vendredi décembre 29, 2006

Media life - SimpleCenter.org

I've been changing a lot of my "digital life experience" around me lately - new phone, new service provider (including DSL TV), new home computer. I have yet to look into all the possibilities of these devices. I'm certainly hoping I can drop my aging Palm information to my phone and have a better communication of all digital media across these devices including my iPod mini (I have yet to buy anything from the iTunes music store).

Vincent recently pinged me about SimpleCenter (which BTW is going open source  under the GPL), so I took a quick look at it and here's the result of me spending a little time playing around with a dev build :

Good:
- java/Swing-based (although defaulting to Java 6 would help)
- picks-up existing content (iTunes, My Pictures, ....)
- nice ribbon (no explicit menu)
- desktop integration (using JDIC with Java 5)
- supposedly nice sharing and remote access capabilities, but I had no time to really that part (that's really the killer feature if done right IMO). I don't know how DRM is addressed (the description only says "Support for playback of Windows Media DRM protected audio and video"). Sharing with friends and family with the my.SimpleCenter.com portal seems to be the pay-for version (subscription-based I guess).
- overall a polished end-user look and feel and a very nice Theater mode

Not so good:
- unfriendly subscribe to podcast requiring copy/pasting a URL (which one?)
- a few quirks here and there when using the non-English locale

Out of curiosity, some of the libraries used: JAXB (1.x), JDOM, Jetty, OSGi Felix, swingx, XFire, ...
If you're even more curious, FishEye lets you browse the entire source tree.

SimpleCenter 4.1 is scheduled for... well, now.
I'm still curious as to whether this can bring real value to Mac user who already have an pretty integrated fluid experience. Certainly Linux and Solaris users now have something great to play with.

( déc. 29 2006, 09:18:55 AM CET ) Permalink