The world according to...
Nathan Oates
 
 
 

Fri, 08 Dec 2006

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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