Thu - January 3, 2008Syncopation 2.0 is releasedToday, I'm pleased and excited to announce the
release of Syncopation
2.0.
No doubt, the most exciting feature in Syncopation 2.0 is the support for playlists. Not only will it replicate playlists when you Synchronize but you can also define a subset of your music collection to sync between libraries using playlists, much as you might do with your iPhone or iPod. Another neat feature which is new in Syncopation is the ability to drag and drop tracks between libraries in Syncopation to transfer them to a remote computer. You can drag from your local computer to a remote computer, or in the other direction. As the content is transferred from one computer to another it is automatically added to iTunes. This is a super-easy way to just transfer a few tracks in a snap. Also, thanks goes out to those of you that tried out the Beta releases and sent me feedback. I was able to make key improvements to the product during the Beta thanks to a great user base! - alan Posted at 10:37 PM Read More Thu - November 29, 2007Beta 3 releaseA new build of the Syncopation 2.0 Beta has been
posted to the Sonzea web site. The Syncopation 2.0 Beta 3 release may be
downloaded from http://www.sonzea.com/syncopation/beta.html.
This release has improved error reporting and logging of operations during a
synchronization; fixes a bug which was found by a user in which the sync options
for Movies, Podcasts and TV Shows were not implemented properly; and resolves a
Leopard compatibility issue with drag-and-drop which was found in the Beta 2
release.
I'm hoping that this will be the final Beta release before releasing it officially. I still have a bunch of work to do on the documentation, though. For some reason, that is always the last thing to get attention. Posted at 11:08 PM Read More Sun - November 18, 2007Beta UpdateI have just posted an updated build of the
Syncopation 2.0 Beta to my web site. The Syncopation 2.0 Beta 2 release may be
downloaded from http://www.sonzea.com/syncopation/beta.html.
With this release, I have been making bug fixes and performance improvements and have also much improved Leopard compatibility. While 1.0.4 runs fairly well on Leopard, the new 2.0 drag and drop features and application startup routines had some issues on Leopard. This new Beta 2 release has addressed all Leopard compatibility issues that have been discovered. My previous post said I expected to release this by the end of November. As things stand now, that doesn't seem likely. There is still a lot of help files, documentation and such to write. However, as far as the code goes, I think things are quite close to the final state. In recent weeks, as I have upgraded my Power Mac from Tiger to Leopard, I have also been forced to upgrade my Subversion and TRAC server. The configuration I had implemented on Tiger was wiped out during the upgrade. It turned out to be not too hard, and I have created an article about how to install a secure Subversion and TRAC server on Leopard and posted it to my site. I have seen many other good resources on the Internet for this but not any once source that pulls it all together in terms of setting up HTTPS, the subversion repository, the TRAC components and the TRAC project. I sincerely hope that others find this useful. If people have comments or questions, please email me at syncopation@sonzea.com. One of the true drawbacks of my current blogging system is that it does not properly support comments or talk-back. I also would like more freedom as far as being able to post from either my MacBook Pro or my Power Mac. This is also not something which iBlog supports very well. In the near term, but probably after the Syncopation 2.0 release, I hope to install a blogging system such as Typo on my server. I have become very much enamored with Ruby on Rails recently, as that is what we are using at work in a couple of projects. I would really like to find a way to use Rails in my Sonzea project, and this seems like as good a way as any. Hopefully, this will make blogging both easier for me and richer in user content. Cheers! Posted at 09:14 PM Read More Tue - October 30, 2007Syncopation 2.0 BetaOn October 25, I sent a mail out to registered
users announcing the availability of Syncopation 2.0 for Beta Release. I'm
really happy to have reached this milestone and am going to be even happier when
I can make this broadly available.
