Jay Tuley

What Is WOV¹?

WOV pronounced “wahhv”, stands for Wrapper Of Video, its a Mac OS X package format that contains both a non quicktime video source and a pre-parsed QuickTime reference movie and is QuickLook compatible.

What’s WOV Got to Do With It²?

If you have ever had a large Window Media File you want to open with WMVPlayer plugin for QuickTime, you may have noticed it’s really really slow. Same goes with Perian and MKV’s, though not nearly as bad. Since they are converting to a QuickTime movie format in memory its possible to save that file and have much quicker load times with subsequent opens. However you must be careful, because these plugins can (and have in the past) changed they way they work such that imported quicktime movies can be broken with updates, so it’s imperative that you don’t save self contained movies only reference movies external to the original file. So thats what WOV does, it keeps a reference movie which is really small and the original file combined into its package format, that makes it easy to organize these pairs, repair the reference movie if necessary in the future, and completely undo the WOV container and restore it to the original files (if you so desire).

WOV WOV WOV³.

So early on playing around with the idea of WOV, I soon realized it was a good format for simple non destructive QuickTime edits, so I chose one I though was particularly useful which is joining files. So there exists an option, when converting a batch of files in WOV Converter, to combine multiple files into a single WOV file. That resulting package contains a chapter-ized reference movie, the original files, and an M3U playlist of the original files. Thus when trying to open the WOV file in a non native QuickTime App it will try and open the M3U file, I choose M3U since it is so simple it’s likely to be supported in most apps (it is supported in VLC specifically).

Tainted WOV⁴.

There are decent possibilities for caveats with this format, which is why I am putting it out in this early beta and not integrating into NicePlayer right away. One of the obvious caveats is that the original type is masked, which makes it hard to tell if a non native quicktime app is going to be able to open a WOV file ahead of time. I’m not sure if that will be a big deal, but I need people to use WOVConverter & WOVOpener to get feedback to figure out stuff like that.

It should be noted that there is also major issues with using WMVPlayer with WOVConverter. WMVPlayer version 2.2 must have the preference “Open Local Files Immediately” unchecked, or alternatively you must downgrade to version 2.1 to work properly with WOVConverter.

The Book of WOV⁵.

WOVSuite — entirely open source, licensed: MPL/LGPL/GPL

has a few parts:

• WOV Opener — Utility that opens WOV files. You set the actually program you want to open the video and whether that program supports quicktime files natively. Supported on 10.4 & 10.5
• WOV Coverter — Utility that converts any quicktime importable file into WOV files, repairs broken WOV files, and unwraps original files from WOV files too. Supported on 10.5 Only
• WrapperOfVideo.framework — Framework to make it easy for other cocoa applications to support WOV packages without WOV opener. Supported on 10.4 & 10.5

Fun Footnotes

¹ What Is Love

² What’s Love Go to Do With It

³ All You Need Is Love

⁴ Tainted Love

⁵ The Book of Love

While NicePlayer is pre-1.0, I strive to make each release solid enough for general mass consumption. However it’s not easy, it involves testing on different processors, os’s, migrating localizations, updating readme’s and documentation—it’s a long laundry list of things. And we need more help on testing. NicePlayer is open source and the source can be checked out and built prior to release for anyone to try out features and bug fixes, but I don’t think that is accessible enough to get the feedback necessary to for quality releases. So I created a Preview builds page where I can easily upload preview builds of NicePlayer.

http://jay.tuley.name/build/

These releases aren’t ready for mass consumption, but are solid enough for enthusiasts to try out. Anyone is welcome to try them, but please only link to the build page and not the actual download. Also be forewarned that the download links changes every 5 minutes so if you try to link to the actual download it will stop working quick (so no unauthorized MacUpdate posts!). On the build page I add what’s changed and what I need tested to the description of each build. The description will also show up in the preview appcast that NicePlayer autoupdates from, so you can keep up to date on this bleeding edge track.

The First Release

So the first released was 0.96.0 in the wee hours of the A.M. of October 26th a last ditch effort to release something that actually worked on Leopard combined with a few bug fixes from 0.95 and some minor features I had started working on prior.

