Nicolas Richeton

I’ll work a lot on Sharemedia this week-end (25/08-26/08) and I’ll be available on IRC/MSN/Mail to introduce the application to new developers and help the current ones to catch up.

Everyone who is interested in contributing to this project should join #sharemedia on irc.freenode.net these days. There, I’ll give advices on how to build Sharemedia from sources, how to create new plugins and improve the existing ones. Ideas are also welcome.

For developers, the bare minimum is to have good a Java skills. This application is developed with RCP/SWT. If you don’t know what RCP is, the following document provides a good technical description of Eclipse RCP : eclipse-platform-whitepaper.pdf (no need to read the JDT – Java Development Tools part)

Here are the current development areas and the corresponding technologies used :

== Primary goals :

* Release Jabber plugin : Due to the latest refactorings, Jabber support was not longer working and thus was not included in ShareMedia releases. This plugin has to be fixed and improved to support library sharing and chat with other users.
(RCP, Smack, Java, Jabber, XML)

* Google plugin improvements : currently, only public albums are supported. Support for private albums and write access should be added.
(RCP, GData, Java)

* Local Library : Several settings should be available to the user, including enabling/disabling “Auto import”
(RCP, Java)

* MP3 player : POC of MP3 support (w/ sharing and streaming)
(RCP, JMF, Java MP3 players)

* Sharing plugin : sharing support for libraries : playlists, picasaweb, jabber …
(RCP)

* Website update : The current website is out of date. It must be updated (Developer docs, features, screencasts…)

== Secondary goals :

* Website publishing library : plug an FTP server as a library and build a complete web gallery from sharemedia…
(RCP, Java, apache commons, HTML, PHP, Flash, …)

* Google Map : locate selected photos on google map.
( RCP, Google Maps, PHP ? )

* Notify users / Alerts of new shared content.

* Flickr library

* Facebook library

* My Computer library : Scan all computer or selected folders for media.

…

See you saturday or sunday.

Sharemedia 0.2.2 was released yesterday and now comes with a Google Albums plugin. This plugin enables read access to picasa web albums and online photo browsing, even with the OpenGL (3D) plugin.

How to install :
1 – Download the new release form sourceforge
2 – Start Sharemedia
3 – Go in Updates->New features-> New remote Site
4 – Add http://sharemedia.free.fr/update
5 – Select Finish
6 – Sharemedia will search the update site and find 2 plugins : Google Albums and OpenGL Viewer. Select the one you want and push finish. The new features are available immediately.

This version also includes several bugs fixes and speed improvements.

You may have to rebuild your local library. See previous news on Sharemedia project page. Update system seems broken at the moment, please download the binary packages.

Update : OpenGL plugin doesn’t work. Strange … I’ll fix it this evening.

Update 2 : OpenGL plugin fixed.

Happy testing.

The next sharemedia release will include :
Drag and Drop
Improved OpenGL viewer (better annimations, and effects …)
Media ranking
Improved Browse view.
Custom playlists and intelligent playlists
Maybe custom libraries.

At last, I found why the drag and drop fails in Sharemedia. This is a bug I introduced when I created a separate plugin for apache commons. SerializationUtils.deserialize has problems with the OSGI class loader and introduced a bug at the lowest level (my custom Transfer object).

This is fixed now.