Thanks to the work of Luis Garcia Rio (who has also been working on the OpenMoko port), we have just released Vagalume 0.6 for MS Windows.

In case you’ve never heard about it before, Vagalume is a Last.fm client designed for the Maemo platform. More info here.

Please note that this is an experimental release and doesn’t contain the complete set of features. It might also be more unstable than the GNU/Linux version. We’d like to hear about your problems with this version in the mailing lists.

Vagalume for Windows has been tested on XP and Vista. Here are screenshots of both versions (click to enlarge):

Installation

To use Vagalume in Windows, you need to install:

• The gtk2 runtime.
• GStreamer including all gst-plugins-* packages (base, good, bad and ugly).

Some important notes:

• When installing GStreamer, you will be asked whether to use the existing GLib installation or to install a new one. Choose no to use the existing installation.
• When installing Vagalume, you will be asked whether to install an icon theme. If in doubt, choose Yes.

Go here to download Vagalume for Windows. There are two different installers, the full and the minimal installer.

Both will ask you to install GTK+ and GStreamer (just choose no if you have already installed them). The difference is that the full version comes with both packages, while the minimal version will point you to their respective web pages.

To uninstall Vagalume, go to the Windows control panel.

As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Regarding Vagalume 0.7, we’re fixing a couple of bugs that we’ve recently found. It will be out soon.

Update: 23 Jan 2009

Vagalume for Windows can now be found here.

I’ve just got back from Istanbul and when I was about to release Vagalume 0.7 I saw that the Last.fm web page had been redesigned.

However I am missing a very important feature ! Where’s the ability to listen to free records in the Last.fm client ?

When I went to pages like this one there used to be a “Play in Last.fm software” which pointed to this lastfm:// address so I could play the album in my Last.fm client. But I can’t find that link anymore, it seems that the only choice now is to use the flash player.

Has this feature been removed ??

I’ve got a thousand things to do these days so this is going to be a very schematic post 🙂

• On Thursday me and some other igalians are flying to Guadec-ES (Madrid) where we’ll meet the Spanish-speaking Gnome team. We have some talks there: I’ll talk about the Maemo platform, a topic which will be further extended by Mario. Victor will show his YouTube viewer and Claudio will talk about how to extend Eye of Gnome,
• From there we’ll go to Guadec at Istanbul (not Constantinople). There we’ll meet the rest of the Igalia crew. Some of us will deliver talks there as well: I’ll talk a bit about the Vagalume Last.fm client, Iago will talk about the Gnome Buildbot and Juanjo about Gtranslator.
• The next version of Vagalume is going to be released very soon. Among other things, this will be the first version with support for the Moblin platform (the support is already available in SVN). Here you can see a screenshot of Vagalume on Moblin (click to enlarge):
  
• Regarding Vagalume, I was interviewed some days ago in a program called Extrarradio in the Galician radio (Radio Galega). Those interested in hearing the interview can get it from here, but note that it’s in completely in Galician Portuguese and that I talk very fast 🙂
• Wanna see Vagalume in action ? Someone has posted a nice video here.
• Our beloved Modest has finally seen its first official release !

See you in Istanbul !!

Vagalume 0.6 is here!

Among the new features introduced in Vagalume 0.6, the coolest one is probably the brand new tray icon for desktop users written by Mario, similar to the one already available for Maemo:

Other highlights from this version include:

• Update the status message of your IM client. Tell everyone what you’re listening to. Currently supported: Pidgin, Gajim, Gossip and Telepathy
• Gettext support: Vagalume has been translated into Portuguese, German, Finnish, Spanish, Galician and Italian
• New setting to disable the love/ban confirmation dialogs
• New D-BUS methods and a script to control Vagalume from the command line (currently only for Maemo, more news soon)
• Osso-backup support

I would like to thank all the contributors, in particular Tim Wegener for his work in the IM status support. And of course all the translators too!

Last but not least, I’d like to remind you again that, as I said in my previous post, I’ll be at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin with other Maemo hackers. Hope to see you there!

And now, enjoy!

P.S.: I’m moving Vagalume to Maemo extras, so one of these days it should be available there. Stay tuned!

Update: Vagalume 0.6 is now available in Maemo Extras

We’re about to release a new version of Vagalume and this one will be the first with gettext support. So if you want to help to see Vagalume in your language feel free to send me an e-mail, download the latest vagalume.pot file and send me the translation (you can also join the vagalume-devel mailing list).

Note that there are people already working on translations, so if you want to help please have a look at the translations that we already have and ask me before starting.

I’m also glad to announce that I’ll be talking about Vagalume in a couple of conferences:

• First, at LinuxTag 2008 in the Maemo track (Thursday 29 May) with other Maemo hackers and users.
• Second, at Guadec 2008 in Istanbul where I’ll give a lightning talk. It has been scheduled for 14:55 on 11 Jul 2008.

Hope to see you there! 🙂

Mario and me have just arrived from our trip to San Jose (California) for the Mobile Rules! awards ceremony. Unfortunately we had no luck this time and we didn’t get the award.

We had a great time nonetheless and I’d like to congratulate Nokia for having organized the event and all the other participants (namely the winners, specially the people from MyStrands who beat our Vagalume in the Multimedia category). The trip was great, we enjoyed it a lot and we met some cool people.

A thing I’m more sure about now is that Vagalume still needs lots of improvements. I’ll continue working on it very soon (but it’ll take me some days because I’m starting teaching this weekend in our Master of Free Software). So it is time to get back to work!

Oh, no, we didn’t get the award!

Greetings from California!

The Mobile Rules award ceremony will begin in a few hours. Me and Mario from the Vagalume team are already here in San Jose ready to talk about our program and tell everyone how cool Maemo and Gnome are for developing software for mobile devices.

Let’s cross our fingers and see what happens!

OMG ! Last Friday I published the new version of Vagalume and the same day the list of finalists of the Mobile Rules! competition was announced. Guess who is one of them …

Award ceremony in San Jose (California) next month.

Thanks Óscar for your words of support!