I’ve talked about working on iPod support for Rhythmbox, and iPod support in general under Linux. I did do some work with Rhythmbox, but in the end I faltered and gave up on it. The future of Rhythmbox isn’t clear to me, and from the start I had qualms about writing application-centric support for something like the iPod. After much internal debate, I’ve decided to take a fork in the road.

I’ve been using Perl quite a bit lately. Then I discovered GNUpod. The wheels began to turn. I started to play with gtk2-perl. More cogs began to spin.

Thus was born podlet, a perl application that uses Gtk2::TrayIcon (which follows the freedesktop.org System Tray specification). In essence, it will be a complete syncronization tool, not just for music but also contacts, calendar, and tasks (not limited to, but including this bounty).

Proposed look of podlet, sitting in the Notification Area. The icon changes based on the current status – idle, syncronizing, or disconnected.

One- and two-way syncronization of music. I use my iPod with my laptop, but I don’t want to keep a full backup of it on there. One-way syncronization would let me syncronize music to the iPod without filling my hard drive. Two-way syncronization, as you would expect, would make sure that your library on your iPod is a mirror of that on your computer.

Calendar, contact, and task syncronization should work with any application you choose to use. There will be a plugin system to support various sources for this PIM data, so you can sync your iPod with Evolution, vcards, Thunderbird, Sunbird, etc.

In the end, I think podlet will make a pretty decent little syncronization tool. I’ve thrown my work into CVS and started to hack out the core of what needs to be done. I’ve also started to play with Glade. There will be a preferences dialog to manage podlet’s settings, and possibly a druid to be run on first run to walk the user through setting up syncronization.