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MacTF v2.0b2
Recently I tackled some of the problems in MacTF. Most of them stemmed from the complicated threading that was going on, while trying to prevent
those threads from trying to interact with the Toppy at the same time (causing interrupted transfers). So I had a great idea and turned all those nasty
threads into a single one (well two actually, one for the UI and one for all the Toppy communications), which worked on a queue of transfers. This
worked out very well, and when combined
with working out how to properly resume transfers from any point, enabled me to set up a fully "interactive" Toppy experience, even during transfers.
I had planned to make it v1.5, but with all the changes I decided to overhaul the interface too and make it a proper v2.0. So I've added live searching
and made the interface look like an iLife app (using the great iLifeControls framework). The not-publically-released v1.4 also added the navigation
bar, which I find much more intuitive than selecting ".." to move up a folder, which was a bit too unixy for some people. Also the Sparkle framework
has just been added, to provide update functionality (I used this in MacTF-EPG too).
So all in all a pretty big update, especially functionality wise, as you can now do just about everything while a transfer is occuring
(the only thing currently disabled is "previewing", although it too is theoretically quite possible). The main thing remaining for me now is to
implement
some form of "queue management" - I'm imagining something like iTunes "Downloads" interface.
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MacTF-EPG 1.4.2
It's been a while since my last post, but I should have a bit more time
now to devote to fixing bugs and the like. So I've posted a new version of
MacTF-EPG with a few tiny bug fixes, but more importantly updated the
website which was lagging behind (it was still on 1.3 I think) and also
updated the feed that the built-in software update checks. So hopefully
any stragglers who don't check the Topfield forums will now be able to
find the new version.
Speaking of which, I've added a quick link to the MacTF-EPG Now On menulet
to the MacTF-EPG page. I'd previously only mentioned it in a post on the
Topfield forum. This is just a quick little menubar app that
displays a table of whats playing at the current time. It reads in the
same TGD files used by MacTF-EPG, so you need to run them in
conjunction.
While I'm on the topic of addons, occasionally people ask me what
TGDPicker 0.2 is. This is just a small standalone TGD viewer app. It's
where the original code for parsing/displaying the files came from in
MacTF-EPG, and it hasn't been developed any further really. It's by no
means necessary, but I still find it useful as if you have
it around you can double-click on any TGD file and see what's inside,
which is perhaps easier than opening it through a text-editor.
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Forums return
I've just re-enabled the forums, now there is no webspace pressure. I
managed to upgrade to the newest version of yabb and it managed to import
all the old forum data. So hopefully if you registered it should just work
still.
The reason I re-enabled them now is not that I think all discussion should
occur here. I ususally check the Topfield forums more often than my own
site  so it's better to post stuff there. But I want to use the forums
as a basic bug-tracker. People send me bugs and suggestions quite often
but I either deal with it, add it to a list or forget about it (sorry, it
happens!). So I thought that if people posted a bug in a thread (try to
keep it one bug/request per thread) I could then keep track of it and also
inform you when I had dealt with it.
Also, if the Topfield forums are down, like they were recently, it gives
me a place to discuss problems etc like the recent grabber failures.
The forums haven't yet got a site button, but they are at: http://noates.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl
Also, I think I finally worked out how to do a proper redirect from the
bur.st/~cazlar domain to noates.com, but if you have a link using the old
domain I'd appreciate if you changed it to noates.com
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MacTF-EPG 1.2.2
I've been a bit lax in posting to the blog, but there's a new verion of
MacTF-EPG up now. This fixes the problem that most (but not all) users
were having with no data being downloaded by the grabber. Thanks to
v8jlene who managed to find what had changed and updated the grabber.
While I was packaging up the new version I also changed the update
mechanism to the Sparkle framework. This was a bit last-minute, but looks
to be a really nifty way to update your app. It allows me to post a
webpage for each upgrade and if you need updating you'll see what's new in
a window, with the option to download it. Sparkle then seems to quit the
app and restart with the new version. It also has some "always install new
updates" features but these are very beta, so please don't enable them (I
tried disabling them but haven't worked out how yet).
The best thing in my mind is that if there is an issue like last time
where there is a data source problem, I can simply set up a fake "update"
and users will be able to see a message explaining what the problem is.
Then when I actally get the problem solved, I just add the download and
everyone can get it. So I recommend letting the app check for updates
(I'll make this a pref soon, now it just asks once).
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MacTF-EPG 1.2
I've released a new version of MacTF-EPG. The main added feature is a grid
view that is generated by a script from the intermediate XML files that
the Oz grabber creates. Unfortunately, the UK scripts go straight to TGD,
so I currently
can't make a grid from that data. The grids are just a html page and are
not interactive at all (no setting timers etc). However, because of this
it is quite easy to edit the CSS file (which will be put in the folder in
App Support), or edit the settings (to mark favourites on the grid in a
different colour, or different genres) in the xmltv2htmlrc file. As
examples, news shows are marked
as slightly blue, while "The Simpsons" is a favourite and should show up
bold.
The other major changes is that I've compiled it as a Universal binary.
I'm not sure whether it will make much difference as the scripts used
by the app are either Java (and therefore native already) or compiled for PPC. I've also
not had an opportunity to test on an Intel-based Mac, so I have no idea if
it will break anything. Please tell me if it does.
