Newsarchive

So then, after the buildprocess is already nice I thought I should have a look at performance and memory-usage. And I found something that could become better ;). Besides that I added a "ManualBrowser" to browse any arbitrary URL + regexp and a "ChangeBunchWindow" to auto-edit mlib-entries based on a given property/value.

After 0.3 was released some days ago I was still a bit unhappy with the buildprocess - even though more verbose, it still sucked much. Now in most cases you don't need any parameters to ant anymore, ant should find most things on its own. Besides that I found a NPE-bug which is also fixed.

Today 0.3 - finally, after a really long testing period - was released and wants to be tested :). To get an impression on the long list of changes check this page.

After quite some fixes since 0.3-rc3 I thought that it's time to release one more rc before 0.3-final. This rc introduces an ErrorHandler which catches unhandled exceptions and sends it to us if wanted, fixes some bugs with xmms2 and heap-corruption/overflow, improves speed and changes some internal things. Have fun trying, ebuilds are also updated.

I updated the ebuilds for xmms2 and x4x recently. Also there are ebuilds for XWidgets and esperanza in the x4x-portage cvs-repository. More info on these ebuilds is available at Ebuilds.

To give you one more way to follow the development we now offer a blog at http://xwidgets.blogspot.com/. Have fun reading.

The javabindings were temporary removed from xmms2 due to problems with waf. They will come back as soon as we get up with waf/swig, get genIPC working with java or the buildsystem changes again ;). For now the javabindings are in x4x in a cvs module.

0.3_rc3 is out for testing. Thanks to Spmp, he found some bugs in the buildprocess (the startscript was buggy). Besides other bugfixes we added global keybindings (not configurable yet), -X start parameter to avoid opening the maingui (if a systemtray is present, click on it opens the mainwindow) and Jappo, the Java preprocessor. Jappo makes it possible to let parts tof the build fail/remove them but to move on with the rest. E.g. if there's no jmdns available support for it won't be compiled in, same for xmms2, mpd works always. Note: Although README states that you need XWidgets-0.1_rc3 you need 0.1-final. This is a bug in the README.

At the moment the almost only way for you to get support (help compiling, request features, general talk, ...) is to visit us in #x4x on irc.freenode.net. The IRC user Spmp will now say, "Hey, noone's talking to me in that channel". Indeed, sorry Spmp, noone was there when you asked your questions. In future you can also use the mailinglist x4x-general to get answers to your questions. Don't worry that your questions may be dumb, there are lots of things the wiki doesn't cover yet so please ask everything you have in mind (unless you are a spammer ;)). If you guys think that a forum like phpbb and friends makes sense too don't be afraid to tell us.

We need one more rc on our way to 0.3_final. This rc gets up with changes in the xmms2 api, removes jmdns temporary (will come back soon though), improves the mpd backend and fixes bugs. Have a look at it, it's worth it.

... to get the next release up (ok, not 0.3 final but at least an rc ;)) and those of you who already know earlier versions will immediatly see why: Loads of things changed. Not only the UI changed all over the place, also some internals were added and improved. Check the 0.3 release page for more details.

We started recently to migrate to latest XWidgets beta, therefore we also changed some thing UI-related things. Read more

Today the Xwidgets project released their first beta for public testing. Check [1] for more details.

Hertha is out folks, well, nothing great happened between Carol and Hertha besides the move to java5 but Hertha will work with xmms2 DrGonzo, so Hertha is besides some code improvements just a maintainance release. Anyway, it should be more stable now since the javabindings got more mature.

No, we are not dead, it's just a bit busy atm. Currently I have to work during summer, find a flat, do lots of other things, work on XWidgets, etc. Therefor time is rare but i have done some things though. The biggest thing i did is migrating X4X to java5. Java5 is out since quite a while now, therefor i think that change shouldn't make too much problems. Java5 has some fine things which make life easier, e.g. a global Exception-catcher, enums and type-safety. The other two things I did lately were removing jdom and log4j dependencies. X4X used only a small set of their functions, too less to need separate libs. I migrated the code to use the with java shipped w3c implementation of DOM and friends and logging is done via the java logging API. As XWidgets are getting closer to a release I'll release some pre's before the next bigger release which probably already use the more improved XWidgets. After some testing X4X' ui will get improved too, e.g. by adding tree's for navigation etc.

Carol is released! 0.2.1 fixes some annoying cpu-eating problems but still doesn't ship binary packages (it's just too much in development to build binaries everytime).

Atm it's examtime and so I was a bit bored. Therefor I tried to get x4x running via java webstart and succeeded. All you need is a xmms2 DrEvil rc or wait for DrEvil itself. There's no need to install the javabindings when you use x4x via webstart, but you can use webstart only on linux, I don't have the libs for the other OSs by hand, hopefully that changes soon.

I uploaded some ebuilds which make it quite easy to install x4x and xmms2 on gentoo. Look here for more information.

