I just upgraded my home fanless PC to the Karmic Koala. After reinstalling phonon-backend-gstreamer, that was left out by the update process, I was able to run Minitube 0.7 without problems. I was shocked when I found that video seeking now works. Not only it is working, but it can seek beyond the buffered part of the video. This means that you can immediately seek to the end of a video. This is just awesome.

A new version of Minitube is out, sporting minor fixes and an important enhancement. Many users will have noticed the dreaded “Embedding disabled by request” message. It happens when a YouTube user explicitly disables “embedding” of his/her video on webpages. Often these are videos from major labels and other evil entities. Now Minitube can happily play these too. Enjoy.

I’m starting a new ambitious Free Software project. Yes, that’s it, Yet Another Music Player™. I’ve got a few innovative UI concepts in mind that I hope will justify the incredible duplication of effort already present in this area. But the real reason I’m doing this is that my living room lacks a decent music player. You read it right. The gazillion Linux players around are all unusable, for a reason or another. I used to be an enthusiastic Amarok 1.x user a few years ago, then came KDE4 and Amarok2. I guess all good things must come to an end… Mac people are in an even worse position.

After the positive Minitube experience and since the new player will inherit part of its codebase, I’d like to call the new player Minitunes (hope I don’t get sued because of the last 5 letters). In the picture, a detail of the Collection view, showing the artists in my collection… Get ready for the brand new iTunes killer. No less. -.-

You may have noticed that your beloved Minitube is not working anymore. Don’t panic! Version 0.6.1 is here to help you. Many thanks to Guillaume Girard for reporting the problem and suggesting a fix. Mac builds will arrive in a few hours Mac builds are up.

Minitube has been reported to work on the brand new Nokia N900. This phone sports the Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system. Cool!

There is something deeply wrong to the way people in the IT field conceive the software development process. I wish all the people I worked with read this insightful article. Beware! If you’re a project manager or any “high level” software architect/designer/academic this article may change your life for good.

The major problem with this is that ALL of software is design. 100% of software is design from the high level architect-like design to the low-level design of a for-loop. The implementers of software are not human! I knew you suspected as much given how odd many programmers are. No, the implementers of software are actually ‘perfect’ machines.

Yes, all of software is design. There is no implementation. Pardon me as I stress this over and over. There is only high level and low level design. To mirror other fields of engineering: A civil engineer also has high level design, such as choosing the type and shape of bridge. A civil engineer also has lots of low level design, such as choosing the kind of screws, where they go, where to weld…

Version 0.6 is out now! This cycle has seen an increase of contributions from various people around the world. In particular Kiwamu Okabe, from Japan, magically appeared on Gitorious and added HTTP proxy support and a Japanese translation.

I think I’m going to take a break and slow down development a bit. I have a couple ideas for two new projects and I’d like to take the time needed to experiment. It is always Qt stuff. After years of server-side programming and Web development I guess I found my real interest: I just love to design the UI of native applications.

Marcel Hilzinger wrote a very positive review about Minitube. Thank you!

Minitube landed in the FreeBSD ports. Yeah!

In other news, among various blogs talking about Minitube, Tony Iliakostas wrote an outstanding (Mac-oriented) review of Minitube.

And now for the bad news, Google banned the Minitube project page from their search results, maybe because lots of people are linking to it. Way to go, Google!

Grab it now!