Thursday, May 24, 2012

Welcome

Welcome to my blog!

I've started this blog to document the progress on my Google Summer of Code 2012 project for PulseAudio, but I will hopefully keep posting about other (more or less) interesting things I'm working on.

The project aims to provide basic GUI integration and user feedback for device discovery events, through the Desktop Notification specification. This will come as a PulseAudio module that will communicate through D-Bus to the notification system provided by the desktop environment. The module will be subscribing to the server to receive device discovery events and will be relaying that information to the user. If the user decides to take an action with respect to that device, this will be communicated back to the module (through the D-Bus Desktop Notification API) and the module will change the server state accordingly. I have split the development into the following tasks:
  1. write a simple module to detect new devices;
  2. add basic interaction with D-Bus through the Desktop Notification specification;
  3. implement user feedback through DN;
  4. implement persistence of user settings through the PulseAudio database;
  5. improve the user intreface, from a usability point of view:
    • should the user set a whole device as default or sinks/sources;
    • should there be separate notifications for each of the sinks and sources of a device;
    • what happens if a user ignores the notification etc.
  6. adapt the zeroconf module to integrate with this module well (e.g. add authentication prompt);
  7. inspect other available user feedback/notification systems, such as Ubuntu's, and extend the module to provide for those mechanisms as well;
  8. make some adjustments to the existing GUIs (such as disabling volume controls when pass-through mode is enabled).
I will start coding in about a week and I will try to post updates on my progress weekly. The posts will not be aimed only for those who have a good understanding of PulseAudio; I will try to explain what I discover and learn so that others who would want to start coding for PulseAudio can read through the posts easily and understand how everything works.

I'm looking forward to this summer and to working on this project!

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