GNOME Desktop features a great multimedia framework called Gstreamer that defaults to patent unencumbered
formats by default. However there are times when you need to use a format such
as mp3. Just like I did when I wanted to upload by music to Last.fm. The cool thing about this that you can
create a profile and suddenly that profile is available to all the great apps
such as Sound Juicer or Sound
Recorder.

To create a new profile, run gnome-audio-profiles-properties.
Alternatively you can select edit > preferences from Sound Juicer’s
menu and click on the Edit profiles button dow at the bottom. Here is
a couple of useful, yet cryptic looking Gstreamer pipelines that you can
add:

• audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc Creates a VBR MP3 profile that uses LAME to encode (make sure you have the lame plugin for gstreamer installed).
• audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc vbr=0 bitrate=128 – same thing except constant bitrate of 128 kbps. Required by Last.FM for some reason.

Feel free to add comments to this entry to share your own pipelines that may
be useful.

Now if only this was as straight-forward with video as is for audio. I really
dig the interface of Thoggen, but I don’t
have a DVD player supporting Theora. I haven’t seen those yet.

Ingenious straw design:

Inkscape has an extensive keyboard control. One thing I thought is impossible and I love in blender is being able to use the same transform functions in different contexts (on nodes as well as objects for example). As Cornelius pointed out today on #inkscape (freenode), you can for example scale selections of nodes with Ctrl+, (down) or Ctrl+. (up). Nifty!

• screencast demo

• 1920×1200
• 1600×1200

Another shameless plug.

Thursday Feb 9th, http://147.230.26.4:8000.

To get a taste what’s coming, tune in now.

Beauty is coming!

Many have noticed ground has started to shake in the rotting icon theme department. Why the cleanup? Why not keep the sleeping giant alone?

I believe the gnome icon theme should be as generic as possible. Right now we have an icon theming system, but not really. What good is a theme system that requires every theme to ship with a full set of the thousands of icons? Nothing looks worse to me than a mish-mash of icon styles. What good are accessible themes when they had so many “holes” in it (showing default mimetype icons with tiny text labels to differentiate them apart). Even GIT hasn’t really been “complete”. How could Bluecurve, Gorilla or Nuvola ever achieve that?

Let me offer the following paralell. I loved how the Mozilla folks avoided the Frankestein and solved the issue of specific needs with their extension system in Firefox. Firefox only ships with essential functionality, that pretty much everyone will find useful. And if there is a need for a specific functionality for a specific user base, somebody sits down and writes an extension for it. Such extensions are developed separately from the main app.

Similarly gnome icon theme should only ship with the bare essial icon set. A set that will be easier to maintain, and easily themed by other authors. A set with defined naming and metaphors.

And then there will be room for extra sets installing to the theme prefix, yet having a separate maintainer. I am sure to jump to a gnome-icon-theme-artists when time allows. I do want to easily distinguish Blender project files form generic text document as much as seeing GIMP‘s XCF files better in a bunch of PNGs. I will probably also do a gnome-icon-theme-hackers for developers to be able to find Makefiles or header files in a folder full of C files easier. But before I do (or somebody else does) our desktop will not be shipping icons that don’t look good in a file selctor. Icons that pretend to be 48×48 while being 48×52. It will be shipping a relatively small set that will provide scalable icons for large density screens and will allow for distributions to theme easier if they want to.

And gnomers, don’t be affraid not to use an icon in your app. It’s better not to have it at all than to have a non-obvious sucky one. Steven got it right when he once said that if you can’t think of a good metaphor for an action, maybe that action doesn’t really need an icon. Yes you heard me. A guy who’s spent most of his work time drawing icons warns you about using too many And I’m not the only one.