Version 0.96 (v543)
• Basic Leopard compatibility
• Progressive movie loading progress in scrubbing area
• Chapters expand in playlist drawer.
• New Playlist and Volume menus
• Fixed subtitle bugs involving parsing commas in SSA, and foreign encodings.
• Using Sparkle for future updates
• Fixed Transparency behavior in regards to correctly representing opacity and transparency

Something, I just found out is that, my pre-sparkle method of updating actually broke on Leopard so users didn’t get this update notification, however since 0.95 doesn’t work at all on Leopard, I’m sure such users have found the update since then who needed it, so it’s a good thing I’ve switched to sparkle on this release.

The Second Release

I got to fully test the sparkle update method by releasing, two weeks later, 0.96.1, which contained a few bugs that were introduced in 0.96.0’s haste (whoops), but also I got to try out some fun Leopard stuff.

Version 0.96.1 (v573)
• Fixed playlist delete bug – introduced 0.96.0
• Fixed playlist drag and drop bug – introduced 0.96.0
• Added Leopard Sized Icons
• Added Sparkle Preference Pane
• Fixed preference bug that ignored preference changes – introduced 0.96.0
• Code signed
• Resolution Independent GUI (Glitchy in Tiger, works pretty good in Leopard)
• New and Updated AppleScripts for the Script Menu

I added code signing as a build stage, however I haven’t figured out if being signed actually does anything. I thought it was supposed to reduce warning messages when downloading updates, however I tested downloading two copies of the same code signed NicePlayer and they both had the same warning dialog. Oh well. Sparkle updates don’t seem to cause warning messages, but i think that is not dependent on the code signing.

I also added new 512px icons, they are fun, the main app icon looks like glass in coverflow.

It’s great.

I updated quite a few of the default AppleScripts for the script menu. Since Leopard made setting the default dvd player scriptable, I’ve updated my script that previous did the same with laborious UI scripting (but still falls back for tiger). Also I’ve fixed the fullscreen behavior of the aspect ratio scripts so that by default they rescale to fit the screen after change the ratio. Finally, the most interesting to me of the default scripts changes, is that I added a pair of scripts to set the UI resolution for just NicePlayer. This means that if you want to set the scale of NicePlayers interface to 300% you can, with out using Quartz Debug and without effecting any other applications. The ideal usage of this feature in my mind is if you have a large screen and a wireless mouse and you want to control it from across the room. But I’m sure it helps with 30 inch screens upclose as well, I’m sure there are other uses, it’s always interesting to find out the creative things people use NicePlayer for.

Here is a picture at 300%, although it’s on my macbook so screen the size isn’t large enough to contain the menus but you get the idea.

I’m very excited to get resolution independence working on NicePlayer, it’s something I tried to do on Tiger but I wasn’t having success, but with the new Leopard docs I finally figured it out. Although the changes I made work for resolution independence on Tiger, there are some weird glitchy bugs in windowing behavior such that I don’t recommend using it on Tiger.

The Third Release?

So there appear to be two significant bugs in 0.96 that have been reported. The first is that NicePlayer and Leopard Spaces aren’t friends, I have some ideas of where to look to figure out what is going on, so I’m hopeful, and if i do figure out I’ll just release another small update 0.96.3 rather than waiting for 0.97. The other bug I’d like to fix, but It’s only been reported twice and I can’t reproduce it, is that on Tiger some people have reported that the Volume icon shows up over the video and stays there on open and doesn’t disapear, since I can’t reproduced it, even though I have a Tiger install, it makes it kind of difficult. So if anyone has any clues to reproducing it, send preferences files or whatever, I’d appreciate it.

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.96.X the Early Leopard"

Although NicePlayer is still Mac OS X only and will probably stay that way, it’s now open source and what better animal than a penguin represent open source (even though it suggests linux)...plus NicePlayer’s icon and widgets are shinier (they literally have a sheen now) so that’s why this release is the Shiny Penguin¹.

¹ Previous releases were the Dark Horse and the Bad Wolf.

