After
reading
about the new
Nautilus-Python
bindings, I decided I had to try my hand. And what better feature to
enable than everyone’s favorite, Creative
Commons
License support. Lately I’ve
been working on updates to our embedded license tools which allow users
to tag an MP3 with a CC license and then provide a web page which
“verifies” the license claim.
The new tool, as of yet unnamed (suggestions?) adds a Creative Commons
tab to the file properties of any MP3 file. For example, a track from
Copy Me/Remix Me :
As you can see, the property page displays the license claim, and then
verifies it against the web page. If the verification page didn’t exist,
or didn’t match properly, you’d see an error message instead.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: “cool! how do I get in on the action?”
It’s simple. Or at least straight-forward. You see, this bit of
integration is made possible by some Nautilus code that’s not in the
latest release, but never fear; I’ve provided a source tarball and I
think it’ll work with Nautilus 2.4 and later (for sure 2.6 and later).
There are two packages you’ll need, and both are available at the CC
Tools Sourceforge Project.
First, nautilus-python provides the actual Python bindings for
Nautilus. Simply untar it, and do the configure/make/make install
dance. This will install the Nautilus support and install some example
Python extensions. The default installation location is under your
Nautilus library path; on my system it’s
/usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0/python.
The second package,
nautilus-cc
, provides the extension and all of it’s dependencies. Simply untar it
in the nautilus-python directory
(/usr/lib/nautilus/extensions-1.0/python on my system). Restart
Nautilus and right click on an MP3 to try it out.
There’s definitely room for improvement in the tool, from simple UI
polish to further integration. For example, what about a context-menu
option which lets you license your file and publish it to the Internet
Archive via ccTag, all integrated with the
desktop. I’m sure there are other ideas out there as well. Leave a
comment with a cool idea on this post; my favorite will get a CC t-shirt
(so yes, you need to leave your email address and you implicitly give
permission for CC to implement your idea; oh, and it’s my blog, so it’s
my decision; but I really want to give away a t-shirt).
The cool thing about this integration is not necessarily the license
display. I mean, that’s cool, but not necessarily the coolest thing. The
coolest thing is that it took me longer to figure out the GTK code than
it did to write the license parsing code. That’s because I’m reusing
lots of code from previous projects. This further emphasizes the
importance of packaging our code in ways that encourage reuse; we should
be able to say “Hey, you developer there! Wanna integrate CC in your
app? Here’s a library that makes it painless!” And yes, that’s a project
I’ll be tackling in the coming weeks for CC.
date: | 2004-10-27 10:59:11 |
wordpress_id: | 223 |
layout: | post |
slug: | creative-commons-support-in-gnome |
comments: | |
category: | General |