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Blog back
Sorry for the blog downtime. It seems something went pear-shaped a few weeks ago, and I've only just had
the time to investigate and fix the problem. But it should be fine now I hope. I'm still quite busy, the
move went well but I'm now in thesis-writing mode so don't have much time for much else. However, I did
manage to hack in a HTML grid-preview into MacTF-EPG, and hopefully I'll look into some of the crashes in
MacTF 1.3 some are having.
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Moving house
Due to a relocation to another state, I'll be offline for a number of
days probably, and busy for quite a bit longer after that, so it may
take me a while to answer any queries that anyone might have during
this period.
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A few slight bugs
Although MacTF 1.3 seems to work pretty well, a couple of people have
reported crashes when they try to upload or download anything. It was
hard to pin down why (as the bug was in a piece of code that has been
fine since it was introduced back in 0.3 or 0.4). It's most likely due
to the subthread handling memory a little differently, and maybe a 10.3
vs 10.4 difference too, as all reports so far are from 10.3.9. Either
way, the bug is now fixed.
I'm halfway to getting a few other things finished though (rec file
header preview, and a
navigation bar to get rid of the ".." entries in the file list),
so I'll hold off on releasing an interim fix for the moment, in the hope
of finishing them soon. However, if you
are getting the crashes and want them to stop, just drop me an email and
I'll send you a fixed build.
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MacTF 1.3 released
As indicated earlier, MacTF has been updated to v1.3. The main changes
are a redesigned interface and multithreaded
transfers. A Finnish translation has also been added, as well as a number of bug fixes.
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 MacTF 1.3 delays
I've been planning to get MacTF 1.3 out for a while now, but due to the interface changes I needed to redo a lot of
the localization things, and unfortunately I have been very busy lately. Also, I still need to test some things as I
finally made the file transfers threaded! This
makes things in the UI work much better (eg. no need to use Exposé to get back to the screen) but did make the
code a bit complicated as I have to try to avoid various combinations of actions that don't go well together (like
disconnecting while transferring could cause a crash).
Hopefully though these changes will allow me to pause and resume transfers in a future version though, and it should
be possible to also resume partial downloads.
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Universal apps
With the release of the first Intel-based Macs yesterday, I've had to begin thinking about whether MacTF and my other apps will work nicely on
an x86 system. The answer is that I just don't know, and as I'm not looking for an iMac or a 15" laptop, I'll have to wait until an iBook
equivalent or a Mac mini is released so I can test it out myself. Before then, if anyone tries them under Rosetta, I would appreciate a note
saying if they worked or not.
Some possible problems I could envisage: - Byte-swapping could cause data problems. The data coming from the Toppy USB port is all
backwards (little-Endian) and I swap it back to normal before using it. I think this should be OK, as when I write out data to files (or read
it in to upload), the file-system should deal with any conversion. But it may not, so files might turn out to be all garbled.
- Divide-by-zeros - I was surprised to learn that on PPC "x/0 = 0", but on x86 "x/0 = CRASH!". I'm not sure if I ever do a divide-by-zero
anywhere, but it's possible I haven't checked for it somewhere, so this could cause problems (but is pretty simple to fix and should be easy to
see in a crash log).
- Anything else I haven't thought about.
I'll probably flick the switch over at some point and make MacTF-EPG universal, but if I do so for MacTF I will lose 10.2 support as far as I
know. I'm not sure if anyone is still using 10.2, but I'd like to keep it as long as possible. I'll get someone who owns an Intel-based Mac to
beta-test if they want.
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Voice Command of your Toppy
This was just a bit of silly fun, but someone mentioned a few weeks back if it was possible to mute the Toppy by telling it via vioce
recognition. It turns out that it was really very easy, as I had already put AppleScript into VirtualRemote.app. So all you have to do is make
an AppleScript like this:
tell application "VirtualRemote"
sendKey numbered "65548"
end tell
Then if you save this as an app with the title of what you want to say eg "Toppy mute" or "Silence", put it in the Speakable Items folder in
~/Library/Speech/Speakable Items (just the main section if you want to access it at any time), then turn Speakable Items on in the Speech
Prefs. Make sure that the VirtualRemote TAP is running (you will have to run it without any other TAPs though - press 0 during startup and then
launch just the VR TAP), and say the magic words. The Toppy should then mute or unmute as appropriate.
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 Sneak Preview of MacTF 1.3
The last few days, thanks mainly to more email conversations with Janne, I've been changing the look and feel of MacTF a great deal. I still need to add a bit more code under the hood and also fix a few more bugs etc, but I thought I'd share a screenshot or two. The main change is that all the buttons for the various functions have been replaced with a toolbar, which is user-configurable. Note that the icons in this picture may not be the final ones, some are just placeholders.
This has allowed me to alter the layout of the rest of the app, so overall it should look cleaner and be a bit more intuitive.
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Belated MacTF v1.2 announcement
I forgot to put a post when MacTF moved to v1.2 (and
also forgot to update VersionTracker as well), so I might as well put a note here for anyone who
reads this blog but doesn't visit the main page (new versions now have a "NEW" button next to
them for ~2 weeks).
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