The whole reason I learned Cocoa in the first place was so I could work on PandoraBoy. It’s a great project, but I haven’t really worked on it in quite some time. As Pandora changes, PandoraBoy becomes more and more broken. I barely have time to look at the patches that have been sent it, let alone apply them. My life has moved onto many other projects.
I’m actively looking for a new maintainer. It’s a good project, and the code base is in decent repair, though I don’t know if it builds with Xcode 4. The system basically works, but there’s a long list of things that could be improved, and some things that are now downright broken. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll help hand it off. I took it over when I knew next to nothing about Macs. It’s a great place to learn.
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?
Neil Mix from Pandora contacted me today about the troubles I’ve had with the notification system. He showed me the code they use to text the API, and using that code has fixed a ton of problems. Anything based on knowing the current track is fixed in the 0.5.2. That includes growl, console log entries and Applescript. I’ll have it out shortly.
I’m back into PandoraBoy development. Looks like Pandora changed something with their last UI update, and it’s broken PB and maybe also Pandora.FM (who uses the same API as we do). We’re just not getting events anymore from the API. So I’ve dropped a note to their support list and we’ll see if they can help us out at all. This is why Growl is broken; Pandora doesn’t know when tracks change.
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….
No, I haven’t forgotten about PandoraBoy, but I have been exceedingly busy of late. Of course it comes in the middle of my work on a large feature (Full Screen plugins), so I’ve done a lot of PB work, but haven’t made a new release. I’m about to the point of releasing what I have (which works but isn’t pretty) and rolling some critical bug fixes out in the not too distant future.
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.
