ROSA Media Player 1.0 Beta

Hello everyone!

Today ROSA team is glad to announce the our new product ROSA Media Player 1.0 Beta. What is the ROSA Media Player? 

ROSA Media Player (ROMP) is a new media player for the ROSA/Mandriva. Technically it is based on MPLayer and SMPlayer code, but considerably differs from the SMPlayer (yes, ROMP is fork of the SMPlayer). What for? The main reasons that made us to fork SMPlayer are:

• possibility to allow our users to just see a video without taking the trouble with many features (yes, we don’t want to refuse the our “pure choice” concept);
• impossibility to put our code to upstream project because of different ideology;
• modern look and best usability; 

Just see the screenshots: 

                          Pic.1: ROSA Media Player is playing video

                            Pic.2: ROSA Media Player cutting video

          Pic.3: ROSA Media Player Plugin allows to show streaming video

As you can see, we made not only the player itself, we also made the ROSA Media Player Plugin (ROMPP) - plugin for the Firefox/Chromium web-browser to show the streaming video. The ROMPP is created from scratch. 

Some words about stability. Because ROMP is based on the SMPlayer it has a good stability and word “beta” in the title speaks more exactly about new features and usability that we want to do before we will release the ROMP 1.0 final. So, you can use it without a fear that it will be unstable.  

If we speak about our further plans, I can mark out several important (in my opinion) features:

• possibility to record video from the screen (like recordMyDesktop);
• possibility to strip the video by size;
• possibility to connect, download and play a video from some video services like Youtube (as in Miro);
• New interface (maybe on the QT Quick);

And this is not all! Today we want to ask you, our users: what features do you want to see in the video player? How do you see your best video player? Please, feel free to send me emails or comment on this blog post with any your idea. We don’t promise that we’ll implement all of your ideas, even right now, but you can be sure - we will consider any of your ideas!

P.S. The packages (rosa-media-player and rosa-media-player-plugin) already in the Mandriva Cooker and Mandriva/ROSA 2011 ‘main/backports’ repositories. 

UPD: The source code for the ROMP is here and for the ROMPP here. 

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28.11.11, 0 comments

Some interesting statistic about user experience with the applicationsicons on the desktop

In the my previous post I asked about launching applications from the desktop by clicking on the icon on the desktop. Also I run 2 public opinion polls on the Russian sites Linux.Org.ru (the most popular site about GNU/Linux in Russia) and unixforum.org (the most popular forum about GNU/Linux in Russia).

It is a time to gather stones. I made a diagram, that explains the results (the results on 06.11.2011):

I had the 1 goal: to have a clear view about opinions of users about the current ‘desktop’ paradigm. But questions in the my pool is organized by many components, because it was very important to clarify by which reasons users use (or not) icons on the desktop for running applications. Of course, this pool can’t give all necessary information, I will do investigations and later, but it can give some food for thought. And, how you can see, the results are very interesting. If we combine all questions by the one component (yes/no) we will have the next results:

81% vs 19%. Thus, only one in five uses icon on the desktop for launching applications for now. If we will count the questions where users can renounce from icons on the desktop (or already did it), the results will be next:

93% vs 7%. Fantastic! How you can see, the most of users do not use icons on the desktop already now and only the very small number of users do not want renounce this feature under no circumstances. It is a normal situation. Always will be conservative people, who do not want to get into the new way to use their computers. But really it is signifies that the ‘desktop’ paradigm has become obsolete. Of course, I speak about distros for the desktops/laptops (actually tablet pc use the peculiar ‘desktop’ paradigm).

If we speak about applicability the results of this pools on a practice, they will be taken into account in Mandriva/ROSA Desktop distros development. Actually, we fully understood problems of the current ‘desktop’ paradigm - that is why we started to develop SimpleWelcome. And no, we will not add feature ‘create shortcut on the desktop’ to the SimpleWelcome.

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6.11.11, 0 comments