Wednesday, October 8, 2008

A Talkative Banshee

I gave a talk about Banshee to the Chicago LUG a couple weeks ago. It went great – a good crowd, lots of questions and interest – and was a pleasure to communicate what Banshee is and how we're rocking. I started my presentation by running through the major features (the vertical list on the left), verbally going into detail about niceties, fun things, and usability features as I went. Banshee displaying and downloading podcasts An iPod loaded in Banshee, showing the sync configuration screen I then talked about project organization, history, measurements of our progress and growth, and how to learn more and get involved. A slide describing some basic Details about Banshee as a project And finally I spent some time alternating taking questions and demoing – an interactive process that generated more questions and demo opportunities. The time I spent putting together my slide deck was a good chance for introspection about the project and thinking about how to effectively convey my excitement to a diverse group of people. I'm quite happy with the resulting content and design, but look forward to tweaking it for new talks to different audiences, like a talk to a class at IIT I'll give next week.

9 comments:

  1. Nice presentation, even found out a few features I didn't know were present in Banshee.

    ReplyDelete
  2. That's quite a nice presentation theme. Is it OpenOffice.org Impress or latex-beamer or something else?

    ReplyDelete
  3. @anon: Thanks, glad to hear it

    @michael: Thanks, I made it using Impress. The trick to doing reflections is to just copy your image, flip it, make it translucent, and move it below the original. You might have to crop the copy to be able to move it far enough down. Takes ~ 20 seconds per image, including cropping - all done in Impress.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Very nice presentation! It mentions that Banshee is licensed under MIT/X11. Most if not all GNOME applications are licensed under the GPL. Why did you choose MIT/X11?

    ReplyDelete
  5. @robin: Thanks! I didn't choose the license, Aaron the project founder did. I believe the decision was originally made to allow the most flexibility with respect to codecs. For example, Rhythmbox was recently relicensed, adding an exception for non-GPL compatible gstreamer plugins/codecs.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Thanks for the explanation, Gabriel! (By the way, that "you" was meant in the plural sense :)) So... When does 1.4 come out?

    ReplyDelete
  7. You guys have done an amazing job with Banshee over the years, and for that, I just wanted to say, thank you! :)

    ReplyDelete
  8. Awesome!
    Are there any news about a windows port? I'd really like to be able to use my favorite media player when I'm constraied to win32 too. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  9. So, cool.

    Have you thought about Audio-Books? that would really rock :)

    ReplyDelete