2005's news archive

I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year. Once again, a very nice year 2005 was. 2006 will probably be the biggest HS year yet. I'm very productive with Python and have a lot of neat ideas for my upcoming products. You can expect the Mac/Windows release of musicGuru very early in 2006. I know it took me a long time to finish it, but I tried a lot of things, and made a couple of mistakes (like investing so much time in wxPython, which is very nice, but being a cross platform API inherently makes it a lowest common denominator of all platforms. I can't accept this standard of quality.).

Hardcoded Software is moving to a new server right now. It might take a while for the DNS information to propagate everywhere. Thus, there might be some problems with the registration system in the next 2 days. Of course, I'm there to deal with any issue that may arise. Oh, and if you are reading this, you are currently accessing the nice, new, shining server.

I'm now back to Canada and I resumed my development.

I am taking a 3 months break. I need to get away from computers for a while. My older brother Eric will take care of Hardcoded Software support while I'm away.

Yeah, this means that musicGuru release will be delayed. I underestimated the amount of work required to finish it, and I didn't forsee the couple of problems I had with wxPython. (I have 3 months to decide whether I stick with it or not.)

I finally made the move to linux. I'm now coding under a Gentoo installation, using Ratpoison as a window manager.

It took me a while to adapt my code to make it work well under wxGTK because I was using a couple of windows only functions. However, everything works well now and I can publish a linux musicGuru screenshot [link no longer valid]. (The pretty theme is Yattacier 3

I think that the "project I'm working on for which I won't give details until it's advanced enough" is advanced enough, so I can give out some details.

This software is a music collection manager that will probably be called musicGuru. "Oh, yet another music manager" you might say. Yes, there are a lot of music managers out there, but mine will inherently be better because I code it ;)

musicGuru will take further the MPL concept introduced in Mp3 Filter. It will have all the standards music collection features, plus a couple of quite cool and unique ones (I won't give details about these yet :) ). Besides, because I code it in Python/wxPython, musicGuru will work on Windows, Linux, and Mac (Mac won't be supported for the initial release because I don't have one yet, but I plan to buy a Mac Mini, they look really cool!).

Shortly after the release of musicGuru, a new version of Mp3 Filter will be made in Python/wxPython, and both programs will be tightly integrated to each other.

I do have some screenshots:

• Volume view [link no longer valid]
• Artist view [link no longer valid]
• Album view [link no longer valid]
• Search results [link no longer valid]

The icons there are the leftovers of Mp3 Filter. Thus, they will probably be changed before the release.

I expect to be quite finished implementing musicGuru features within a month. Thus, you can expect a release within 2-3 months.

Nothing big to announce for this first news of the year 2005. I still am working with Python. This language amazes me every day I use it. The "project I'm working on for which I won't give details until it's advanced enough" is progressing very well (Thanks to Python for that!).

I made minor changes to the website's stylesheet today. I would appreciate any glitch report (Of course, I appreciate glitch reports at any time, but glitches are more likely to happen now.). And if you don't want glitches, use Mozilla or Firefox :).