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Launchpad Blueprint Link: Not reported yet

When the market leader is looked at, Apple in this case, they have strived to make the Media sector of their business appeal as much as possible. Media is a large chunk of what most users do currently, many people have MP3 Players, are connected with sites like Flickr, Youtube & Google Video. We should be aiming to make life easier for this demographic.

Detailed Outline

Collaboration, Not Fragmentation

Currently there are a large volume of projects out there for the media sector, however none meets 90% of the expectations of the common user. Most have a backend that supports the more common restricted formats, some have good support for Podcasting/Videocasting but lack in other areas such as Removable Device support. This is therefore extremely annoying for different users who then have to switch programs to do certain tasks.

Overkill

When looking through the 'Sound & Video' section of the Add/Remove panel, there are approximately 180 different packages there, this seems like a great waste of not only users time having to sift through most of the packages which essentially do a only a few key tasks, but over a wide set of applications. We need to set out a clear set of key media areas which should be supported through 1 or 2 applications.

Sharing & API Usage

Users now expect their content to work first time, for it to be simple and so that they can share it with friends. Sites like Flickr include ways to add new content directly from the desktop using their API key service. F-Spot, already includes many different upload sites. This is great as it allows for seemless sharing of content between groups of users.

Currently there are no facilities such as this for Video sharing sites, it should be our goal to contact the large video hosting websites to ask them to implement such a system to allow for easy sharing of videos.

Proposed Solution

Define Media Areas

Within the 'Sound & Video' section there should be a few key areas which applications should be developed for:

• Viewing
• Editing
• MIDI

(These need rethinking, but they are okay for now).

Inside the viewing area it should cater for what appear to be smaller tasks: sharing, tagging, conversions, CD/DVD ripping & creating, Pod/Video casting.

Editing - To do.

MIDI - To do.

Technical Changes

Packages Affected

All within 'Sound & Video' sections.

Action List

• AlexLatchford (20070415) - Blueprint drafted.

CategoryUETeam