Aaron Bockover, the lead developer behind the open source Banshee project, has published an outline of the Banshee community's plans for the next major version of the program. Banshee is evolving beyond the scope of its original function as an audio player for the Linux desktop and is transforming into a comprehensive multimedia application platform.

The Banshee 1.0 release last year introduced support for video playback. Subsequent point versions have added other nice features, including improved compatibility with media devices such as the T-Mobile G1. A play queue and a new context pane which displays song information at sites like Wikipedia and Last.fm are under active development and could arrive in upcoming point updates.

The developers aim to take Banshee to a new level with version 2.0 by introducing support for photo management. According to Bockover's blog entry, the core functionality of the F-Spot photo manager will be integrated into Banshee's infrastructure. Photo management, viewing, and tagging features will be exposed through the Banshee user interface as an optional extension. This will enable Banshee to deliver unified image, video, and audio management and viewing capabilities with a cohesive user experience.

Although Banshee will take over the role currently held today by F-Spot for many users, F-Spot itself will continue to exist as an independent application as the developers reposition it to serve different needs. According to Bockover's blog entry, F-Spot's own user interface will be retooled so that it can evolve into a professional photo management tool like Adobe Lightroom.

Another exciting advancement for Banshee is a new custom user interface shell called Cubano that is designed specifically for netbook environments. Although Cubano is still at a relatively early stage of development and will likely change in many significant ways as it matures, the screenshots of the latest prototype are impressive. Its subtle gradients and generous spacing exhibit a degree of simple elegance that is seldom seen in GNOME applications. It largely appears to eschew menus, a characteristic that will make it feel consistent when it is used alongside Intel's custom Moblin shell on netbooks.

The Banshee developers, and Bockover in particular, are user interface perfectionists. The current version of Banshee uses totally custom list view widgets that were meticulously crafted to provide richer functionality and aesthetic sophistication while still conforming with the basic look and feel of the user's underlying GTK+ theme. This same attention to detail and level of care is clearly going into Cubano. It includes a nifty cover art grid view and several other highly visual user interface elements.

"Cubano is more about experiencing your music than managing it. I am aiming to introduce visual metadata (photos, colors) and simple whitespace as UI elements to separate and emphasize content instead of the hard lines from traditional toolkit widgets," Bockover wrote. "However, even with a minimal interface you don't lose any of the power to which you may be accustomed from the traditional Banshee interface."

The emergence of Cubano is part of a broader trend in the Linux community to build alternate user interfaces specifically for appliance-like, small form-factor Internet devices that are intended for an audience of regular consumers. We have previously looked at several projects in that general category, such as Intel's Moblin netbook shell and Canonical's Ubuntu Netbook Remix environment. Another example is Anjal, a custom e-mail user interface that could serve as an alternative to the full Evolution client on netbooks. (Keep an eye out for our upcoming coverage of the KDE community's netbook interface efforts).

These netbook-oriented custom user interface projects are intriguing because they force Linux developers to place a stronger emphasis on usability and think about different kinds of user interface paradigms. Cubano appears to be shaping up nicely and is an improvement in some important ways over the media library interface prototype that is included in Moblin.

It's important to note that Cubano is not intended to replace the standard Banshee user interface on the desktop by default. Much like Muinshee, a port of the Muine audio player UI to Banshee, the new Cubano interface will be available to desktop users as an option. In the future, some of the new user interface elements that were created for Cubano will be shared between Cubano and the standard desktop UI. These include an improved track info display and a "Now Playing" interface that takes advantage of the Clutter scenegraph library.

Rise of the application platform

The availability of multiple Banshee user interfaces and the introduction of new photo management infrastructure in the 2.0 release reflect the program's transition into a media application platform. Plugins and third-party software, which can integrate with Banshee through Mono Addins and D-Bus, can deliver custom multimedia user experiences that leverage Banshee's underlying capabilities. This could be used in a lot of really useful and interesting ways in the future.

In a blog entry from 2007, which is when this vision of a platform-like Banshee first began to take shape, Bockover pointed out that media center programs like Elisa (now called Moovida) could potentially use Banshee's library system as an underlying media store. Another project from 2007 that is emblematic of Banshee's potential as a media application platform is the experimental Web-based user interface that developer Joe Shaw made during Novell's first hack week.

Banshee's underlying infrastructure and extensibility mechanisms are more mature now than they were when these ideas first emerged. Bockover points out that Banshee's current desktop user interface accounts for only about 800 lines of the program's total 105,000 lines of C# code. This demonstrates the extent to which Banshee's presentation layer is separated from its underlying functionality. All of the program's power is sitting underneath the surface waiting to be used and repurposed in innovative ways by third-party developers.

Cross-platform support is another area where Banshee is maturing. Last year, we looked at the Mac OS X version and its implications. Availability on other platforms can help popular Linux programs expand their base of contributors, thus leading to additional improvements that help the program's users across all platforms. Bockover says that Banshee will soon be available on Windows in addition to Linux and Mac OS X, an important milestone for the project.

There are clearly bright things ahead on the horizon for Banshee. The program has a lot of value to offer today on the desktop and will become even more significant to the GNOME ecosystem as it gains integrated photo management capabilities. Novell already ships it by default in its own OpenSUSE Linux distribution, but there are signs that Ubuntu could adopt it by default in the future, too. For more details about the future of Banshee, check out Bockover's blog and his presentation slides (PDF) from the Gran Canaria desktop summit.