Open Source

NicePlayer is tri-licensed under the MPL, LGPL, GPL. They are all copyleft licenses, MPL (Mozilla Public Licenses) is the least restrictive it terms of reuse. MPL is not what “GPL-haters” like to call viral as it only pertains to the licensed code that you are modifying and not the rest of your projects code that is incorporating it.

Shiny Controls

I gave the controls sheen, they extend across the movie bounds continuously when the video is black it’s more obvious that they are controls and not strange floating symbols.

Subtitles

I’ve also added basic external subtitle support, it was something I wrote simple parsers for a year ago, but never added a renderer, I kept on putting it off, so finally decided to put it in this release get some feedback.

It’s already been reported that I don’t allow the encodings to be set for subtitles. When this was reported I figured it’d automatically work with UTF-8, but it actually automatically treats it as a c string unless a Byte Order Mark is at the front of the file. This typically doesn’t get added for UTF-8 because it can mess things up for some kinds of files (though it does not in this case).

So the next version I will change it to the 10.4 api’s, which have been improved for dealing with encodings. We probably will stick to making UTF-8 and UTF-16 the only guaranteed way of your encodings working (with out BOM being necessary for UTF-8), because even if most subtitles out there aren’t Unicode they should be, and it’s not hard to convert (we may include a simple converter next release too), and that is preferable to adding a huge list of encodings in the preferences.

Perian

Perian has helped shape some of the features for this release. I’ve been compiling from source seeing what is in store for version 1.0, such as matroska support. My test file had chapters,subtitles, and alternate audio all show up in QuickTime Player. So I added menus so they can be used with the CoreVideo engine in NicePlayer too. Also the current version of Perian has FLV support, so we added an association for that file type so you can opened by double click.

Virtual DVDs

Another program that inspired a feature was Virtual DVDs. Virtual DVDs allows you to wrap a VIDEO_TS folder in a bundle with the extension .vdvd which makes it double clickable from the finder to open in DVD Player. So I adopted their convention so you that can double click one of those same .vdvd bundles to open in NicePlayer as well.

Scary Transparency

Finally last feature I’d like to note is that we’ve made it possible to make movie windows transparent. I’m not sure there’s a good reason for it (beyond a couple people asking for it), but then again it only can be invoked via applescript (so it doesn’t clutter up the GUI). We have a default script under the heading “Just For Fun”.

Rundown

Here’s the official change list for 0.95:

• 100% Open Source (MPL/LGPL/GPL)
• Added support for Chapters, and enabling extra Audio and Video tracks for the Core * Video engine
• Added basic support for external subtitle files
  • .ssa substation alpha,
  • .srt SubRip,
  • .sub MicroDVD
• Added file type extension recognition for
  • .divx,
  • .vdvd (package around VIDEO_TS ala “VIrtual DVDs”),
  • .mkv (Matroska added in anticipation for future Perian support),
  • .ogg( for Theora/Ogg support provided by the xiph components),
  • .flv (for current perian support)
• New fresh look
• Added AppleScript-able Transparency, with a default script for applying it
• Added preference for volume memory on creation of new windows
• Added AppleScript vocabulary for determining full screen
• Fixed bug that caused niceplayer to hang on quit after watching a DVD on a Core2Duo Macbook
• Fixed bug involving not being able to unmute
• Fixed bug involving changing window level in fullscreen
• Fixed bug in auto dvd launching script
• Fixed bug that sometimes would cause movies to show up black when opened off a removable disk
• Fixed various crashes

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.95 the Shiny Penguin"

So I think, at the suggestion of Robert, I’m going to get in the habit of naming each release of NicePlayer with the Adjective Noun. 0.92 was the Dark Horse which end up pretty accurate, I said so at the time based on versiontracker downloads compared to that of other alternative movie players for mac. Excluding MPlayer and VLC which get a huge amount of downloads, NicePlayer is probably only second to DjoPlayer (MPlayer based) in Download rates on versiontracker.

However there has been recent evidence of NicePlayer being a Dark Horse, while NicePlayer is still quite unknown, there was a review on MacMod’s Video Player Roundup comparing QuickTime Player, Windows Media Player, VLC, MPlayer, and NicePlayer, and the conclusion found VLC the best with NicePlayer as runner up.

