Building a Sexier GTK Media Player - Part 1

    Today I feel the need to express my discontent for the majority of Linux application UI's, I love GTK and I think it's an extremely simple to use yet powerful widget toolkit, and the unified styling of my choosing by all GTK applications is nice, but there are some cases where I just wish applications would stop looking like crap because of it.

There's no reason for a media player (I'm talking about one that just plays media, like totem, not a library managment program like rhythmbox/banshee) to look like this:

Oh, and that's without the menu since I'm using gnome-globalmenu. When I'm watching a video I just want to see the video, I shouldn't have to hide controls when I'm playing a video just to get them out of the way, and users that don't use the global menu shouldn't have to see a menubar either, it's yet another UI control I don't want to see when I have a movie playing. I think Apple got it right when they redesigned the UI for QuickTime X, I want to see that on my operating system of choice.

So let's do it, I want to see how much work and code it would take to reproduce the UI and functionality of QuickTime X on Linux using nothing but GTK, Cairo (for pretty vector shinies) and GStreamer for media playback. I've already done the necessary poking around at documentation and some example code to know the techniques I'll need to use for most of the project, all that's left is writing the code and wiring it all up.

So buckle in for the ride, I'm hoping the next few weeks will be interesting :)

Comments

Post new comment

  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You can enable syntax highlighting of source code with the following tags: <code>, <blockcode>. Beside the tag style "<foo>" it is also possible to use "[foo]".

More information about formatting options