PandoraBoy’s user interface is pretty screwed up since the recent Pandora update. I’ve talked with Pandora and it’s a known problem with WebKit. You’ll see the same issues if you run Safari. Pandora is working on a fix, and when they deploy it, PandoraBoy should automatically work again.
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).
To all you aspiring Cocoa developers….
If you want to make a private framework, you need to remember to set the install path for it to @executable_path/../Frameworks. Just copying it into your bundle isn’t good enough. Otherwise your app is going to think it’s in (~)/Library/Frameworks once you package it up and give it to other people.
In related news, PandoraBoy 0.5.1a is now released.
Yes it is true, a new version of PandoraBoy is up, 0.5.1. I haven’t put it into Sparkle yet, and probably will skip it because it only fixes a couple of things (most notably, paid accounts now work correctly). Technically there’s an entire full-screen mode in there now with a plug-in architecture and public framework, but I’ve disabled it because it’s still kind of flakey and doesn’t work very well. I’m going to focus for a while instead on some of the bugs that have been reported and get those cleaned up.
Maybe I’ll play with the new version of ShortcutRecorder that just came out thanks to OmniGroup’s contributions (great company, great products). Hopefully I can get rid of my IB2 dependencies and finally move 100% into XCode3.
And of course I’ve been promising improvements in Sparkle that will help PandoraBoy a little bit, and I more deeply need for my day job. I’ve been mostly working on those during what I consider “day job” hours, but right now core product features are far more pressing than automatic updates. And #1 on my list: collapse the current branch back down to trunk! Ah, subversion, thou viper. Linus was right. There’s no such thing as “CVS done right.” But in truth, it isn’t so terrible, it just isn’t so good either….
Well, I’m spending a little more time hacking PandoraBoy today. It now will compile under XCode3 for anyone playing along at home. I’m hoping to learn a lot this week to move things forward even more. Right now I’m here, getting ready for this. Sometimes I think I picked a good life this time.
Now if I can just get back into my home computer to get my PB todo list…. Back into full-screen mode stuff.
Full-screen PandoraBoy has been a major learning experience. Quartz Composer is an incredible tool, but it took me a long time to get rid of the random noise in the picture. First secret: spend some time and read through every patch available, particularly the ones in Tools. It’s important to know what’s available so you don’t spend hours trying to reinvent the basics. And don’t forget that “transparent” defaults to meaning “whatever random memory happens to be on the video card.”
I’ll be spend quite a bit of time trying to improve the interface for the full-screen plugins. I’m trying to make it as easy to write new full-screen modes as to write new screen savers. Once I’ve gotten a second full-screen plugin written, I think I’ll better know how to structure the interface.
I’ve also finally gotten rid of an old, nagging bug where PB would fail to respond to keyboard shortcuts or Applescript. WebKit is a bit funny about plugins (i.e. Flash). I finally tracked down a weird race condition that causes hitTest: to sometimes return the Flash view and sometimes to return the view that contains the Flash view. PB was only handling the more common case, so sometimes you’d get a stray “ERROR: Could not find webNetscapePluggin” error in your logs. Hopefully that’s now fixed.