Since not everyone want to read a bunch of pointless April fools crap postings on the internets, and just in time to probably fail to compile with the latest version of Vala, I have a new little project written in Vala!

Quite a while ago, I made a basic metronome application and named it hubcap in honor of Linux Outlaws host Dan Lynch. Anyone that has ever heard me play music knows just how much I really need a metronome, but that is beyond the point, and I promise that this won't be some pointless April 1st crap.

Fortunately, the Linux Outlaws has two hosts and I had a yearning to hack code and process data.

Say hello to Shnerkel!
Shnerkel is an aggregator and player of the Linux Outlaws ogg feed. Sauce: shnerkel.tar.gz


--Requirments--
gstreamer-0.10
gtk+-2.0
webkit-1.0
libxml-2.0
Vala ( for compiling )

The main impetus for creating this application was to play with webkit in Vala. As I see it, there are a few bonus results of creating this app.

1. Since the app plays the ogg version of the Linux Outlaws audcast, the statics for numbers of downloads of the mp3 and ogg versions will hopefully tip towards ogg.

2. It is a fairly easy way to increase the expose of Linux Outlaws and Ogg, although I'm probably preaching to the choir on both accounts.

3. Almost a full dozen people will have something real to read on April 1st.

The Good
With shnerkel, there is no more waiting to download the audcast. The audio file is streamed over HTTP by the gstreamer library. Shnerkel uses the same audio player class as sap, which really cut down on development time. Thanks Open Source.

The Bad
You will notice the lack of a progress bar. For some reason gstreamer doesn't return the duration of an ogg file being played over HTTP. What the hell is up with that? It is either a problem with Gstreamer or a problem with the Ogg format.

The Ugly
plenty. Before you complain, go look in the mirror. Oh snap! You got burned by that one! In the appwindow.vala file, I pull information from a GTK TreeStore as follows:

string description="";
string file="";
tree_selection = tv.get_selection();
tree_selection.get_selected(out model, out iter);
episodeTreeStore.get(iter,3,&description,2,&file,-1);

It seems to me that passing 'description' and 'file' to the function as references is rather un-vala like and the function should instead use 'out' to pass data to the strings. Oh well...

It's almost midnight, but I don't think I'll stay up and write the first page of my movie script for the ScriptFrenzy challenge.


Now quit reading, and go find the elusive Dirk Shnerkelberger.