For those who’ve been following things, you’ll have seen that there’s been a few things going on during the last week as part of the prep work for the coming first WACUP beta. With all of that going on, there’s not been as much coding done as I’d have liked but there’s enough for me to ramble on about it for a while :) So onto what was done…
One of the things that continued on from last week’s work related to playing youtube urls directly in Winamp was based on a reminder comment about youtube playlist support.
It’s now been done in addition to soundcloud playlists also seeing this improved support. As part of doing this, I’ve improved most aspects of the plug-in responsible for this support with better ATF support, caching of the urls that Winamp can play to help reduce delays with repeat playback (soundcloud is a pain as it has a low expiry time on it’s urls).
All of this extra work should make the plug-in a bit easier to use though there’s more that needs to be done to get it to a point I’m 100% happy with like using the artwork that is provided instead of a generic image but it works in general & doesn’t crash for me which at the moment is the main aim :o)
The next thing done was a minor thing which I didn’t think about when I added tweeting support. So what I’ve now done is add an extra option that allows you to have authorised tweeting but for it to not send tweets unless checked (on by default).
This is helpful if only wanting it to work some of the time but not having to mess around with re-authorising with twitter as was the only way before where you’d have to logout to prevent tweets being sent.
The next thing is that I’ve no completed my work on making a single bookmarks plug-in to replace the native library bookmark plug-in and my ML Bookmark Categoriser plug-in. It’s getting there but with everything else going on I’ve just not made the progress on this as I’d have liked.
A feature that was added last minute with the Winamp 5.666 release was the addition of a F8 hotkey in the media library window which allows for refreshing the current search (subject to the library view supporting it).
As there wasn’t the time to make use of that in all of that native library views (it can be helpful to refresh the current view without changing to another view and going back again), I’m now trying to add it into any of the replacement library plug-ins I’m making.
So the replacement downloads view got this support this weekend which is helpful if the view is open and new podcast downloads are added. The bonus is that with the selection state fixes for when sorting the views, I’ve been able to apply this to the refresh option so the existing selection will be maintained where possible (and is something that I’ll need to apply to other library views as development of their replacements continues).
The rest of the coding done mainly involved cleaning up anything that I know isn’t safe to use and have either finished up the obvious issues or disabled it from being accessible (e.g. the embedded area in the library window).
This is to minimise some of the issues that could arise with beta testing where I know there’s more that needs to be done on certain features but haven’t gotten them to a reasonable state (e.g. the classic album art plug-in no longer has an embed in library option as it conflicts with the replacement code but that hasn’t been finished to allow for selecting what to show within the area).
I’ve really rushed my way through this update (no images, etc) so apologies it not as visually pleasing as it can be at time but with so much left to do to get a beta release out this week I think it’s acceptable.
With the availability of the forum I now believe I’ve contacted everyone (directly & via the general tweets / facebook posts) who had shown prior interest in helping out beta testing WACUP. If I’ve missed anyone then please accept my apologies and you’re more than welcome to sign-up on the forum.
Now finally, here’s a general summary of what was talked about:
- Forum opened up & all that’s related to doing that
- Youtube and Soundcloud playlist support plus better integration
- Option added to disable tweeting support without de-authorising
- Not as much done on replacement bookmarks plug-in as liked
- Adding F8 (view refresh) support to the library downloads view
- Getting everything as ready as possible for a beta release…
-dro