I hope everyone had a good break. I surely enjoyed my one month off. In fact, I logged over 12,000 km during my time off visiting many people and places. But alas, I knew it had to come to an end at some point. Now that I am back at school, it's time to start up work on Birdtorrent again.
The next few months I will be working toward a 1.0 release. On average, you will see a point-release every couple of weeks. It's going to be hard and fast, but I am confident that I'll come out the other end of the jungle holding the Golden Idol of Fertility.
Anyway, the purpose of what I write today is to give you an idea of my vision for this project going forward. The following is a brief project plan that I have come up with.
Project Description
The Birdtorrent project, in a nutshell, is an add-on for Songbird, an Open Source media player. The purpose of this add-on is to allow users to download music via Torrents directly to their library. Currently, users that wish to get their music via Torrents must first download the torrent, download the contained content with a torrent client and manually import the media into Songbird through the File menu. The purpose of this addon is to largely automate these steps.
In it's current state (v0.3), Birdtorrent integrates bookmarks and search for 5 of the top torrent sites. These sites were chosen by a user poll conducted over a week on my blog. Clicking the bookmarks or using the integrated torrent search allows the user to more easily track down the content they are looking for. Currently, Birdtorrent also enables Songbird to recognize .torrent files by mime-type. Typically, Songbird throws up the Download Manager for files it doesn't know how to handle; similar to how Firefox treats anything that isn't a web page. Currently, Birdtorrent throws up an alert dialog congratulating the user for opting to download a torrent.
The following describes my vision of how this project will progress from this point.
| Release Plan | |
|---|---|
| 0.4 -> 0.7 | Get media from a .torrent file to download to the default music folder |
| 0.8 -> 0.9 | Get media to automatically import into the library after being downloaded |
| 1.0 | Final testing, documentation, polish UI and code |
Goals
Primary
- Download content within a .torrent file via Songbird's Downloader Service
- Automatically import downloaded media into the media library
Secondary
- Resolve incompatability with SELinux
- Get Birdtorrent to work on Mac OS X
- Get Birdtorrent to work on Windows XP and Vista
- Create a custom Downloader Service UI to display torrent-unique information (ie. connected peers)
Potential Issues
Legal - there could possibly be push back against this project due to the controversiality of Peer-to-Peer networks and the music/film industries.
Windows Support - The binary component used in this add-on (libtorrent) is only supported on *nix platforms. This could mean potential issues with getting Birdtorrent to compile on Windows.
Mac Support - Problems with generating the binary component in previous releases prevented work being done toward a solution for this issue. As a result, Linux is currently the only supported platform.
Fedora Support - Problems with SELinux in Fedora result in the binary component being disallowed from loading. This issue will have to be worked out later.
So, that's basically what I have in mind so far. This could change going forward, but at least it gives some sort of idea of what is going on in my head right now. I'll probably post a more detailed release roadmap once I have a better idea of how each release will map.
Anyway, that's it for now. Feel free to post any feedback you have in the comments.
Cheers!
I am a 