Niceplayer is one of the best. For watching movies, the onscreen controls are near perfect. With a little work on file compatibility, Niceplayer would quickly reign supreme over the other Mac video players.

If only file compatibility require just a little work. NicePlayer is mostly and most importantly a user interface, and for file compatibility, we have very basic plugin interface that really lets you plug in any cocoa view as a replacement and you just have and have it respond to a few commands. So I’m hoping for third party action on the file compatibility front. You can find out more on the NicePlayer Plugins page such as how to make one, and what plugins already exist.

Why so Bad?

So why call 0.93 the Bad Wolf you say? Chose it at random that’s all…it just sounded good…does it matter? But you’ve heard that before? You’ve heard it lots of times? Everywhere you go? Two words following you? Nah, just a coincidence, like hearing a word on the radio and then hearing it all day.

Obscure Cult Sci-fi references aside, there are a few Bad Wolfish things NicePlayer does, such as has a somewhat controversially script menu. Apple provides a global script menu but it’s not a great experience for application specific commands, and especially not useful if you want to provide some default scripts to novice users. Some people say you should only use the Apple provided menu, but there also prominent apple apps with their own menu too. NicePlayer has taken a side and it’s CocoaScriptMenu (since I wrote it for this app). The other thing I added in this release somewhat Baddish was an easter egg, something of no value what so ever, but is now a hidden feature. What is you ask? Well since a signature feature of NicePlayer is the ability to have floating movie windows, the new hidden feature is the ability to have movie windows lay below the desktop icons, see I said useless, but fun and hidden. And finally Robert’s been battling the Tiger DVD Framework, for some reason the framework has been degrading functionality wise as of late, so the DVD plugin is a bit of a workaround this version.

Other than that I wouldn’t say 0.93 is Baddish, unless of course this is a case when bad means good. This version should be much more stable, it should work better on 10.3.9 than the last one, it smartly handles non-square pixels with DV footage, and can send us crash reports if you install Smart Crash Reports.

The Full Run Down

What’s new in Version 0.93 (v394)

• Can switch playback engines on the fly


• Detects correct aspect ratio of DV footage (Tiger only)


• Can open content nested content by opening it’s folder


• Integrated AppleScript Menu


• Manually change aspect ratios via the script menu


• General stability enhancements


• Increased applescript vocabulary


• Support for Smart Crash Reports if you have it installed (http://www.unsanity.com/smartcrashreports)


• Fixed bug that caused windows to disappear


• Fixed bug that caused NicePlayer to crash when launched on a case-sensitive file system.


• Fixed multiple bugs with dvd playback on tiger


• Fixed bug with playlists occasionally opening improperly

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.93 the Bad Wolf"

So I started making some default scripts and other script examples for NicePlayer. I then realized that I needed keyboard shortcuts on the CocoaScriptMenu. DVD Player’s script menu just uses numbers in order, I don’t like that, another solution I considered was to have some kind of separate config, either gui or text file. However, since renaming is required to order and change the menu text in CocoaScriptMenu, that could get a little complicated.

Keyboard Shortcuts

The solution I settled on was to add the keyboard shortcut itself to the filename. I feel this implementation ended up working really well. The main worry I had was that user error could end up disrupting the host application’s keyboard shortcuts, but the script menu is loaded later than the other menus, so it’s menu shortcuts have the least precedence and thus show up blank if a user tries to duplicate a shortcut. To facilitate adding keyboard combos to file name, I came up with an ASCII representation for the modifiers that kinda look like the real symbols and all require shift to create them (so they won’t reduce the possible representable keyboard short cuts). The symbols are as follows

∗ – Command

$ – Shift

^ – Control

% – Option

To create a short cut you add it between two curly braces in the file name before the file extension, ordering the modifiers before the key character, such as Hello World {∗^$H}.scpt for command-control-shift-H.