Hrhr, today we finished our bachelor thesis which means it is bonded and submitted to the university. We will place a html version of it soon on the homepage besides the pdf, maybe one likes html better ;). Just one note to everyone also writing some thesis which has to be bonded: Go and save some money, we bonded everything in quite good quality and had about 100 pages. So for 5 pieces (1 for everyone of us, 3 for the university) we had to pay (!!) 170Euro (!!).

Today I'm proud to release my birthday present, our new release of x4x, 0.2 aka Anja. X4X supports plugins now, stabilized quite much and we ship some binary packages now too. (Someone should look at a windows release once the xmms2 clientlib works there). We hope that our downloadcounter recognizes the new release ;).

It took quite some time for sf.net to get cvs back to all of us. Yes really all of us, even developer cvs wasn't reachable since 3 days now. But now it's back up and move to new servers. This implies some new address for our cvs too. It's now located at cvs://x4x.cvs.sourceforge.net. Anoncvs should be back up soon too.

First: Today I did some work on the first UIPlugin for X4X. Its name is X4XIRC, yes, an IRC plugin. Very basic functions but working. Second: I built some public calendar for X4X on google, it's offered via XML and ICal formats. Have fun watching our progress.

I started hacking at the plugininterface the last days. For now I have no idea on UI- and VisualPlugins but OutputPlugins where easy and so I implemented two exampleplugins. First can be used to send titles from your playlist to your Nomad Jukebox (Creative Zen Micro e.g.) using libnjb and once more swig. Works great! A small window opens and tells you how much to go and how fast we transfer the shit. Even smb-files are possible this way since we stream it to the local machine before sending them. Second plugin is used to generate files of a given list of titles, default is to generate a html-playlist but that can be changed to almost everything else. All plugins are developed in a second cvs-module named X4XPlugins.

Sourceforge anonymous cvs is still not synced with developer cvs. sf.net says that this will last at least until end of april. Till then you can checkout cvs via dev-access and your sf.net account.

This new release adds more nice features like branding, commandline arguments, better playlisthandling, speed improvements etc. to X4X. Check Changelog for more details

Small bugfix release which fixes some annoying problems

Today we released Gerda aka version 0.1. It uses quite some functions xmms2 provides but is only tested on unix-like systems. To install you need ant, swt and latest xmms2-devel or DrDolittle. README tells you more. Come to #x4x on irc.freenode.net and tell us what you think

Today is a good day. I'm proud to announce that our bindings have their first birthday today, or better their birth ;). Anders included them today into his tree and after some minor testing (we are the only ones using them ;)) and inclusion of patches from xmms2-bugs #664 and #669 we will release Gerda. Ah well, and btw: Our second project X(Cross)Widgets was accepted first by the University as a second bachelor thesis and second by sourceforge.net. Thank you all!

Well, we are about to finish our bachelor-part of X4X the next days and so a release will be done too. To make it more interesting here 3 screenies where some parts in core are still to do but the layout shouldn't change anymore. I'm sorry that they are in german but i was to lazy to grab them twice ;). Medialib search Networkbrowser Titleinformation

Sorry folks for the long delay but we had to implement some necessary things, learn for exams (looks like all of them did well) and write our thesis. At the moment we have about 42 pages of about 100 when finished. You can check the current state here but I'm sorry that the thesis is in german. The bindings are still not included into xmms2 cause there are some unsettled issues with all the SWIGTYPE_p_* typewrappers swig generates. Anders and I had already some looks at this thing but it looks like unsolvable. Maybe we'll leave the types as is and stay with the ugly names.

After long time of fiddling with the bindings it looks like they are almost ready now to be used by others (at least i hope so :)). We have implemented a special MainloopJava class which acts as a simple mainloop. You can set all callbacks using it. Just implement the Callbacksinterface or use the appropriate Adapter. The rest of the functions should be the same as in xmmsclient.h. void* are int[] since java would be unable to use it otherwise. Maybe one has the time to work with bindings, would be happy if so :). And it looks like we will include them into xmms2 after DrAlban release.

hrhr, our logo is ready and i really like it. It's one of 15 variants Franz'/isnogood's girlfriend Tamara (german site) designed, she's a gfx artist. At this place a real big "Thank you" to Tamara, good work!

At the moment we are at a pre alpha state, releasing something would make no sense. Most of the time used is invested to get the bindings working. The thing between java and c is that we are connecting a strictly typed, object oriented language to a strictly typed, non object oriented language. The whole sh.. would be easier if we would connect to a non stricly typed language like php/ruby etc. But that's really not that funny ^^. Getting the standardfunctions to work is really easy using swig, even putting references to functions works, you just have to use objects therefor. The really hard sh.. hit us when we first tried to get a simple file descriptor and then when we wanted callbackfunctions. Everything possible, but a bit confusing though and it takes hours to find such things using google. Get more infos on the hard work getting the bindings up here.