Installed the second Phoebe beta from Red Hat last night. Most of the bad bugs in the first Phoebe beta is gone and things are looking really smooth. The GNOME2.2 setup which will be in RH8.1 is so smooth that I felt, well in lack of a better term, I felt proud of having been part of creating it.
Things are really looking bright these days and good news just keeps rolling in. Looking back there has been a painfull, but important transition in the GNOME community from being technology oriented to being solution oriented. Yes, I know it sounds like a stupid catchfrase from a management book, but it is true. I feel that where we before where mostly focusing on ‘we must implement this technology and add this option’ the now focus more on ‘how can we make GNOME as easy to use and intuitive as possible’. This is also examplified by earlier having a list called gnome-hackers being the most important, to now having desktop-devel as the most important. While it is just a name it also says something about a change in mindset.
We also made the 0.5.2 release of GStreamer last night, feel very happy about it. Think the subset of GStreamer that GNOME currently uses is very solid in it, and I think that the last remaining issues which we need to address for the framework as a whole to be solid will be taken care of within the next month. In fact the only core component which is substandard atm is the autoplugger (which none of the GNOME 2.2 components use atm), but omega is hard at working creating us a new one. It will probably be ready within the next 10-12 days. There are of course tons of polish needed in regards to formats supported, interactivty and of course bugfixes, but we are getting there fast.
dolphy has done some really nice work on gst-player. Thanks to his effort is has gone from merely being a nice technology demo to being a very nice media-player. Hopefully it can ship as a standard part of GNOME 2.4.
thomasvs did as usuall a splendid job in preparation for 0.5.2, GStreamer would not be half as good as it is today without his efforts, strange to think he was only looking for a ready made backend for his Dave/Dina box when he first came to #gstreamer ;). His Nautilus-media package seems to work very well for me now, which is rather impressive given how short it has been in existence and thomasvs having to squeeze development time on it in between work and general GStreamer hacking.
Also can’t write a diary entry today without saying a great thanks to Bitstream for their donation of ten fonts to GNOME. Go Bitstream!