381 - Merely-Busy

A small note about what I’m up to at the moment. As seems to be the norm for this year — my final year at university — I am currently sitting facing five big deadlines within ten days of each other. This isn’t exactly conducive to spending time writing for dx13. I believe that it gets somewhat less hectic after our exams in January.

This isn’t the real reason, however, just my excuse. The real reason is that I’ve been spending most of the time where I’m not working hacking on bluefunk. Those of you who have been watching my Linux screenshot in the sidebar will have noticed the results of my work steadily producing a nicer player. I’ve also been squashing big bugs in the playlist logic that were leading to quite a few crashes. I’ve also been cleaning up the UI; sanding down the rough edges. Finally I have been neatening the internals for -data handling, including escapes for Pango rendering.

It’s mainly been small things, taking an hour off work now and then to do some bluefunk coding so there are no major new features, but it all works — and looks — far smoother than it did a month ago. There are still quite a few bugs that I need to track down in the trees that make up the various views.

I also want to re-organise the way the GStreamer and playlist code interact: they can be more tightly integrated without sacrificing modularity. The way it work now puts far too much code around in the GUI that should be internal to the player/playlist combination. In short, the way things are organised now means that you have to use fairly convoluted code for what should be easy stuff to do.

After these two things, or perhaps before the player clean-up, I am going to try and release a 0.1 version so people can play around with it and hopefully get some more people interested in the project.