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• Winamp and the March of GUI

  1er juillet 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General, ars technica, gui, user interface, winamp

  Ars Technica recently published a 15-year retrospective on the venerable Winamp multimedia player, prompting bouts of nostalgia and revelations of "Huh ? That program is still around ?" from many readers. I was among them.

  
  
  

  I remember first using Winamp in 1997. I remember finding a few of these new files called MP3s online and being able to play the first 20 seconds using the official Fraunhofer Windows player— full playback required the fully licensed version. Then I searched for another player and came up with Winamp. The first version I ever used was v1.05 in the summer of 1997. I remember checking the website often for updates and trying out every single one. I can’t imagine doing that nowadays— programs need to auto-update themselves (which Winamp probably does now ; I can’t recall the last time I used the program).

  Video Underdog
  The last time Winamp came up on my radar was early in 2003 when a new version came with support for a custom, proprietary multimedia audio/video format called Nullsoft Video (NSV). I remember the timeframe because the date is indicated in the earliest revision of my NSV spec document (back when I was maintaining such docs in a series of plaintext files). This was cobbled together from details I and others in the open source multimedia community sorted out from sample files. It was missing quite a few details, though.

  Then, Winamp founder Justin Frankel — introduced through a colleague on the xine team — emailed me his official NSV format and told me I was free to incorporate details into my document just as long as it wasn’t obvious that I had the official spec. This put me in an obnoxious position of trying to incorporate details which would have been very difficult to reverse engineer without the official doc. I think I coped with the situation by never really getting around to updating my doc in any meaningful way. Then, one day, the official spec was released to the world anyway, and it is now mirrored here at multimedia.cx.

  I don’t think the format ever really caught on in any meaningful way, so not a big deal. (Anytime I say that about a format, I always learn it saw huge adoption is some small but vocal community.)

  What’s Wrong With This Picture ?
  What I really wanted to discuss in this post was the matter of graphical user interfaces and how they have changed in the last 15 years.
  
  I still remember when I first downloaded Winamp v1.05 and tried it on my Windows machine at the time. Indignantly, the first thought I had was, "What makes this program think it’s so special that it’s allowed to violate the user interface conventions put forth by the rest of the desktop ?" All of the Windows programs followed a standard set of user interface patterns and had a consistent look and feel... and then Winamp came along and felt it could violate all those conventions.

  I guess I let the program get away with it because it was either that or only play 20-second clips from the unregistered Fraunhofer player. Though incredibly sterile by comparison, the Fraunhofer player, it should be noted, followed Windows UI guidelines to the letter.

  As the summer of 1997 progressed and more Winamp versions were released, eventually one came out (I think it was v1.6 or so) that supported skins. I was excited because there was a skin that made the program look like a proper Windows program— at least if you used the default Windows color scheme, and had all of your fonts a certain type and size.

  Skins were implemented by packaging together a set of BMP images to overlay on various UI elements. I immediately saw a number of shortcomings with this skinning approach. A big one was UI lock-in. Ironically, if you skin an app and wish to maintain backwards compatibility with the thousands of skins selflessly authored by your vibrant community (seriously, I couldn’t believe how prolific these things were), then you were effectively locked into the primary UI. Forget about adding a new button anywhere.

  Another big problem was resolution-independence. Basing your UI on static bitmaps doesn’t scale well with various resolutions. Winamp had its normal mode and it also had double-sized mode.

  Skins proliferated among many types of programs in the late 1990s. I always treasured this Suck.com (remember them ? that’s a whole other nostalgia trip) essay from April, 2000 entitled Skin Cancer. Still, Winamp was basically the standard, and the best, and I put away my righteous nerd rage and even dug through the vast troves of skins. I remember settling on Swankamp for a good part of 1998, probably due to the neo-swing revival at the time.

  
  
  

  Then again, if Winamp irked me, imagine my reaction when I was first exposed to the Sonique Music Player in 1998 :

  
  
  

  The New UI Order
  Upon reflection, I realize now that I had a really myopic view of what a computer GUI should be. I thought the GUIs were necessarily supposed to follow the WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) paradigm and couldn’t conceive of anything different. For a long time, I couldn’t envision a useful GUI on a small device (like a phone) because WIMP didn’t fit well on such a small interface (even though I saw various ill-fated attempts to make it work). This thinking seriously crippled me when I was trying to craft a GUI for a custom console media player I was developing as a hobby many years ago.

