Cocoaphony

Several people have noted that PandoraBoy is displaying a “Profile” window over the player that interferes with the player. This is a notification from Pandora because they’ve changed their privacy settings (you can now make your profile private, and they want to know if you want that).

This should be a one-time event for existing accounts. I suspect that new accounts will not see it. The solution is to open www.pandora.com in Safari, answer the question, and then re-launch PB.

PandoraBoy goes directly to the the mini-player on launch. Pandora doesn’t code for that since it’s impossible from the website. So sometimes they make interfaces that are larger than the mini-player without updating the mini-player code to resize. PB doesn’t resize the window (it doesn’t know how large it should be). It just relies on the mini-player to do it in Javascript, but in cases like this, the mini-player also doesn’t know how large the window should be.

BTW, I often am asked why PB doesn’t make the window resizable for cases like this. The answer is that it doesn’t help. The mini-player is a flash app, and has a clipping frame independent of the window. So while you can resize the window, the content is still clipped at the border of the flash app. Ah, the wonders of Flash.

For those of you having trouble with Flash 10.1, I’ve fixed PB to handle it. This moves from the hackish “dig around in the NetscapePlugin objects and call undocumented methods” approach to a standard CGEvent based keyboard injection. You can’t use NSApp’s sendEvent: to talk to Flash (probably because Flash is not in Cocoa). But the following code is a good general purpose “send me a virtual keystroke.” Read more…

I’ve put out PB 0.8. It has a small number of preference and hotkey fixes, upgrades to the latest ShortcutRecorder (which took a lot more work than I hoped, and I still think may be a little flakey), dropped 10.4 support (because of the latest ShortcutRecorder), and adds experimental Rowmote support. (I may accidentally list “rowmote” as “rowmate” in the changelog; sorry about that.) I say “experimental” because I haven’t gotten around to testing it myself. The author of Rowmote kindly provided me a patch, and I’ve applied it and nothing seems to have blown up.

I’m planning at least another day of PB work this week, so vote on the Issues list for things you most care about and I’ll hit those first. Testing 10.6 support is obviously top of the charts. My main production box is still 10.5, and that’s where I run PB, so I haven’t actually run into the problem yet. But I have 10.6 boxes around to test with.

I know there are a lot of significant bumps with PB these days. I focus almost all of my development time on my full time Mac and iPhone projects, and only look at PB now and then (since it does everything I really want it to). But later this week I’ll make some more time to take care of the bigger issues that impact folks the most. Pandora is still my favorite music service, and I spend a lot of time listening to it. I like to help others enjoy it as much as I do.

I started implementing a hotkey to regrowl the current song. ishermandom sent me a patch months ago to do this, and I’ve just started integrating it. It’s very small, I just hadn’t done it yet. Since I’ve restructured hotkeys due to the ShortcutRecorder upgrade, I’ve actually had to reimplement it anyway, but really, it’s not complicated.

I also pulled some of the NSLog() statements out, so PB will no longer fill your Console with messages about what song is playing. If you want need this functionality for something, let me know. There are better ways for me to implement it.

Funny, Pandora seems down this morning? The silence is deafening. Even while I’m investigating why the flash player isn’t coming up (even in Safari), I keep hitting my “play” shortcut because its too quiet. I guess I pull out iTunes….

For the last couple of nights I’ve finally gotten back to PandoraBoy work. The backlog of issues has gotten a bit out of hand as I’ve focused on other projects. One thing that has hung me up for a while has been the Hotkey preferences pane, which uses ShortcutRecorder. SR had an IB Pallet that only worked with IB2.5, not IB3, which made working on that panel very difficult. I’ve finally upgraded SR to the latest version, which required a lot of recoding since PB relied SR’s now-deprecated autosave functionality.

The side effect of all of that is that the latest SR requires Leopard, and so now PB requires Leopard. I had planned to wait for SnowLeopard’s release to drop Tiger support, but this accelerates that a bit. It does make my coding a work a bit easier, since 10.5 has many nice developer features.

Drop me a note if you’re still running PB on Tiger. Every other major user of ShortcutRecorder had already gone Leopard-only, which is why they made the move. Tigers are getting pretty rare out there.

Thank you stinkblog, thank you for saving me a great deal of pain debugging this. PandoraBoy work can now continue.

For those of you worried about the trouble with PandoraBoy’s hotkeys and Applescript, I’ve finally carved out some time to work on this stuff. I keep getting hung up on the hotkeys preference pane, which can’t be opened in IB3, due to the use of the Shortcut Recorder IB Palette. The answer, I’ve always known, is just to rewrite the hotkey pref pane. It isn’t that hard, I’ve just avoided it, and it’s finally time to do it and fix a few bugs in the process.

Have I mentioned recently that PandoraBoy is an excellent small project to practice and hone your Cocoa skills?

It’s been a busy few weeks for PandoraBoy… well, for PandoraBoy’s mailbox. I’ve been incredibly busy getting my day-to-day work out for months now and have barely looked at PandoraBoy since about February. The backlog of Issues has grown to a troubling level, and it’s probably another few weeks before I’ll be able to get back into PB development. But in the meantime I’ve been amazed at how much mail I’ve been getting on the subject. Mostly small bugs people are running into, but then, this just in:

PandoraBoy in French. Yes, Pierre Rudloff, out of the blue, sends me a fully translated lproj. I really appreciate it. I’ll make sure to get it integrated into the next release. I probably won’t get started on PB development until after WWDC because of other projects, but after WWDC it’s top of my list. Especially all the annoying little bugs that have been creeping in (I suspect because of some backend Pandora changes).