However after implementing this, I realized most people are going to be using a filesystem that supports unicode, and this can look a lot prettier. So I added support for these shortcuts, not just in the ascii, but using this UTF8:

⌘ – Command (0×2318 PLACE OF INTEREST SIGN)

⇧ – Shift (0×21E7 UPWARDS WHITE ARROW)

⌃ – Control (0×2303 UP ARROWHEAD)

⌥ – Option (0×2325 OPTION KEY)

And you can surround them by LEFT & RIGHT SQUARE BRACKET WITH QUILL (0×2045 & 0×2046) instead of curly brackets. Such as Hello World ⁅⌃⇧⌘H⁆.scpt

While UTF8 looks a bit neater, for safety sake, all my default NicePlayer scripts will use the ASCII way. And the ASCII way is also easier to type, so I’m guessing it will end up being the preferred way, but it’s left up to the user.

You can even add Function Key shortcuts by just typing out {F13} or {⌃⇧F2} or even {∗F16}.

and this scheme should cover a great majority of the possible keys, getting all of them however would require more parsing, which I don’t really see the need at this point, but is possible in the future.

The down side is that I added a new instance variable to the Command classes, so if you do any subclassing of these classes you’ll need to recompile those subclasses with this framework Versioning and Compatibility (not a big deal as CocoaScriptMenu is meant to be embedded not shared).

Count of Scripts

I added a method to the menu generator to count the number of scripts, this can be used to determine whether or not scripts are currently installed.

Panther Compatibility

I did a little bit of hacking to give developers basic usage of the framework under 10.3.9, but I haven’t done any testing with other 10.3ness such as compiling under GCC 3 or actually compiling on 10.3. That said with these compatibility additions there’s a little more work needed when adding support for new filetypes or being more specific with filetypes, as I pretty much just fake the UTI stuff when it runs in Panther and thus more faking or a better solution is required, but if you don’t care about 10.3 then you can continue to not worry about it.

PS

MarsEdit rocks, I wrote this post in it and didn’t have to worry about the UTF8 characters, they were safely converted to html Entities.

Continue reading "Cocoa Script Menu Revised 1.01"

The Sunday Project

So last sunday I started on something new, really it’s a feature for NicePlayer, but also a feature in a lot of other existing apps out there, and could be useful in a lot of cocoa programs that don’t have this feature yet, so I wrote my implementation as an embedable framework, and am releasing under the MPL/LGPL/GPL (my latest preferred OSI approved license for those who notice what license I release under).

So here’s a riddle, what do iTunes, DVD Player, Xcode, FlySketch, NetNewsWire, MarsEdit and BBEdit all have in common?

Give up?

They all have one of these (more or less):

Their own script menu.

Uses in NicePlayer

Having a script menu in NicePlayer has been something in the back of my mind for a while. There are some features requests, while really simple, are very specific to individual user needs and we can’t justify adding a feature. Sometimes there are features requests that just don’t fit into Robert’s or my idea of NicePlayer, and we barely have enough time to add the features we want to add, so in the next release users can add their own menu commands in this script menu.

One of the features introduced in 0.92 of NicePlayer was an option to remove the fixed aspect ratio. Maybe you want to distort the movie, maybe the aspect ratio is just slightly off, this feature works in those cases, and only adds one more menu to the window and is inline with adding basic window options in the Window menu that we did before. However this isn’t useful when someone has a lot of media that is consistently using non-square pixels. In the case of standard media formats, the proper behavior of NicePlayer should be to automatically adjust (this feature has been added for the DV codec when using the CoreVideo plugin in the next version of NicePlayer 0.93). However there are people out there for some reason, how have media that is encoded with non-square pixels for no standard reason, and there isn’t a way to detect the correct aspect ratio. It turns out writing an AppleScript with the current NicePlayer dictionary to set a Window to a different aspect ratio is pretty trivial, so this is one of the scripts we’ll likely include in the next release (since its one the scripts i’ve been using to test anyway).

I think the main benefit of having the script menu, will be nicer integration with other apps. Whether having it integrate with a cataloging app, Toast, or just organizing with the finder, there seem to be many potential uses in this respect.

