Planet SoC

Though it hasn’t been released officially yet, the third alpha on our trip to the big OnePointOh is soon going to be popping its head out the door.

Naturally, I’m going to go ahead and spill some of the information for those of you who don’t follow Banshee SVN religiously.

Some of the latest goodies aren’t going to be enabled in the build process, but they will be showing up as they approach stability:

• Podcast Extension: Mike Urbanski has rewritten a large chunk of the Podcast Extension from stable, and it plain rocks now. The functionality is much the same, but it should be a bit of an improvement over its predecessor.
• DAPs and MassStorage: Again, not enabled by default in Alpha 3, but Gabriel Burt, Alexander Hixon, and others (if I missed your name, apologies!) have done some really cool stuff with the underlying DAP handling and the first pass at MassStorage support that should make other DAP extensions a breeze to implement.

There is much more information on both of those than I could plausibly detail in a single posting, and there are certainly other things being worked on, but I think both will stir your appetites a bit.

What you will see in this release, is a boat-load of bug fixes for issues. It’s hard to believe, but performance on the ListView has skyrocketed even further. Scott Peterson has done some really nice work on implementing a new widget similar to Firefox’s “Forward” button that makes selecting a Shuffle method a breeze.

Banshee is just rocking more every day, and I’m sure that each release is going to continue to surprise you.

As always, some time shortly after 0.98.3’s release, Foresight Linux users will be the first to get to enjoy the new Banshee. They need only run this command:

$ sudo conary update banshee-1

Thanks go to Ken VanDine for helping me churn out these packages for Foresight.