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CenterStage - open source media center for Mac

C

chuckiej

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 16, 2003
133
0
Check out this demo of the UI that they are going to implement when they get to beta:
http://centerstageproject.com/the-future.php

This is the way interfaces should be!

screenshot-main-full.jpg


screenshot-movies-full.jpg


I'm pumped about the Fan Art idea, I can design a special "page" with a photo of the artist much like the special pages for popular artists in iTunes. Except it could be for any artist or movie, like my friends in Six Days from Sunday.

screenshot-fan-full.jpg


If you know some Mac developers, please let them know about this. The CenterStage crew needs a little more help to get to beta.
 
Beautiful.

What about finding people off of something like rent-a-coder, and have people donate via paypal to fund it?

If we can compete or compliment tvease.net/mythtv I would be jazzed!
 
Chucklej;

I spent the last hour reading the PDF, watching the video and sifting thru the CS forums. It looks as if that video was all a theoretical flash mockup, and not actually anything that is working at this time. Also, (and I could be wrong) there are only 2 or 3 developers that are working on this and they do in their rare spare time.

I assume that you could use the flash video and the PDF as a development guide and actually hire some developers overseas or even here locally in the states to actually finish this project in 8-12 weeks for less than 2k - especially if you can reuse preexisting code or API's such as VLC, and some preexisting emulator code/knowledge such as SNES or whatever...

Obviously, Im just a PHP developer an designer, and I dont know what platform it is written in Java? C?, but if I can help in any way let me know. I'll even go as far as to say that I will donate 250 bucks to the cause if you guys are serious and want to get this done.

- Doc
 
Doc, thanks for spending all that time looking around! That is the hope! I'm just a fan of the app who wants it to go forward.

You are essentially correct but let me try to clear it up a little. What you see in the demo is the planned UI that has not been implemented yet. "Mucx" is a great UI designer and he is always ahead of the devs in that respect. Many of the pieces are already in place however for the dream to come to reality. One of the major ones was making CS modular - the ability to make plug-ins. For instance, I believe a dev was working on a RadioShark module because they had one and it interested them. (May have been put on hold to work on the core program)

EyeTV integration already works, for example, but probably needs some cleaning up (I don't have one so I do not know)

So what is done? WellThe underlying code that allows different modules to be made, the code that allows playing of many types of media as well as from different sources. Bringing it all to Beta stage feature set and capability is what is not done.

I don't know anything about how money works in a project like this, I think "Mr Zippy" has been paying the bandwith bill for the site himself for 2 years. Other than that, I dunno.

I think the take home message is a couple more developers would be able to help us get to beta.
 
right. I agree that developers are the issue.

What I was suggesting is that we scrape up 2k or so and hire some C or Java developers on rent-a-coder. As much as the website and webhosting is valuable, I would assume that the main need is additional developers (as you said) and not to diminish the contribution of the developers so far, but I don' think that you can continue to develop long term without some finincial investment to get you over thois hump and into the beta stage or initial 1.0 launch.
 
Hi there,

Just thought I would get in on this to add to some of the things being discussed here by you guys and ChuckieJ

The application or CenterStage is written in Cocoa. In fact it gthers around 33 Xcode targets and something in the region of 20,000++ lines of Objective-C code. So any potential developers would need some understanding in this area.

In terms of webhosting, it is in a sense free and provided for us by Taktik who helped startup the project and laid down the initial code base. In fact Fabien Lydoire who is the main developer there, got his job with Taktik after working on CenterStage as a bit of fun. He continues to work on it to this day.

We are close to releasing a new Alpha version. It will still feature the 'placeholder UI' that allows us to operate quickly and concentrate on functionality and code work rather than the distractions of trying to get the UI perfect at this stage. I would test out the Latest nightly build on our site to see the latest work (some bugs present at the moment unfortunately...but not for long!).

The Demo itself is a proof of concept and because the development work now has a stable base, with all sections of the application or media center are there (except Games), and what is there is fully working it was time to put up a visual goal or marker and detail visually what we are striving for. This was put online as is the nature of OpenSource for the pulic to look at and digest. It seems those hours figuring out what a Media Centershould look like have been worth it on my part! Although the 'New UI' as we call it has been worked on and put together in part via Interface Builder already.

In terms of VLC, we plan to integrate and use the work they have done (permission granted already I believe) and use it as the framework. In fact the 'Google Summer Of Code' programme (Google offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects under a mentoring scheme). They have accepted the VLC OS X framework project. What this means is that a guy named Pierre is currently writing or creating a VLC media player framework that can be used by both VLC.app and VLCplugin.bundle to integrate better with other Mac applications...like CenterStage. This work concludes in August so we will begin adopting that playback framework then. Again it will be a huge jump in how fast the CenterStage porject moves as we concentrate on teh application and feel of it rather than getting things to simply 'Play' in all the different ways.

So yes, development help is the biggest issue. In fact just one serious & experienced Cocoa dev would push the project ahead at an amazing rate. We are discussing behind the scenes about (monetary or not) the ways to entice or get development help.

David McLeod (Mucx)
CenterStage
 
Thanks for the insight David!

The conceptulization is awesome. Looks like an amazing product once its done. Just shout if I can help at all.
 
CenterStage 0.6.2 Was released last night! It is the stable platform we need now to push on for the Beta (which means the new UI comes with it).

News post about it is here as well as a download link: Click Me!! (Please Digg it here!)

Any help on the development front is needed. Or just help us along in bug testing or generally take part in our forum.

Cheers,
David
 
Mucx said:
CenterStage 0.6.2 Was released last night! It is the stable platform we need now to push on for the Beta (which means the new UI comes with it).

News post about it is here as well as a download link: Click Me!! (Please Digg it here!)

Any help on the development front is needed. Or just help us along in bug testing or generally take part in our forum.

Cheers,
David
Click to expand...

Looks cool. again, your best bet of finding developers is to pay them, and there are 83 cocoa developers on rentacoder, including dozens here in the states and england. If you want to start a paypal donation fund and ask people to cough up some money I'll even go so far as to match as much as $250 if your serious about getting it done.
 
D0ct0rteeth said:
Looks cool. again, your best bet of finding developers is to pay them, and there are 83 cocoa developers on rentacoder, including dozens here in the states and england. If you want to start a paypal donation fund and ask people to cough up some money I'll even go so far as to match as much as $250 if your serious about getting it done.
Click to expand...

Should be announcing some funding options soon...
 
Hmmm I saw this on mp3car.com when it finally got a maccar section.

and its been a long while since then, CenterStage hasnt wowed me since.

this doesnt help.

its been in development for so long, and nothing tangible has come out of it.

When FrontRow came out, it took CenterStage's thunder. Eventhough its far more capable.

Hurry up already!

:D
 
Sdashiki said:
Hmmm I saw this on mp3car.com when it finally got a maccar section.

and its been a long while since then, CenterStage hasnt wowed me since.

this doesnt help.

its been in development for so long, and nothing tangible has come out of it.

When FrontRow came out, it took CenterStage's thunder. Eventhough its far more capable.

Hurry up already!

:D
Click to expand...


I do agree about the timescale. I wanted things to move a lot faster myself but we could only go as fast as development help allowed us to.

Things are set to change there though. It is hoped that we can announce some things after WWDC but in any case. We have had new developer requests flying in the last few days.

There is a solid complete framework now....so I think releases will be coming out much faster. I know a new release again is already close that will include Music Video and podcasts playback in the Music section.
 
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