Democracy player

After some time I tried again DemocracyPlayer... and I've to say that it didn't change a lot. Especially on the side of the contents.

The player itself is not bad. It has nice ideas, nice features, nice technology, but it lacks the contents. Democracy is a great software that broadcasts youtube like contents. Which is not enough to be the next-generation TV.

Here is some suggestions.

• Make it possible to stream on demand a content. Now you can only download as a podcast and then watch it. Streaming would be a wonderful feature to have.
• Find contents providers. We desperately need to show that it is possible to provide contents with a great open-source multi-platform tool.
• Integrate it better with the desktop environment, the web browser and with other media sources (for example youtube).
• Think about cooperation with some CC-licensed (for example Jamendo) music in order to open a music section on Democracy.
  

I really think that democracy could become an open iTunes if properly developed.

Green my apple closes

Greenpeace closed Green my apple because, they says, they achieved the results they wanted.

I doubt a little about because Greenpeace only has an open letter by Steve Jobs where he says that Apple will improve the efforts for the environment. I'm not sure it's enough: I recently attended to a talk by Katherine Richardson about the climate change and she's been very very scaring.

I think we should rethink computer science in terms of power consumption and pollution reduction. Use power saving and think twice before changing your computer, guys!

Apple tags un-DRMed contents

Apple is now selling contents without DRM, but tagged with the user name [1].

This should prevent somehow the sharing of the content without affecting user's freedom.

[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2007/05/30/tuaw-tip-dont-torrent-that-song/

Google gears

Google is now using gears with its rss reader. Google gears extends the browser allowing to use the web applications offline. Which is wonderful. At the moment only Google Reader supports the offline mode and Google Gears is only available for Firefox and IE, but I hope that in the future more applications and browsers will be supported.

When you go offline, that happens is that Gears download what it supposes you need to use the web app offline. Then, the data it has downloaded are available. If anything was modified, Gears should automatically synchronize with the web app.

No configuration is needed (even if it would had been nice to have something to tune).

As a first step, it's not bad, but in order to make the web apps as usable as the regular web apps, something more is needed:

1. Support to any application
2. Complete control on what is download and how
3. Some more transparency. At the moment I have to decide if I want to go offline or not. It would be wonderful if Gears automatically went somehow offline and automatically synced, so that a down of the network would not affect my surfing.
   

Few ideas for IMs

Since I started using Ubuntu, I switched to Gnome, so I had also to switch to pidgin.

After some 6 months of use, I have few comments and ideas about how an IM should be.

1. It should be possible to group different users into a meta user. This is actually already possible and allows to group together the same buddy when he or she uses different protocols.
2. It should be possible to specify details for each user. For instance, it should be possible to specify a preferred language for the (meta) user, and the IM should automatically set the spell checker according to the language
3. If some details are specified for a meta user, the users that belongs to the meta user, should inherit the details. It should be possible to redefine any inherited details
4. It should be possible to tag users in order to have a more fine-grain classification than the group-based one.

I hope to see some of these features in the next versions of pidgin and kopete.

Daemons... from the hell...

Today I discovered the music player daemon project. This is a wonderful idea I totally agree with. Splitting all the services into client/server architecture would bring to some very good results.

First of all, different clients could share same data with great effects on migration from one client to another.

Second, unifying the efforts on the server side, we could achieve better products sooner.

Third: interoperability. Among different desktop environments. The daemon should run at a lower level than DE (when possible), so that it could be possible to change DE without losing personal settings.

I can think at least to two different fields that would take some advantages from a client/server architecture:

• Instant Messaging: if we had only a server that provides access to different protocols (jabber, msn, skype, irc, etc.), it would be nice. Especially because every client would take advantage of any progress made on the server. I'm not the only one that thinks that this approach would be useful. These people agree with me ;-).
• Music and sound players: having the same server means having the same music library, the same settings, the same playing quality, etc.
  

Last Jamendo

Jamendo is a very nice site. You can upload your music and give it away with a nice Creative Commons license.

This help artists to share and distribute their music and users to access free music without fearing the revenge of the majors.

The only problem is that Jamendo lacks a suggestion service and finding in more than 25000 (yeah, 25 thousands) songs the right one for you may be hard.

What would be very very nice is having a service like Last.fm that only suggests free (for instance CC) music. Imagine, you listen to your old non-free playlist and after a while your music player begins to populate your library with free music... a dream come true.