Syncopation 2.0 Beta


Syncopation 2.0, featuring playlist support, is now in Beta release.

On 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: Tue - October 30, 2007 at 09:29 PM          

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