Up North

Really excited to be able to share some information about a project that we have been working on lately!

Pioneer recently released their new service SyncTV in a private beta. What makes it very interesting is that it’s built using GTK+ and GStreamer. SyncTV is an application and service to watch movies and TV-series over the internet.

SyncTV provide this service on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, all through the cross platform capabilities of GTK+. SyncTV also shows that you can make really slick applications with GTK+ that look identical no matter which platform you run it on.

At Imendio we have worked on the project since spring 2007, mainly by improving the GTK+ Mac OS X port, but also packaging the application into an easily installable application bundle.

The project also included making Webkit/GTK+ run smoothly on Mac OS X which involved replacing the font backend to make it use Pango. Sven blogged briefly about this last year.

The observant follower of All Things Imendio (TM) would also realize that part of this project was to create hooks for GTK+ to integrate with the Mac OS X menubar which Mitch blogged about.

For a more in-depth review, see Download Squad.

Noticed that Miguel posted a screenshot from the film Mitch posted earlier so I figured I make one in a better resolution where you get a better view.

Click for original size

Have been sick the last few days but today I felt good enough to get some hacking done. I started hacking on GtkStatusIcon support in the Mac OS X port and is pretty happy with the result of todays hacking. 

Showing Gossip with status icon in the Mac OS X menu bar It’s fairly complete, only need to add support to hide the status icon and clean up the code a bit. However, the Mac OS X NSStatusItem API doesn’t support everything we support in GtkStatusIcon so there will be some restrictions on what you can do but I think that is true for the Windows port as well.From what I can see you can either get it to signal that the user left-clicked on the icon or that he double clicked. Not both at the same time. More over would it be nice to be able to set an NSMenu instead of showing a Gtk menu, it would make it integrate better.Most of it was pretty straight forward but I had to fix an assumption in the event system causing a crash since Gdk assumed that all windows where created by Gdk.