sixones

Zenses, Yet another change

2009-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

Zenses has gone through yet another change, I decided to drop the C++ and QT version because the smallest things were taking a long time and my experience with QT is very minimal. In the past I’ve always avoided C++ applications with a UI as the available frameworks aren’t the greatest.

This time around its being written in Java, and well they say the third time’s a charm, its proving to be correct. The Java version is far more complete than any of the previous C++ versions I wrote alone and this time I’ve been able to get help with the development to speed things. The new Java developer called Liliana has been spending time working on the device connection and track detection under Windows. She has also been implementing all the basic scrobbling logic whilst I’ve been concentrating on the user interface and joining the bits together. The current code is proving to be very reliable and we have managed to scrobble a few thousand tracks from our devices whilst testing.

Using Java has changed a few things though, as we are aiming to get a release out there as quickly as possible there wont be a Mac OS X or Linux version available for a while. This is because the current libraries available for MTP communication in Java are very limited and are mainly written for Windows, the ones available for OSX and Linux seem to be missing the `usecount` property on tracks. I have started work on completing an existing libMTP wrapper for Java but I’ve decided the user interface is a bigger priority so we can at least release Zenses to all the Windows users.

I am still not able to devote as much time as I would like to the project due to priorities with my full time job at Videojuicer, we are currently in the stage of releasing a new player and platform. But since I’ve been able to get help with the development on Zenses things are able to move abit quicker and I am still aiming for a summer release.

A lot of people have been asking for support for x64 (64 bit) based platforms, now unfortunately the library we have been using to communicate with MTP devices has been compiled for x86 (32 bit). I have tried compiling the library for x64 (using Visual C++ Express and the Windows SDK) but I end up with missing dependencies (ATLCOMTime.h) that are only available from the full Visual Studio package. Luckily though I have a full copy of Visual Studio Professional so at some point I will compile the library so it works for x64 based operating systems, but at the moment this again isn’t a priority.

A beta release is planned, and should be released shortly, hopefully we will be able to get a beta out to people before the middle of July. If you want to be on the beta just follow me, sixones on twitter and I will post details when its nearer the time / ready for testing. If your not on twitter, don’t want to follow me or would rather wait for the stable release I will be posting details via the last.fm group and here on my blog. I’ve thought about different solutions for releasing the beta and posting details on twitter will hopefully attract a smaller group of people so it will make things easier for us to fix any issues and bugs that will arise. Though obviously I wouldn’t mind if all 2,000+ Zenses users decide to join in and use the beta version, it would just make issues more unmanageable but we shall see. The plan is after a number of people have provided feedback from using beta the final stable release will work without crashing or problems for most of the users.

Until then though, here’s some screenies of Zenses detecting tracks from my Microsoft Zune. Please keep in mind that these screenshots are from development builds and as such there is bugs, one being that the track listing only displays one track but I did not want to delay the screenshots any longer;

As you can tell the UI is pretty raw, this is what detracted me from using Java in the first place but the user interface isn’t everything and in the future when we have some pretty icons and have spent more time ironing out the interface things will look better. The screenshot’s have been taken from Windows Vista x86 (running through VMware) and I was using my Microsoft Zune (the original model, other models will also work) as you can probably tell.

Btw my desktop wallpaper is a freebie from little-gamers, which is an awesome little comic.

For now enjoy, and I’m sorry a release still isn’t ready!

An update on Zenses

2009-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

The new version of Zenses is in development at the moment, after a change of heart its being wrote with QT4.5 rather than XULRunner and XPCOM. I made this decision after spending a few weeks trying to get a prototype working correctly, but the lack of documentation on XPCOM made it a bit of a headache. QT is actually turning out to be really nice, and im regretting not using it in the first place, but mistakes are made to learn so onwards and upwards. I noticed on the Last.fm group there are a few people asking questions about support for various devices and the current state of the new Zenses so I thought I would spend some time to post an update.

Features

Zenses v2 will be a big improvement on the old application, all the device tracks will be stored in an internal SQLite database allowing you to quickly fetch tracks into Zenses and then scrobble later on. I decided to implement this so that the device could be released from the application and memory which will hopefully provide a nicer user experience. The times between scrobbles will be adjustable to provide more user customisation, scrobbling to multiple last.fm accounts will also be possible, though one played track will only be allowed to scrobble to one account.

Some of the suggestions from the forum thread will be used but most likely will not appear in the earlier versions of the new release as I’m trying to release as quickly as possible.

Device Support

When Zenses hits beta it will have support for many devices, a lot more than the current version. The first release will most likely only contain support for MTP devices but after the first release is out support for other devices will begin, this will include file based media players (possibly – needs research), NJB devices and then devices from the iPod family.

Microsoft Zune Support

Zenses will include support for all models of the Microsoft Zune across either Linux, Mac OS X or Windows thanks to libmtp and its ability to read the Zune. There are issues with using libmtp with the Zune but luckily these headaches are only related to writing to the device, and as Zenses only needs to read the devices database it all works.

Release Date

The release date is still unknown as any number of issues could crop up at the last moment, I’m trying to make sure the first release of the new application is stable rather than being as unreliable as the current released versions. The first release will most likely only be for Linux and Mac OS X due to issues with libmtp on Windows, soon after support will be added for MTP devices on the Windows platform.

Operating System Support

Zenses v2 will run and fully function on Linux, Mac OS X as well as Windows Vista and XP.

