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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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.