CocoaScriptMenu.Framework in Your Own Program

The framework is called CocoaScriptMenu.Framework and available on my software page. It’s not my favorite name of the software I’ve written, but I think it’ll help in being google-able for those wanting it’s feature. I’m releasing it as version 1.0, and as I said before under the MPL/LGPL/GPL license. The basic way to use it is to:

1. Add the framework binary to your project
2. Add the framework to a copy phase that puts it into the Frameworks folder of your app bundle
3. Add this line [[CSMScriptMenu sharedMenuGenerator] updateScriptMenu]; somewhere right after the nib loads (while including <CocoaScriptMenu/CocoaScriptMenu.h> for that file of course)

And that will give you a typical script menu once you compile and run your app.

Features

I wrote typical, as not all script menus are the same. I tried to add what I felt were the best features of all the script menus, while being able to behave, depending on how you use it, like 80% of the script menus I’ve seen with out any extra customization. Some of the features are

• It looks for scripts in Application Support/AppName/Scripts in all domains.
• You can make submenus by nesting folders.
• You can add a menu separator by adding a file or folder with a dash as it’s name.
• You can order scripts, separators, and folders using a two digit prefix on the file name (two digit prefix not required).
• It runs AppleScripts, Automator Files (.workflow), Application Bundles, and Shell Scripts (sh/python/perl/whatever but remember you need executable permission for shell scripts).
• It automatically updates the menu, without relaunching the application, as you add items or folders nested inside the script folder, unless that folder didn’t exist at Application Launch.

Extending w/o Modifying

The singleton [CSMScriptMenu sharedMenuGenerator] has 4 optional delegate methods that allow you to keep the core functionality but make some slightly different script menus without having to modify the source (although modification is certainly an option. (warning most of this is untested as I use only the default implementation of each of these in NicePlayer)

-(NSMenuItem*)showScriptFolderMenuItem;

If your delegate implements this method, it needs to return a NSMenuItem that should be used instead of the Open Scripts Folder menu item. An example would be a menuitem with a submenu with an open command for each each script folder in the domains. The default behavior is a menuitem to open the first location returned by the delegate method -(NSArray*)scriptLocations; in the finder.

-(NSArray*)argumentsForShellScripts;
The default implementation returns nil. Implement this method in your delegate if you want to pass string arguments to any shell script. (is not used for AppleScripts, Application Bundles or Workflows)

-(id)scriptMenuItemOrItems;
This should return something that has a subMenu or menu getter for an NSMenu. This NSMenu is what the script menu items get added too. You may also return an array to add the script menu in multiple places in your app. The default implementation adds a Script Menu in-front of the Help menu and returns it.

-(NSArray*)scriptLocations;
The default implementation, returns the paths to Application Support/MainBundleName/Scripts for every domain that the path exists, with the User domain guaranteed first. Also creates the folder for the user domain if it doesn’t exist.

Extending by Modifying

So in version 1.0 the script running implementations are very basic. They are setup as a Class Cluster, with the CSMCommand class providing the public interface and several subclasses that implement script running for various types of scripts or executables.

Diagram of class hierarchy:

alloc on CSMCommand returns a singleton instance of CSMPlaceholderCommand. CSMPlaceholderCommand’s initWithScriptPath: works as parameterized factory method and depending on the path passed in returns the correct concrete implementation allocated and initialized.

So to extend the implementation of script execution for an existing file type, you would just modify one of the subclasses. To add a new filetype you would modify the initWithScriptPath: factory method and add a new subclass.

initWithScriptPath: uses Apple’s Uniform Type Identifiers to determine which concrete class to instantiate, so order does matter, make sure you add the more specific type checks in the beginning of the method and the more general towards the end.

There are a lot of ways that I can think of that the concrete script execution classes could be improved, however for NicePlayer these all work well, thus I figured for version 1.0 it was better to stick with the basic implementation and release it now, rather than try and over engineer. So I’ll wait and see if people need more or not, not to mention they have the option of contributing code.

Updated at Cocoa Script Menu Revised 1.01

Continue reading "My Sunday Project - Reusable Cocoa Script Menu"

Apple Bug Friday

So I’m was reading many blogs today, and I feel so uncool with all these “Apple Bug Friday” posts. I have an apple bug (or at least I considerate it, don’t know if apple will) that I had written some unit tests to explain the behavior problems. I’ll have to prime for next friday it’s 19 minutes past saturday!