The new Syncopation 2.0 Beta may be downloaded from http://www.sonzea.com/syncopation/beta.html There are several new features. For a complete description, see the release notes at http://www.sonzea.com/syncopation/beta-release-notes.html . But without a doubt, the playlist support is the most exciting to me. Syncopation will update and maintain playlists while synchronizing, but will also allow you to use your playlists to specify which tracks are synchronized. I have found this to be a much more powerful and intuitive method for controlling what content is synchronized than the "Pin" and "Block" functionality in the previous release. Another cool feature is the new look of the UI and the ability to transfer songs to a remote machine by dragging them. The UI is updated to look more iTunes like, and as it turns out, a bit more Leopard-like as well. On the topic of Leopard, I did install the released version over the weekend. I had installed some of the earlier builds, such as the WWDC developers build, on an external FireWire Drive but never really had too much time to play with them. Since they were Beta software, there were the standard caveats about not using the O/S for production systems and also that the Betas would not be able to be upgraded to the final shipping version of Leopard. Well, I don't know how that ended up, but the warnings were enough to keep me from installing the early Leopard releases on my main computers and using them as my primary operating system. My MacBook pro is a production system to me, as it is where I do all of my development for Syncopation and my PowerMac hosts my orders database and source code repository. So, I could not afford for either of those systems to be destabilized. Having Leopard on a separate drive allowed me to boot it up and toy with it a bit, but I was never really able to use it on a day-to-day basis. So, like the rest of you, I'm really just getting my feet wet with Leopard. I received an e-mail inquiry a couple days ago asking if Syncopation supports Leopard. From what I have observed, it runs fine. There's no major compatibility issue, but I do have a bit more Leopardization to be done. The primary issue is to have Syncopation support Time Machine's mechanism to specify which files are "cached data" and do not need to be backed up. So if you are running Syncopation (1.0.4 or 2.0 Beta) on Leopard and are using Time Machine, you may be backing up some Syncopation data that is not absolutely necessary. However, the volume is pretty small, so it is probably not going to really make a difference to you. By the time 2.0 releases, Leopard will be fully and officially supported. While I'm talking about support for operating system versions, I will say that in the near future, I plan to drop support for Tiger and start building Syncopation for Leopard only. Certainly, Syncopation 2.0 will support both, but beyond that, Leopard will probably be a requirement. I will say that one of the reasons... really the main reason... that I do this project is to have fun and to do some cutting-edge development that I don't get to do at my full-time job. There it is all about Windows, SQL Server, and Oracle, and we support some really old versions of those. Let me tell you, developing on old stuff is not fun. Having to test Syncopation on both Leopard and Tiger for compatibility does not sound fun to me either. And... (and this is the BIG one)... there are some really, really cool new API's in Leopard that I want to start using (Core Animation, Objective C 2.0, etc.) Thats about it for now. Try out the Beta, and drop me a line at syncopation@sonzea.com to let me know what you think, or if you find any issues. I'll be doing another Beta build soon (in a week or so) and expect to release it officially by the end of November. Posted at 09:29 PM Read More Thu - March 22, 2007Long overdueIt has truly been a while since I've taken the
time to update this space and I know that many of you are wanting to know what
is happening with Syncopation.
I've had several e-mails over the past few months asking (begging, even) for playlist support. (That plus ratings, play-counts, album art.) I'm sorry to say that at the current time I am not very close to having a new major release. My full time job at a Seattle area tech company has become quite demanding of my time as we are just entering the Beta testing phase of that project. The final release date will be within the next couple of months, but since December we have all been working many extra hours to ship our product. Unfortunately, that project has simply crowded out my time to work on Syncopation. I do have a good start on Syncopation 2.0, but it is really not ready for end users yet. I have to say that I don't expect to have very much time to devote to enhancements in Syncopation until May or June. After the push is over at my day job (and I take a much needed vacation) I hope to be able to focus more on getting that upgrade to Syncopation, including playlist support, out the door. In the meanwhile, I have been truly gratified to see how many people have downloaded and purchased Syncopation. I have received some very wonderful messages from people who found the program to be exactly what they were looking for. To those of you who have written and those who have not but are using my program, thank-you. Posted at 09:51 PM Read More Fri - August 4, 2006TextMateI'm an EMACS guy. I cut my teeth software-wise
writing code on Unix in college, and Emacs has always been my editor of choice.
When doing Cocoa development, I do use Xcode quite a bit as well. Its Emacs bindings are pretty close, and its got lots of other great stuff too that makes it not so painful to leave the comfort of Emacs. (Apple, please, please, please add keyboard macros!) Recently, however, I found a neat editor that is not trying to be an Emacs clone, but in a very "Apple-esque" way captures the power and extensibility of Emacs. That editor is TextMate from Macromates. I found it while watching a screencast tutorial on Ruby on Rails. I won't comment on Rails here (I'll save that for a later entry) but I found myself amazed ad that editor that he was using to pound out that code so quickly. I'm still in the evaluation phase of TextMate. I've found that Emacs and Xcode have a lot of inertia with me, and switching editors is not a simple proposition. But this one has a shot... Posted at 12:12 AM Read More Thu - August 3, 2006PlaylistsWithout a doubt, the ability to support playlists
has been the most requested feature that I've heard by email and in comments on
download sites. Honestly, this didn't come as too much of a surprise to me. When
I sync to my iPod, I have a set of specific playlists that I synchronize. I
like this feature, and I can also see how much more powerful and useful
Syncopation would be with this
feature.
