Posted by: mschrag
The Prerelease Before the Prerelease - 19/08/2002 21:17
Well .. after many long nights, the new version is really close. I wanted to let the daring grab it and try it out to help catch any goofiness before putting it up. I've gone through the basic things (adding different soups, dleteing soups, deleting non-soups, downloading, synchronizing, importing).
Known issues:
1) Loop checking in the UI isn't in (though it is done at download time). So if you paste a playlist into another playlist that causes a loop, it will let you, but it will be fixed after the next download. This will be fixed for the release.
2) Pasting into and deleting from soups is not done yet (they just do nothing right now)
3) "Find Container Playlists" has gone bye bye for now ... This is primarily because soups are now actually playlists, and since you could setup a search that finds containers and itself would create containers, you can get into some nasty infinite loops -- this is kind of tied into #1 but even nastier.
4) Download w/ Full Path isn't working right now (Playlists have many parents, and I haven't decided how I want to track that path information). It will download fine, but it will only create paths for one level back up.
Notable things:
1) dmz put tag rewriting on download ... Check out Tools=>Options to turn it on
2) soups everywhere -- on the empeg, off the mpeg -- Checkout Tools=>Add a Soup Playlist... Essentailly each row of the list corresponds to a layer of the soup, so to have a "By Artist=>By Album", you would "Add Tag Layer=>Artist" then Add Tag Layer=>Source (Source = the generic name for Album). You can choose to add the soup onto the Empeg or only to jEmplode (this is like the old way)..
Notable things with soups: You should be able to copy sections of the soup and have them continue to update _as long as the soup you copied them from still exists_. If you remove the top layer of the soup, the sub-copies will stay there, but they won't update any longer. It is technically possible to have this work, but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth for now. Along these lines, there may be weird problems if you copy a subsection of a transient (jEmplode-only) soup and then delete the entire soup... I'm not positive if the copy will stay around or not (haven't gotten around to testin this).
3) Toby's new XML format is in there ... a lot easier to work with than the Emplode format.
4) There are several colors (and they go up the tree again). There is a dirty color (red), a "colored" color (blue), and a dirty-colored color (purple). Would people want a separate "marked" color? It's already checking marked, it's just not colorizing.
Anyway ... This has all the usual caveats of a hot-off-the-presses release, though I've spent a lot of time redoing a lot of the low-level system to make it more stable.
One thing I'm very curious about is the performance of the soups on Empegs with several thousand tunes. One performance note is that you may want to wait to open the soups until after their icon is set (you'll see what i mean). As soon as you open the soup, it has to calculate all the children and then it does quite a bit of event firing and array resizing to keep the tree in sync with the soup. This is an area I will be working on quite a bit, but you were warned (if it is taking a while to get the soup up to date).
I highly recommend JDK 1.4 ... I have not tested this on anything but 1.4 so far. I haven't even tried it on my Mac w/ 1.3 yet (I'll do that tomorrow), so if you have a Mac, fire it up and let me know how it goes.
The look and feel defaults to the system look-and-feel now ... On 1.4 I've tweaked a couple things to make the Toolbar look more natural... I'm curious what people think about this as opposed to Metal (the Swing look-and-feel). Anyone have any other look-and-feel preferences?
Anyway -- give it a shot... let me know what happens:
http://www.jempeg.org/jemplode20-supersecret.jar
ms
Known issues:
1) Loop checking in the UI isn't in (though it is done at download time). So if you paste a playlist into another playlist that causes a loop, it will let you, but it will be fixed after the next download. This will be fixed for the release.
2) Pasting into and deleting from soups is not done yet (they just do nothing right now)
3) "Find Container Playlists" has gone bye bye for now ... This is primarily because soups are now actually playlists, and since you could setup a search that finds containers and itself would create containers, you can get into some nasty infinite loops -- this is kind of tied into #1 but even nastier.
4) Download w/ Full Path isn't working right now (Playlists have many parents, and I haven't decided how I want to track that path information). It will download fine, but it will only create paths for one level back up.
Notable things:
1) dmz put tag rewriting on download ... Check out Tools=>Options to turn it on
2) soups everywhere -- on the empeg, off the mpeg -- Checkout Tools=>Add a Soup Playlist... Essentailly each row of the list corresponds to a layer of the soup, so to have a "By Artist=>By Album", you would "Add Tag Layer=>Artist" then Add Tag Layer=>Source (Source = the generic name for Album). You can choose to add the soup onto the Empeg or only to jEmplode (this is like the old way)..
Notable things with soups: You should be able to copy sections of the soup and have them continue to update _as long as the soup you copied them from still exists_. If you remove the top layer of the soup, the sub-copies will stay there, but they won't update any longer. It is technically possible to have this work, but it seemed like more trouble than it was worth for now. Along these lines, there may be weird problems if you copy a subsection of a transient (jEmplode-only) soup and then delete the entire soup... I'm not positive if the copy will stay around or not (haven't gotten around to testin this).
3) Toby's new XML format is in there ... a lot easier to work with than the Emplode format.
4) There are several colors (and they go up the tree again). There is a dirty color (red), a "colored" color (blue), and a dirty-colored color (purple). Would people want a separate "marked" color? It's already checking marked, it's just not colorizing.
Anyway ... This has all the usual caveats of a hot-off-the-presses release, though I've spent a lot of time redoing a lot of the low-level system to make it more stable.
One thing I'm very curious about is the performance of the soups on Empegs with several thousand tunes. One performance note is that you may want to wait to open the soups until after their icon is set (you'll see what i mean). As soon as you open the soup, it has to calculate all the children and then it does quite a bit of event firing and array resizing to keep the tree in sync with the soup. This is an area I will be working on quite a bit, but you were warned (if it is taking a while to get the soup up to date).
I highly recommend JDK 1.4 ... I have not tested this on anything but 1.4 so far. I haven't even tried it on my Mac w/ 1.3 yet (I'll do that tomorrow), so if you have a Mac, fire it up and let me know how it goes.
The look and feel defaults to the system look-and-feel now ... On 1.4 I've tweaked a couple things to make the Toolbar look more natural... I'm curious what people think about this as opposed to Metal (the Swing look-and-feel). Anyone have any other look-and-feel preferences?
Anyway -- give it a shot... let me know what happens:
http://www.jempeg.org/jemplode20-supersecret.jar
ms
On OSX 10.2