The state of the projects

Yeah so this was not the summer of code for Jay Tuley, but now that the girlfriend is finishing school in London, I’ll have some time this fall that will need occupying with code.

So basically NicePlayer is the project that has gotten the most attention from me, because Robert works on it too, and I use it on a regular basis being that it’s now september we’ve missed another self imposed milestone, whoops. I’ll have some time to work on this for sure this fall.

i’ve worked on iEatBrainz very intermittently, fixing little bugs, trying to get the applescript update to be more reliable, I’m going to release it soon, and that will probably be the last update of that code base by me, then I’ll focus on iEatMeta.

iEatMeta was going really good in the spring, and then poof I stopped working on it as life got in the way, it’s current status is that I have reading m4a, m4p, and mp3 metadata that iTunes does plus MusicBrainz data, I want to make some design changes in the api, before releasing the source, I’m not sure the best way to implement writing the m4a tags, I have some ideas, but I think reading is quite useful, and it’s better to get the framework out there, just incase for some reason life gets in the way again.

Sleep

I had some other odds and ends but I’m too sleepy, and am starting to forget what I’m writing, I’d rather just post something now than waiting and posting later. Good night!

Continue reading "Odds and Ends, Summer of Non-Code"

So NicePlayer 0.92 was released this week, and it seems to be downloaded more an more with each release, it’s by no means the most popular video player but it’s got an devoted fan base growing. Tiger QuickTime 7 playback is just really awesome, and the new NicePlayer Core Video plug-in fixed the problem I had with getting dropped frames with 1080 H.264, it’s now very smooth on my Dual 2Ghz G5.

While 0.92 works on Panther, it was barely tested (but I did test it), future versions I can’t guarantee will work. A lot of AppleScript bugs in the previous version disappeared in Tiger, and also I’m getting better at making things scriptable, so I think there will be less problems with this release (at least in Tiger). The most notable applescript change was that I added some multi-screen support for the enter full screen command so that you can do:

tell application “NicePlayer”
   activate
   open choose file
   enter full screen on screen 2
end tell

and get the video to fullscreen on an alternate monitor with out having to move the window there first. Actually, since I haven’t setup my second monitor since moving, I only tested this with “on screen 1”, so that was bad of me, don’t let Robert know, and if you have multiple monitors should let me know if this works.

Something fun I thought of after releasing NicePlayer (so it wasn’t added to the example scripts) was a script for auto playing DVDs in NicePlayer when you insert a video DVD.

You just tell the System Preferences to run this script ->

on video DVD appeared aDVD
   tell application “NicePlayer”
      activate
      set tPlaylist to make new playlist
      add (POSIX path of aDVD) to tPlaylist
      enter full screen window of tPlaylist
      play tPlaylist
   end tell
end video DVD appeared

And Voilà you don’t even need to set the preferences to auto play or auto fullscreen or anything awesome!

The playlist support in NicePlayer is a much simpler than what I had planned, just haven’t had enough time. I’ve been wondering if all the stuff I wanted to add would have been excessive. I’m starting to feel more and more like the simple playlist is closer to the right level of sophistication and to go beyond that NicePlayer needs to just integrate with a separate video database program instead.

The last thing I’d like to mention, if you want to localize NicePlayer or fix a localization, email us before you try and we’ll send you the file to edit, by doing it this way we can keep translations with each version that don’t change, this technique isn’t very reliable when we are given a nib rather than this file.

Anyway that’s all for now, and I’ll post the full new feature list here:

Latest release: 0.92 (v320)

• Basic Saving/Loading Playlists (.nicelist)
• Completed plugin interface
• Basic Core Video support (Tiger only) for improved playback
• Option to resize width and height independently
• Option to use scroll wheel for volume
• Support for notification overlays
• Smart window layout when opening new windows
• Fixes for interface bugs
• Can associate WMF and ASF files with NicePlayer
• Button in title bar for showing and hiding playlist
• AppleScript support for enter full screen on screen x for multiple monitors

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.92 the Dark Horse"

