Day Three: A New Project Proposal

I investigated the Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) that I mentioned in my previous post. Since this modding tool is still in open beta, I was not expecting anything glamorous. I just wanted to contribute to the community that made modding an enjoyable experience for me. Unfortunately, my findings suggest that the community associated with the NMM needs more time to develop. There is a significant amount of forum chatter surrounding the beta release of the NMM, and the community interest is certainly there; however, the communication channels are still in their infancy, and development is still spearheaded by a select few. The sourceforge page exists, but that is really all that can be said. I mean no disrespect to the community behind the project. There is just not enough documentation or activity for me to recommend this software project to my group.

In our initial group meeting, Team 3 decided that each group member should find one H/FOSS project that he or she finds interesting and worthwhile. After abandoning NMM as a viable project, I spent hours looking through dozens of potential projects. I found some pretty cool stuff out there, but, even if a software's community and its documentation looked promising, I had trouble making a connection with these projects. Eventually, I had a sort of epiphany and remembered that my media player (XBMC) is a FOSS. I switched to XBMC from Windows media center (WMC) last year, and it is safe to say that I will never go back. WMC felt static and clunky. I had difficulty associating video and audio codecs with WMC during the initial setup on new systems, and the general lack of customization always frustrated me. XBMC fulfilled all of my needs by providing a comprehensive media center application with a flexible framework that supports third party plugins. As an adamant user of this program, I can see myself as a part of the community.

XBMC seems like a much better alternative to NMM. It has a well-established community, and the wiki documents most things very well. A list of relevant links can be found on Team 3's wiki here. The latest release of XBMC (11.0 Eden) is in beta phase and could probably use a few testers and some updated documentation. I have not researched the project or its community as in-depth as the assigned reading goes, but that information will be listed in a future post if XBMC is chosen as our group project.

Note: XBMC's site will be down on January 18 in protest of SOPA/PIPA so do not be alarmed if you are unable to access the site during this time.