Lunettes

VLC for Mac death is "greatly exaggerated" / What is Lunettes?

VLC for Mac is being maintained. However the old Cocoa graphical interface of VLC, is not being maintained at this time.

The reason is that we are in the process of rewriting a new interface for VLC. Its codename is Lunettes.

Why a rewrite? This is something really easy to see. VLC for Mac is just not "Mac" enough.

So far, we could name 3 reasons for that:

VLC for Mac must attract designers.

They can't easily give a refresh of the graphical interface.

Hence, we have decided to offer to designer the possibility to edit via a simple text file the look of VLC. Even Windows and Fullscreen Head-Up-Display can be changed using CSS.

VLC for Mac's interface code comes from the 2000s.

We need to refresh it.

We want to use VLCKit which is pure Cocoa, Objective-C 2.0 with bindings supports. This will help us concentrating on features.

As a positive side effects, we'll not use old non-64 bits compatible APIs.

VLC for Mac needs a good interface to be the best Video Player.

We want to make sure you'll get the best experience ever when watching your favorites TV shows or Movies using VLC.

• For instance, if I am watching a TV show, and then quit Lunettes. At next launch Lunettes will offer you to go back to where you were.

• Then, we added a better way to visualize the media discovery. This is a seldom known feature of VLC. Now, if you are on a local network that streams TV content (Freebox), Lunettes will automatically show them.

• Then the famous playlist fades out: It is not visible by default, and you don't have to use it anymore.

• Also in fullscreen you can now scroll through your playlists or TV channels.

• And finally Lunettes is 64 bits.

For now, Lunettes is being hosted at: http://wiki.github.com/pdherbemont/Glasses

That said, Lunettes is still under heavy development. And we hope to be able to release a test version in January.

We still want new developers to help us! Try to build VLC and Lunettes!

Pierre.