Better artist “browsing” for gmusicbrowser»

Even if it’s the most favorable time of the year to spend your holiday outside your own hacking station, Simon from the Shimmer Project has been working hard to pull together a new plugin for gmusicbrowser, the default media player for Xubuntu. The new plugin is called similar artist queue, and this is how Simon describes the basic functionality in the Shimmer Project blog:

The new queue-mode I developed retrieves “similar artists” from last.fm and creates a random queue based on the resulting group of artists. This means that you only have to select a first “seed artist”, as we decided to call it, and gmusicbrowser/last.fm will (supposedly) play similar music from your local library.

Read the rest of the original article or check out the testing Git branch.

July 14, 2011 — 1 comment »
Design, Shimmer, Ubuntu — , , ,

Xfce Design SIG launches»

As Jérôme Guelfucci wrote in his blog earlier, a special interest group has been started.  The Xfce Design Special Interest Group (or SIG) has a clear purpose (quote from the groups wikipage):

The Xfce Design SIG aims at improving the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. Our goal is to bring interested users, designers and hackers together to ensure neither of them is working in a vacuum. By establishing a context in which they can collaborate on smaller and larger design-related projects we try to increase the chance of the proposed changes to be merged into the official Xfce repositories.

I’m looking forward to working with Xfce directly and more closely after working years with Xubuntu. It’s both easier for us and assures that all Xfce users can enjoy the improvements, not just those who use Xubuntu.

Are you interested specially about Xfce Design? Join us!

June 22, 2011 — 1 comment »
Community, Design, Ubuntu, Xfce —

Translators, start your engines!»

Again some good news for Xubuntu: the Ubiquity installation slideshow for Xubuntu is now ready and merged into the main branch. You can start translating now!

The design is an improved version of the old slideshow; the slideshow window is now actually a bit bigger, and we added the arrows to move around to make the slideshow smoother. Works really well. Instant win! Also, the texts have been completely rewritten. There were a few keywords we didn’t let off our heads when we rethought the slides and the content: fun, short, necessary. The final version became to be after hard work, many days and a few really long nights. I couldn’t have done it without Simon, who in addition to everything else provided us the fabulous screenshots from his Natty installation.

Love it? Hate it?

March 23, 2011 — 2 comments »
Design, Ubuntu — , , , ,