Lot’s of changes in NicePlayer 0.91

Version 0.91 (v251) • AppleScript Support • Faster Application Startup • Better DVD playback support • Context menus, especially useful for DVDs • New media navigation menu • Screen no longer sleeps during DVD playback • UI elements fade out and other GUI improvements • Option arrow keys do frame step • Bug Reporting website • Improved Japanese Localization • Chinese Localization

There’s also a real product information website at http://niceplayer.indyjt.com/
And we have a support website powered by trac at http://charon.laya.com/niceplayer/

So Applescript Support is probably the biggest thing in this update, and I didn’t get near all I wanted into the applescript dictionary, but I learned a lot about implementing applescript dictionaries, and hope to add more in later versions. I am still kind of wondering if the cocoa scripting classes are still second class, but maybe it’s just because apple’s documentation on implementing applescript dictionaries in cocoa is so poorly documented. I was pretty much using this very useful cocoadev page to figure out how to implement the less straight forward stuff. Anyway I hope the dictionary gets some use, and wouldn’t mind suggestions on further things to add.

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.91"

Robert Chin and I have released NicePlayer 0.88, it has some significant enhancements.

Version 0.88: • Widgets show up when application is inactive • Clicking on time elapsed toggles between time remaining and time elapsed. • File icons for recognized types • Customizable fast forward and rewind speeds • Preferences for looping, time elapsed/remaining default display, fast forward/rewind speed • Fixes for network loading of files • Auto Update Check

Being able to access the player controls without having to click once on the window, because the application is not the active app, is one of the best enhancements in this update. It wasn’t even something that was on my radar, but Robert it was on Robert’s and he got it working. w00t!

In the last version the compressed file size broke the 100k barrier, which was kind of sad, people seemed to like that it was such a crazily small download, but of course it was n’t going to last as more features are added. However, this time the compressed filesize almost doubled!! But it’s only due to the fact that I added icons for each of the supported quicktime movie types. I looked for awhile on the net, trying to find Apple’s Aqua Icon Kit, but alas it was no where to be found. However, I knew I had downloaded it at some point because I used it on 3DOSX, so luckily I found it on an old backup. I don’t know why apple got rid of it, it was a really useful set of Photoshop templates and actions, Oh well.

I was glad to get the “Auto Update Check” into this version, it’s actually part of my IndyKit framework, I’ll be releasing a minor update soon of iEatBrainz that has it too. I was supposed to have the auto update done in summer, but just don’t have as much time these days to work on personal projects (It’s frustrating I’ve got too many Ideas argggh). Robert kept hassling about releasing this version, but I was holding off because I really wanted to get the automatic check for updates in, and I’m glad I did.

Anyway my lunch break is over, back to paying job.

Continue reading "NicePlayer 0.88"

In one day, NicePlayer downloads eclipsed the downloads of iEatBrainz for the month of November, thanks to to 500 visit through this page http://mac.page.ne.jp/ . Okay so we are only 7 days into the month of November, still I’d accept a donation of a NicePlayer nib translated to Japanese.

For an iEatBrainz update, it’s going through some much need code bloodletting.

Continue reading "In one day..."

So right now I’m tracking a bug in iEatBrainz in which the library xml file it’s reading and the actually library when talking through applescript aren’t matching, even when the application waits long enough for iTunes to synch out another update. My first guess was that perhaps there is yet another preset location that iTunes checks for music libraries and those effected might have multiple files which iEatBrainz is choosing incorrectly. However from the preliminary emails I’ve received I don’t think this is the case anymore. So it just occurred to me today that if iTunes Music Library.xml was read only the user wouldn’t notice using iTunes, and sure enought I’ve been able to reproduce the bug symptoms making the library file read only. I’m not sure if this is actually the reason for the reported cases but putting in a check will at least help narrow it out as a cause.

The problem right now is that adding the check will require a new version of IndyKit. IndyKit is a little up in the air right now with other features that I’ve been working on. These features will effect both iEatBrainz and NicePlayer so that release won’t be right away. I’m rather excited though with IndyKit as I believe the classes I’m writing will be very useful to many applications. Once I finish with these classes I will be writing up actually documentation for IndyKit, and officially releasing it.

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