In fact, there are a few people I've heard from for whom it is a necessity. If you have a 60GB music collection on your Power Mac and an iBook with a 40GB drive, it's pretty clear that you're not going to sync the whole library. Even so, I knew that there were a lot of people for whom Syncopation would be useful without playlists, and I wanted to get the product in the market and start getting some exposure and some feedback. Well you will be glad to know that playlist support is coming. I've been busy coding that feature up (plus some UI enhancements) when I haven't been busy with my "day job" and my two-year old! Playlist support has also turned out to be every bit as big of a feature to implement as I imagined it would be. It makes the issue of what is an addition or a deletion a bit less clear when you are talking about an addition to a playlist instead of an addition to the library. However, I've got a model going that I think people will find both intuitive and powerful. Back to the coding! Posted at 11:55 PM Read More Fri - June 23, 2006WWDC, Here I come!Today was the last day to register for WWDC at
the reduced rate. I suppose you could call it procrastination, but I like to
think of it as sound money management. After all, why would I register weeks
ago, when all I achieve is the loss of a few weeks interest on my $1,300?
At any rate, I did drop a chunk of change today to get a e-ticket to WWDC 2006. Obviously, I'm looking forward to getting a sneak peak at Leopard, but there's a bunch of stuff I'm interested in from an educational perspective as well. Syncopation makes pretty good use of Cocoa bindings, but I'm not doing Core Data. I've been doing my own reading/experimenting on the side with Core Data, but I'm hoping to attend a bunch of sessions on the topic. One of the other things I'm keen to get a bit more exposure on is WebObjects. I've got a significant amount of background with J2EE, but not too much with WO aside for a few of the tutorials in the Apple documentation. From what I've seen it looks pretty sweet, and as my requirements for my website grow, I'm hoping to use WO. I have to say, though, I have a nagging feeling that Apple is not very together when it comes to their story on the future of WO. The whole story about deployment on 5.3 was pretty disjoint. I'm hoping that Apple will be very clear about their intentions with this very cool platform at WWDC. Most of all, I'm just looking forward to rubbing elbows with other Mac developers. Plus a trip to San Francisco! Can't wait! A couple of other thoughts... I've pretty much called it a wrap on Syncopation 1.0.1. I'm planning on doing some more testing over the weekend. It should be available early next week. Lastly, kudos to the folks at Panic. In the past few weeks as I've been deploying files and content to my web site, I've really come to appreciate how slick Transmit is. It's truly an invaluable tool! I do think they do it a disservice by calling it an "FTP" client. I'm pretty wary about the (in-)security of FTP. Truth be told, I won't use FTP. It's SFTP for me, thanks. But Transmit is a pro when it comes to SFTP. Thanks guys! Posted at 11:30 PM Read More Sat - June 17, 2006Taking flightIt's been almost two weeks since my web site went
live and Syncopation 1.0 was first available for download. The initial response
was great, and a bit overwhelming at the same time. In addition to trying to
deal with getting this project off the ground, there's been plenty of work to do
at my day job and I had family in town to top it all off. It made for a hectic
first few days.
One of the things that I have really enjoyed about this project has been the exchanges I've had with some of the people that have installed and used Syncopation. Its been very exciting and gratifying for me to hear about how this program has helped people or solved a problem for them. It has also been interesting to hear peoples suggestions for what additions or enhancements they would like to see in the program. Thankfully, things have come back down to normal level of din, giving me a bit of time to get back to doing some coding. I have a few things in the works for the next version of Syncopation. One of the things that has been the most frequently requested is the ability to do Synchronization by playlist. That is definitely something I'm planning to support in the future. In the near term, though, I plan on doing more of a "maintenance" release of Syncopation, version 1.0.1, which will fix some issues that have come up in the last couple of weeks and add some minor new features that I think would be useful to people. More on this later. I'm mostly done with the coding, but want to do a bit more testing before I release v1.0.1 broadly. Blogging is also a new thing, this being my first entry, but I wanted to have a way to share information about Syncopation and other issues about Macintosh and software development for the Mac that I thought would be interesting to a wider audience. Posted at 09:48 PM Read More |
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Published On: Jan 03, 2008 10:40 PM |
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