Mac Users Soon to Enjoy the Sounds of Banshee

After many years of being an Amarok fan, I was introduced to Banshee. Banshee fast became my media player of choice, due to its ability to handle video and audio files, as well as stream internet radio and podcasts.

Until now, Banshee was only available for Linux. Developer Aaron Bockover explained recently a bit about cross platform development challenges, how to get Banshee for your Mac now, and why the Windows version will be Banshee at heart, but could look very different.

Bockover says that the Banshee project plans on releasing versions for the Mac operating system from this point forward (the 1.3.3 developer release will be available at the end of the week, and Banshee 1.4 will be declared stable in a few weeks). Bockover makes special note of Eoin Hennessy's work in ironing out cross-platform bugs and getting Banshee to work well with the OS X menus.

Though Banshee can be installed on OS X immediately if downloaded through github, Bockover says that this version will still be out of date. He indicates that Hennessy will be adding many of the new features (including OS X menu/docking integration) into the Banshee trunk this week.

Bockover also talks a bit about what makes for a successful cross platform project. He says that the idea is to not stick to just one application framework -- that making the ported application run not only true to itself, but true to the framework of what exists on the system it is ported to -- is key.

He explains, as well, why this is a challenge for him in porting to Windows. He is working on getting libbanshee up and running on Windows, and making it available as a binary. He then makes the call: Simply doing a straight port of Banshee in Windows is possible from there, but it isn't his area of interest. He says that using Visual Studio, though, it is possible to build -- and build upon -- Banshee for Windows, much like Google is doing with Chrome.