Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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Making GNOME hot for content creation

A recent report noted that 44% of American internet users have published content online somehow. That's a great figure and cheers me up a lot. So what are these people doing? Blogging? No way, that's a minority! It turns out that the majority use case for content creators is putting photos online.

In the open source arena, the server side of organising photos is nicely met by the Gallery application. But there's nothing particularly great yet for the GNOME desktop. Happily, F-Spot is waiting in the wings. F-Spot was started by the late Ettore Perezzoli and is now being maintained by Larry Ewing.

F-Spot takes a fast and simple approach to photo management. It's currently still in pre-release development, but a 0.1 release is due sometime soon. Here's a screenshot.

F-Spot Screenshot

The idea is that you can easily filter your collection by meaningful tags: people, places, events and so on. Tag assignment will be done by drag and drop. Import and export filters will allow you to get photos from your camera and then sling them up to something like Gallery.

I'm very excited at the possibilities for integrating F-Spot with the rest of the desktop. In particular I want to see the contacts from Evolution automatically integrated into the "People" tags. The evolution-data-server work should make this a snap. I'd also like to play with writing an exporter that creates FOAF depiction data so my labours in photo classification can be shared in an open way over the web.

Another fun thing about F-Spot is that it's implemented using Mono. Later this week I'm heading out to Boston for the Mono open meeting. I'm really looking forward to meeting the Mono hackers, and having some good conversations about desktop integration.

One thing that strikes me about Mono is that it seems to be giving developers more time to think of new ideas for applications. Writing in C, as much as I love it, you do tend to find yourself drawn to perfecting various widgets and small details. Using C# frees more time up to prototype new approaches.

From my point of view, I feel like I could get started on writing or extending these projects much quicker than similar ones written in C. This is because most GNOME C applications have their own relatively elaborate internal infrastructure in order to provide decent abstraction and code maintainability. Unfortunately for the outsider some of this abstraction can appear opaque. C#/Mono provides a lot of the infrastructure already and helps to make the main business parts of an application more transparent.

Before I conclude, what about the other major content creation case? The Pew study reports this to be publishing writings, as distinct from blogging. GNOME needs something very simple that enables a collection of static pages to be constructed and published. My friend Giles Turnbull pointed me at Pages the other day. I'd love to see something like this done as a client-side application. Shouldn't take an excited Mono hacker too long.

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