Month: October 2008

Media art, work in process

Just like with thumbnails are there a lot of applications that want to share media art. Media art is the politically neutral name that we picked for what I used to call album art. Instead of just for albums we concluded that art for other things like podcasts and radio channels exists too. We made sure that the specification acknowledges that.

We still have a few open and unspecified ideas like:

  • Filtering patterns for fields like album, artist and title
  • Support for front, back and pages in a booklet
  • A way to mark artwork as temporary
  • Cached thumbnails of artwork
  • Storing artwork on removable media for reuse by another device
  • Temporary write location to rename to final to gain atomicity (.part files)

I guess this means Aaron, Gabriel and me should do some more meetings. I think it’s time however to involve people who are working on other media players. Especially since the Banshee- and the Maemo team are fully agreeing on the necessity of such a storage specification. Which means that one will be made and most likely shared by Banshee, the advisory documentation for third party players on Maemo and by standard players that will be shipped.

You can find a draft of a draft on Live.

Comparing mobile development to the music industry

I believe it’s important for mobile platforms to specialize on what is important for mobile and embedded. This includes dealing with high latency networks, low amounts of disk space, high I/O costs, slow memory bandwidth. The development tools are often either far more or far less integrated.

There is a lot of overlap with desktop software development. If companies who make mobile technology want to build a developer ecosystem, like the web and the desktop already have, then my advice would be to start integrating with these overlapping areas. This is indeed more expensive and more difficult than doing your own thing. In the long run, this is how you make an ecosystem for mobile software development.

After youtube’s madness, I wouldn’t ever underestimate the creativity of the kids anymore. After wikipedia, the Linux kernel, KDE, GNOME, Webkit and Firefox as browser components, I wouldn’t ever underestimate the energy of volunteer experts anymore.

The music industry usually only allows big corporations to hook-in their music selling. Why aren’t they investing in conferences where they invite both the industry players and the developers who are making tomorrow’s music players? What if they’d involve them in specifying a standardized protocol for buying music? Right now the music industry is making it harder for its customers to buy music than it is to copy and steal music. Right now people who want to buy music are required to own a desktop. How silly is that? With a standardized protocol you’d see mobile software developers writing mobile music players that’ll also be clients communicating over 3G, UMTS or GPRS.

At the Boston GNOME summit I’m meeting Gabriel and Aaron who both developed Banshee. We will discuss a standardized cache for album art and a DBus interface to implement an album art downloader. As a Nokia contractor I will implement this specification on the Maemo platform. This way, all music players that will be made for both desktops and mobile platforms can share the same album art, use the same DBus interface to request album art, and share album art downloaders.