Weekend of Code

I found that for me this weekend is going to be a bit of a quiet affair so rather than sitting around all day doing not very much I decided that I’d try to be productive. It’s been a while since I sat down and done any meaningful amount of coding for myself so I thought that is where I’d start, my next question was what do I want to write? I then remembered that I’m not overly fond of most of the music players that I’ve tried on Windows, the closest so far to something I find acceptable is iTunes. With that I had it: my goal for this weekend would be to write (or at least make a dent in writing) a music player that I would like.

Alright, that’s all fine and dandy to say but what does that actually mean? Brainstorming it I came up with seven key features that I want in my media player:

Only plays music, doesn’t try to do anything else.
Watch folders.
Filter on album, artist, title.
Filter a filter.
Ability to queue songs while on shuffle.
Playlists.
A similar interface to iTunes.

While watching Justice League: The New Frontier tonight I made a bit of start by making some rough UI mock-ups in Balsamiq.

To implement this I’m planning on using C# and WPF, I haven’t had a good chance to play around with WPF or some of the new Windows 7 features that are available so I figured this would be as good a time as any. Finally my other goal with this project is an attempt to get me back into blogging, to that end I will hopefully be making a post at the end of each day summarizing what I’ve done – possibly with some screenshots. Until then I should be posting some updates to my twitter feed.

Tags: .Net, blogging, C++, music player, Programming, Projects, UI Design, WPF
Category: Me, Programming, Projects | 2 Comments

May 7, 2009, 12:05 am

Build System Redux

I decided upon lookiung through the documentation for the latest version of libvtemm that the running of the build commands needed a revamp. Previously the build output just plowed on regardless of whether the previous command succeeded or failed. This as you would guess is bad, you want to find out things have fallen apart as soon as possible without the follow on errors that are caused by an early command failing. Lucky for me the latest version of libvtemm (0.20.2) makes this very easy to do.

While stopping the build from running is a good start there was still more to be done, namely some way to indicate to the user the status of the build. To deal with this a bit more of a serious refactoring was required, this substantially changed the code of the build output class to such a degree that it no longer inherits from the same widget as it did before. Thankfully though it allowed for non-obtrusive place to add feedback to the user. With this in mind a progress bar was also added so that a user could tell how far along the build was at a glance.

Perhaps the most sane part of the change to build system is that now when the a build is initiated the if the build output is not visible it will be made visible, something that is should have been doing from the start. Finally a couple of pictures to show how the new build system looks in various states.

Tags: gIDE, libvtemm, Projects, screenshots, UI Design, User Interface
Category: gIDE, Projects | Comment

December 10, 2008, 4:22 pm

gIDE Update

The new Create project dialog I mentioned earlier this week has hit trunk as of about 5 minutes ago and everything seems to be working fine as always the svn repository is http://mlowen.com/svn/gIDE/trunk.

Before I get back to adding new features to gIDE there are a couple of more overhauls of the current system that I want to do, the parts I want to look at are:

Configuration system.
Add file dialog.
Remove file dialog.

The configuration system doesn’t need much more than some tweaking and at the most is a nights work. I’m also thinking about doing away entirely with the remove file dialog as it just seems clunky where a right click menu would do the trick. The add file dialog is the only one that I’m not overly sure how to approach as of yet, originally it was a quick hack to get the functionality in there (much like the create project dialog) with the intent of replacing it later. Well the time has come to do away with the quick hack but I’m just not sure what the new dialog should look like, all I know is I want something different from what I currently have which can be seen in the screenshots below.