitle-encoding=cp1250 ! subs. \
filesrc location=test.avi ! \
decodebin name=demuxer \
demuxer. ! queue ! ffmpegcolorspace ! \
textoverlay name=subs font-desc="Sans Bold 20" ! \
ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc ! queue ! muxer. \
demuxer. ! queue ! audioconvert ! faac ! queue ! muxer. \
ffmux_mp4 name=muxer ! \
filesink location=output.mp4

It loos complicated but it’s not. It basically works like this:

filesrc opens test.txt
subparse decodes the file as one of the supported subtitle formats and sets fallbac encoding to cp1250 (unfortunately one of the most popular encodings used for subtitles in Poland)
another filesrc opens test.avi
decodebin detects the container format used, demuxes it and decodes the audio and video streams inside
the video stream gets passed to textoverlay which takes the subtitle stream decoded earlier and overlays it in the Sans Bold 20 font
x264enc takes the resulting video stream from and encodes it into the H264 format used by PS3
faac takes the audio stream and encodes it to the AAC format used by PS3
ffmux_mp4 takes both audio and video from the earlier elements and muxes it into the mp4 format
filesink writes the results back to disk

Unfortunately it turns out the mp4 muxer does not work as intended. Either that or all the sound encoders are broken. The resulting file plays fine in mplayer but any attempt to use it with gstreamer gives you smooth video with broken audio (one sample per half a second). Playing it bac on the PS3 is impossible as it claims the file is simply corrupt.

Then I thought well, I can still use xvid, right? Wrong. xvidenc + lame + avimux = broken file. Again, mplayer plays the video without any sound, gstreamer just hangs on the first frame. This time I’m pretty sure it’s my fault but I have no idea what params to pass to the encoders and the muxer. Even the avimux example from the gstreamer docs results in an unplayable file on my machine.

Simple idea: how about creating a encodebin element to mimick the decodebin behavior? It could work like this:

audiotestsrc ! encoder. \
videotestsrc ! encoder. \
encodebin name=encoder profile=ogg ! \
filesink location=output.ogm

Banshee 1.0

The new GUI rocks and the experience is great including all the little animation bits here and there. Hooah to the Banshee team. The Rhythmbox community has a new target to follow (and beat!).

PackageKit GUI ideas

I think we all agree that while PackageKit is the way to go, its interface is less than pretty. Or useful for that matter. That’s why I tried to list the biggest annoyances:

Updates window problems

Has a useless step 1 that tells you the total number of updates available. In theory it groups updates by severity. In reality such information is only available in two distros or so.
Same step 1: I think we are trying to dumb the interface down too much so we ended up adding more buttons than necessary. Even Apple does not hide the list of updates from the user.
Every time you click anything the windows resizes itself. Usually moving along to try and stay within the screen boundary.
When you try to update anything, another small window appears in a different part of the screen. The main window is gone so what is exactly the point of having multiple windows here?
When the update is done the smallish window disappears and yet another small window appears. This time offering you to go back. I think we all agree that if the update is successful a notification would be enough. And the go back button is only there because the UI is broken and hides the interface while doing the work.

Add/Remove Software problems

Every time you click a package, half of the window gets covered with package details and buttons. These are all stacked vertically so they take a whole effing lot of useful place. Not to mention the package you clicked suddenly scrolls out of view.
Every time you install or remove anything the window blanks for a brief moment then it gets repopulated with packages, putting you back at the top of the results list. Doesn’t sound bad unless you try to install a bunch of gstreamer packages (and there are 195 matching results in PLD).

Proposal

Try to keep it each interface in one window.
Really try to keep it all in one window.
Don’t show technical details each time I click.

This is the update mockup I came up with some time ago. Think of it as the main part of the window that allows you to select packages to update. The point is once you click update instead of hiding the window, we can hide unselected packages and show live progress in the very same window. Without resizing it. And then hide it if the update is successful.

If it’s not? Well, see that Failed button? The label is wrong but it should be able to show you the details. We all agreed that update is really a background process so popping a big cryptic Update failed window in the middle of my solitaire session is not a thing to do. Just pop a critical notification and I’ll get back to the window to check the details once I’m done with my current task.

Bonus: It also lets you see the whole queue while updating which is quite useful.

Oh and by the way. One failing update should not immediately break the transaction. This forces me to update packages one by one and is actually slower than typing upgrade * in poldek’s interactive shell (not sure if single failed package breaks transaction applies to other backends as well).

Here’s a mockup for Add/Remove Software. The main difference is that instead of annoying users with a panel that pops up each time you select anything, once you click a package, it shows more info inline. Here more info does not include files and dependencies. How often do users choose their software basing on a number of packaged files? There’s an Information button for that. The one below Install (it actually says Add on the picture above but that’s because there is no stock Install button and I’m lazy).

Bonus: clicking install on any package should just display a small progress bar beside that package. See previous mockup for details. And when it’s done, just update the icons of affected packages instead of refreshing the whole window. This way I can scroll and click Install on any number of packages without having to go through the whole install-wait-refresh-wait-scroll-to-previous-position cycle.