Few things are cooler than being able to work on interesting new stuff. Other people immediately building wild things on top of that work, however, is even cooler.
So, I worked briefly in the GUPnP project, making bindings for Vala. Before I managed to blog about it (hey, midsummer and all…) Zeeshan had ported gupnp-media-server to Vala and Jorn Baayen had built gupnp-media-renderer!
so… what does that mean for people who do not speak UPnP fluently? It means that I just used my N810 Mediastreamer to select the song Måndagsbarn by Veronica Maggio (a flac file on my laptop) for playing on my living room stereo set. Pretty cool, eh?
Now guess how many configuration steps were needed for all three devices to work together? None, it just worked. Very cool.
Maybe it’s not comparable to the rocket backpack we’re all waiting for and maybe I’m just easy to impress, but I still found Ross‘ response to all this very appropriate: “Welcome to the future!”
PS: Did I mention it also works for video and images? Well, it does!
PS2: Some of the stuff mentioned here has not been released yet and may still change (at least gupnp-media-renderer is in svn only). The GUPnP framework on the other hand is ready and stable: See the documentation for API reference and tutorials.
In other news, Tampere is a host city candidate for GUADEC+Akademy 2009. Go Tampere!
