Wishlist and Roadmap
These are some popular wishes and plans along with their current status. Please feel free to discuss them on Internet Tablet Talk.
| Wish | Analysis | Difficulty | Target Release | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Browse music by genre |
This requires taking the genre tag into the index structure of the
media_storage plugin. We can raise the MAGIC of the index to force
rebuilding the index from scratch.
Thus it's easy to make the transition anytime without running into
compatibility problems. A new storage device to appear in the music view must be added to the media_storage plugin. Then it will automagically appear in the music view. |
easy | 0.96.4 | done |
| Volume control widget |
A on-screen control for setting the sound volume. This should go into the title bar at the right-hand side. It could be an always visible icon indicating the current volume level (in the image viewer we could have an icon indicating the zoom level instead). When the user clicks the icon, a slider control appears. The title bar is handled by the AppWindow component in the core plugin. |
moderate | 0.96.x | planned |
| Sleep timer |
The user should be able to set a timer after which MediaBox automatically
stops playing media and allowing the device to enter powersave-mode
(probably by bringing up the menu panel). This should be handled by the Clock plugin. The plugin emits the MEDIA_ACT_STOP message to halt media playback. |
moderate | 0.96.x | planned |
| Controlling the player with the headset button |
The Nokia tablets come with a headset with a single button. Button clicks
can be detected by the software, so it's possible to implement
click-gestures for e.g. click, double-click, and triple-click. The media player should be controlable with these gestures. The gestures are already detected by the system plugin and emitted as HWKEY_EV_HEADSET, HWKEY_EV_HEADSET_DOUBLE, and HWKEY_EV_HEADSET_TRIPLE. The mapping of the gestures to commands is done via the input schema, so no separate plugin is necessary. |
easy | 0.96.4 | done |
| UPnP control-point |
MediaBox should be able to remote-control other UPnP media renderers.
This involves extending/debugging the GENA event handling in the
upnp package and reading into the specification of implementing
a control-point. Furthermore, we need some good idea how to best integrate this into the user interface. |
advanced | 0.97 | planned |
| Kiosk mode |
There should be a way to lock parts of the UI and the hardware keys for
a kiosk-mode. Also, scrolling through lists should be handled differently
to help people with motoric disabilities. The locking configuration module could be provided as a separate plugin. The hardware keys could be locked by an input schema. The menu panel is a plugin now, and if it's blacklisted, you'll be locked into the current viewer. |
advanced | 0.96.x | slowly getting there... |
| GPodder integration |
GPodder is a podcast aggregator. A plugin should provide a storage device
to browse the downloaded podcasts. This involves reading the gpodder database and creating a storage device for MediaBox. |
easy | 0.96.x | planned |
| Flickr plugin |
A plugin to browse photos on Flickr. This should be implemented as a
separate plugin. Technically this is a storage device. |
moderate | 0.96.x | any volunteers? |
| Downloading cover art / artist art |
MediaBox should provide a way to download cover art. This is somewhat a
legality problem because cover art is not free. We also need some good idea how to integrate this into the user interface. |
moderate | ? | planned |
| Use cover art from Canola2 and Kagu. |
MediaBox should use cover art from Canola2 where available. Canola's cover art is indexed by ID tags while MediaBox's cover art is indexing by filesystem path. Indexing by path is quicker and the recommended way for storing thumbnails. For accessing Canola's cover art, MediaBox needs to parse the ID tags of the files. Since the tags are now cached and cover art is only created on demand, this is not so much a problem anymore. The thief module in the mediascanner plugin grabs cover art from other applications (currently UKMP and the OSSO file manager). This needs to be extended for Canola2 and maybe Kagu as well. |
supposed to be easy | 0.96.x | planned |