  I’m looking around at what I have open on my Windows 7 desktop right now. Google Chrome browser, Apple iTunes, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and VMware Player are 4 programs which all seem to have their own skins. Maybe Winamp doesn’t look so out of place these days.

• A *hot* Piwik Community Meetup 2015 !

  10 août 2015 — Community

  Last weekend I arrived in Germany to attend the Piwik Community Meetup 2015 and now I am in Poland. I joined Piwik PRO back in May as enterprise support project coordinator in North America. I am now writing this from the Piwik PRO main office in Wrocław, where I’ll be working from for the next two weeks.

  The meetup was HOT in every sense ! Berlin temperatures reached 35 degrees (celsius), as I finally meet in person several long-time, dedicated Piwik community contributors.

  

  Meetup preparation in Berlin, photo by M. Zawadziński, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0

  Pictures from the meetup preparation sessions
  

  In the first leg of my trip I was in Berlin to meet Piwik community members and Piwik PRO staff to prepare for the 2015 annual Piwik community meetup. These are my notes taken during the meeting at the request of one of my colleagues. I also relayed live on Framasphère, Twitter and IRC.

  

  Community discussion at the meetup, photo by D.Czajka, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0

  More pictures from the Piwik meetup
  

  This was harder than I expected, as I took notes with my laptop, pictures with my phone, wrote live to social media (using the Android Diaspora Native Web App), and used my laptop to relay on IRC. Going forward this requires better preparation, I was glad I had a few links and pictures ready before hand but it really requires intense focus to achieve this. I am glad presenters were patient when I requested repeating some of the ideas they shared. I am also a bit disappointed not much happened in IRC.

  Two day preparation sessions

  The discussions and session we had during the two days prior to the meetup are available here.

  We gathered in rented apartments in Berlin, this reminded me very much of similar community gatherings and perhaps of BarCamp and, at a much smaller scale, UDS sessions.

  

  Piwik Pizza !, photo by F. Rodríguez, licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0

  A list of ideas of topics was initially submitted, we then proceeded to have scheduled sessions for open discussion. Several people shared their concern there was no possible remote participation which led to making public the Trello boards used/linked here.

  Note : The Trello links below still have action items and notes that are pending bug report / feature requests filing which should happen over the coming weeks. Most importantly, many action items will need identifying leads for different community team including Translations and Documentation, and better coordination of coming community engagement.

  Monday sessions consisted of the following subjects :

  • What are Piwik values & how to communicate them ? (see below for details)
  • How to encourage and recognize new external contributors ?
  • How could we double the Piwik userbase ?
  • How Community can organise help resources

  On Tuesday we met again to discuss the following subjects :

  • Piwik Long Term support (LTS)
  • How do Piwik.org (project) and Piwik PRO (company) sit together / are organized ? – An important part of this session was about having better communication channels and improving the new team page (bug #8520 and bug #8519, respectively)
  • Improving usability of Piwik e.g. for new users – this last session was not held has we ran out of time and prepared to go to the meetup venue.

  Some more details about individual preparation sessions

  What are Piwik values & how to communicate them ?

  The main subjects in this session were important changes proposed in the project mission and values. This was edited directly on on the wiki page on GitHub, some of the changes can be seen by comparing revisions.

  Piwik mission statement (bug #7376)

  “To create the leading Free and open source analytics platform, and to support global organisations and communities to keep full control over their data.”

  Our values

  • Openness
  • Freedom
  • Transparency
  • Data ownership
  • Privacy
  • Kaizen (改善) : continuous improvement

  This was also presented by Matthieu Aubry at the meetup and is published in the Roadmap page. Bringing more visibility and perhaps having a top page for Mission and Values was also brought up.

  Meetup agenda and notes

  The official agenda is available here.

  Many Piwik PRO employees stayed in Berlin for the meetup, and we had good participation although less than last year in Munich as my colleagues told me. Some were consultants, others staff from public organizations, universities, etc. In retrospect considering the very hot weather and summer holidays the attendance was good. I was very happy to arrive at the beautiful Kulturbrauerei and enter the air-conditioned Soda Club. T-Shirts were waiting for all attendees and free drinks (non-alcohol !) were welcome

• vp9 : fix loopfilter test code to address Hendrik’s comments.

  20 septembre 2015, par Ronald S. Bultje

  vp9 : fix loopfilter test code to address Hendrik’s comments.
  (I forgot to actually merge them into the patch I just pushed.)
  

  • [DH] tests/checkasm/vp9dsp.c