Comments on: SyncTV, built on GTK+

By: Mikael Hallendal

Mikael Hallendal — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:11:05 +0000

Hi Sander,

We are not at Imendio at least, I can’t speak for SyncTV. It sounds good if the PS3 video service embrace open standards, I guess we’ll see in the future exactly what that means.

Thanks for sharing.

By: Sander

Sander — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:50:35 +0000

Hm.. Just saw an article about Sony’s upcoming PS3 video service. It’s said to ‘embrace open standards’. Is Imendio/SyncTV involved in this? Could be a great opportunity..

By: Christian Schaller » Blog Archive » Official announcement of Songbird using GStreamer on all platforms

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 14:31:13 +0000

[...] Mikael Hallendal reported last week about SyncTV using GStreamer across Linux, MacOSX and Windows for their multimedia [...]

By: Mikael Hallendal

Mikael Hallendal — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 08:22:52 +0000

@Leo, while i definitely agree with you for the applications that are part of your daily workflow (such as Firefox and for example a Java IDE) I think it is less of a problem for applications that are not part of that workflow (such as a media player).

In fact you could probably argue that having a different look to such applications is not necessarily bad, as long as it is well integrated in the platform otherwise.

Regarding the global menu bar not working before recently is that the GTK+ port to Mac OS X did not exist until recently.

By: Omx

Omx — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 03:00:59 +0000

I agree with you Leo, the app’s should look like the OS. But the question are still open, how I do to obtain a look like this?

By: Leo

Leo — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 01:32:19 +0000

Neat. Although making an application look slick really doesn’t have much to do with the toolkit. Also making an application look identical across platforms is much much easier than making it integrate properly with each platform. Just about everyone else has realized that the same look across platforms is not actually a good thing. Firefox tries to integrate more and more, same with Java, etc. That’s not exactly something that GTK is very good at, as evidenced by the fact that just now stuff like the global menu bar is starting to work.

The app itself seems interesting though. I wonder how much it will cost.

By: Mikael Hallendal

Mikael Hallendal — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 00:35:43 +0000

@Colin, as you figured out it’s mostly a GTK+ theme.

@Ben, yes, it’s proprietary software.

By: Colin Walters

Colin Walters — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 14:26:12 +0000

Pretty cool, Mikael! Can you briefly describe the architecture? At least the main parts of the app don’t quite look like normal GTK+; is that a theme, or is it done using WebKit?

Ah, looking at the screenshots, it looks like most of it is a GTK+ theme.

By: Sander

Sander — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:30:33 +0000

Well Ben, I guess that is partly right, however, SyncTV makes use of open standards only. I think that’s good.

By: Ben

Ben — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 13:16:23 +0000

Hey folks. This looks like proprietary software. If you value freedom in your software, don’t expect it from SyncTV.