As I’m currently doing a bit of site related maintenance which some might have already noticed from the slight colour scheme change last week, I’ve just updated the software used for the blog I thought it best to post something to help check it still works (you never know with updates ;) ). The community forum will also hopefully receive some updates before the end of the month along with a possible theme restyle to fit in with the newer colour scheme.

The week was a bit of a short one due to it being Easter but things did progress on one key request that has come up since the preview builds builds were first released & that is removing the Web Browser feature. For some it’s just not liking it or viewing it as “bloat” or seeing it as a security issue (due to it being based on the IE web browser control the OS provides - unless you’re on a version of Windows that has had it fully removed).

So as of this blog post, the Big Bento & Bento skins have been made compatible with the new setting (as added to Preferences -> Skins -> Modern Skins -> ‘General’ tab) which allows the web browser to be enabled or disabled. The cPro (ClassicPro) skin engine has also been started being modified to support the new feature though it needs more work to complete the changes so all versions of the cPro skins will support it when used under WACUP.

Other modern skins will need to be updated to support this mode assuming there there is source code available for them to be re-built to add support.

An interesting thing from looking into the web browser mode of modern skins was that it had been claimed it made things slow to load but testing showed there was negligible impact on the loading time of the skin - it’s just memory usage & what page is being viewed that has the biggest impact on used resources.

Otherwise I’ve been slowly working through my accrued list of issues & requests along with trying to determine why a number of HTTPS based streams (e.g. for mp3 & mp4/m4a based content) fail to connect correctly.

This last one is becoming more of a priority as sadly youtube changed something at the start of the year that means they only provide the streams as HTTPS & not HTTP as was the case when I first implemented the support. This probably won’t be fixed in time for the next build but is now something I’m treating as a blocker for a non-beta/non-preview build.

Until next time, happy Winamping & all that fun stuff :)
-dro

[edit]
Since first posting this earlier today, the forum has now received some of the updates needed to ensure it works better with the current PHP 7.3 release now being used with regards to keeping my server logs clear of deprecated errors :) The only issue is that PM Attachments aren’t available though that had been broken for a while since first moving from PHP 5.6 to 7.0 so it’s not changed things, heh.