Screenshots

At the moment the UI is pretty raw, so I will wait until v2 is abit more complete before releasing any.

Designers?

Lets face it as you can tell from the design of my blog, design is not my strong point as such any help designing an icon and UI would be appreciated from anyone that can spare the time.

I know development is slow on this project at the moment, but the wait will be worth it.

Custom filters in jekyll

2009-04-22T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been using my own version of jekyll for awhile now, tonight I decided to upgrade my fork to the latest code from mojombo. I nuked my fork, and ended up re-implementing custom filters in jekyll 0.5. I’ve re-added everything back so its more in-keeping with the rest of jekyll. Instead of custom filters being enabled by default they are now disabled and you need to enable them through the YML config or by passing the --custom-filters parameter to jekyll.

Custom filters allow you to create your own liquid filters for use in your jekyll blog, you can create the filters as methods on a module inside a _filters directory of your site root. I’ve created an example below, which allows you to easily embed gists inside your site. The filter can be used by passing the gist id to the filter; <script type="text/javascript" src="http://gist.github.com/gist_id.js"></script>

Hopefully in the future I will get round to releasing some more custom filters that can be used with jekyll. You can use jekyll with custom filters by using the gem from my fork, this can be obtained through github. For a quick install;

gem install sixones-jekyll -s http://gems.github.com

Logging to firebug from flex 3

2009-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been awhile since I’ve posted, which wasn’t what I had in mind but nevermind.

I’ve been working on the next version of the Videojuicer Player and as part of the core I’ve implemented a custom logging engine which records and outputs to the Flex Builder console through trace. I wanted to expand the logging functionality so that I could view the console output through the Firebug console, since I’m using Firefox when I’m testing the application it makes more sense.

I decided to create and share a simple class for accessing the Firebug console from Flex 3 or Actionscript 3. After creating an instance of the class, you can call the different methods to send a message to the Firebug console. The code utilises the ExternalInterface class from the Flex framework to call the javascript functions and because of this the page hosting the Flex application needs to include the scripting="always" parameter on the embed / object tag.

The code is hopefully self explanatory, and isn’t really that complicated. You can use the class quite simply:

Use the ‘raw’ link below the snippet to download the source from GitHub.

The code has been tested and works perfectly in Flex 3.3 + 3.2 with Firefox 3.1b3 and Firebug 1.4, all running on OS X 10.5. It should work fine with other versions of Flex 3, Firefox and Firebug without any modifications.

Another change, away from github

2009-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Been using Jekyll to generate my blog and hosting the content on GitHub pages, but a few days ago I decided to use my own servers to host my content. Mainly because GitHub keeps going down when I’m trying to publish changes which is a slight annoyance. I also wanted to use the custom filters in my fork of Jekyll. Using GitHub pages also gives me the problem of not being able to redirect old url’s to there new location, so a few links that have made themselves into Google are currently dead, and the GitHub error page offers no link back to my main site. Don’t get me wrong, GitHub pages could be pretty useful and I will probably end up using them in the future for little bits of content (though at the moment I’m unsure what).

Well all in all, your now reading my blog from my slices at Slicehost, I’m using Nginx as a web server and it’s working out quite well. ~~I still need to setup a post service hook and a simple script to automatically pull my latest blog content from GitHub and then generate the HTML through Jekyll on my slice.~~ I’ve managed to create a simple ruby script using sinatra, the script basically accepts the JSON request from GitHub parses the data and regenerates my HTML content (using Jekyll).

Zenses - a new direction

2009-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve spent the past few nights looking into the different GUI frameworks to use for the new version of Zenses. The plan was to create the interface using QT4.5 but after much thought I have decided to use Mozilla’s XULRunner. Mainly because the QT documentation annoys me (even more than Adobe’s), and I find the interfaces it produces are quite unattractive compared to that of XULRunner (Firefox, Songbird).

Either way after a few nights of figuring out the Mozilla build system, everything is now ready for development. The framework for the application has been built and successfully compiles with the Mozilla build system! You can find the source and track development over at github (http://github.com/sixones/zenses/tree/master), there isn’t much to see at the moment hopefully things will move quickly though.

I will still be updating my blog with information of alpha and beta builds, as well as any other bits.

Return of zenses

2009-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

This might of been said before, but Zenses is back in development well planning with two C++ developers. Zenses v2, is being rewritten from the ground up as a cross platform application using C++ and QT4.5. Zenses v2 will take use of libmtp to communicate with your MTP device and find all the played tracks. We are also hoping to add support for scrobbling from other portable media devices, this however is our last priority in developing the new build.

The only issues within the project at the moment is lack of development time, if you know C++ and interested in contributing please contact me. The source code will be available from github shortly, as well as some form of development wiki.

When the time comes round to it unstable alpha builds will be available for Mac OS X and Windows and unstable beta builds will be available for Mac OS X, Linux and Windows.

Back, this time with jekyll and github

2009-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Recently I’ve come across jekyll, a small ruby application that generates static html content from liquid templates and posts wrote in textile. Because the source of a jekyll blog is all flat files everything can be easily stored with a versioning tool in my case git (through the wonderful github). Its a brilliant idea and works rather well, I’ve decided to give it a go for my blog at sixones.com until I find the time to create my own blog engine with merb.

I decided to host my blog content in a private repo on github and use gitpages to generate the jekyll site every time I push my content and serve the html. Because im using git to store my content, I can keep everything backed up separately and run a backup copy of my generated site somewhere else just incase.