pepsibobby

yeah people know what they are doing. Yeah cause i dont!!!

MP3Car.com

 

iamgnat

Actually after a brief look through the code, i'm impressed. In the key ways, your code is better than a lot I have seen from people that have been programming for a decade. Your code is clear and easy to follow, and your notes appear to be in the right places to answer the "huh?" moments. I'm not saying you don't have room to improve, but I think you could make a good career as a programmer if you wanted to

And I am usually super critical of others code (but i'm also used to having to go through crap that people were paid for ). Kudos for the good work

-dave

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super-fly

A couple of things i think would be great would be if you could play your entire library straight through or shuffle play it. Also if it could be formatted to be used on a 800x600 screen...it leaves a big black bar at the top right now. I have never programmed in coca before but i may mess around to see what i can do....just wodering if these would be easy things to do for someone who knew what they were doing?

iamgnat

For the 800x600, it's a bit more than just expanding the window. If you don't adjust the elements or add new things, then you still have 800x120 of empty pixels. Not that it can't be done, just that it isn't just a simple thing. I prefer the 800x600 resolution myself, so a 800x600 option with additional features is something i'm considering. I'm thinking of a toolbar with icons for some of the other features (photo, movies, web browser, desktop, etc..). I already have too many ideas and i've barely skimmed the code

On the Library issue. He is storing the info in CoreData which I have barely any experience with yet. If all the data is there and he is simply not including it in the playlist list, then it should be as simple and "re"-including it. If he is doing something else, then it depends on what he is doing.

-dave

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super-fly

hmmm....maybe he ll be able to comment on that last part

iamgnat

Just looked into it. Line 3497 would need to change from:

to:

Then it will import the Library playlist and it will function like the others. Depending on the size of your library, that could drastically increase the time it takes to import your library. Like his other recent changes, a config option to let it import the Library playlist would probably be better than the drastic change I show above.

-dave

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pepsibobby

i'm so excited. Guys let me know if you need anything visualy done, i am fairly Photoshop talented so let me know.

iamgnat

Don't get excited over me. Look back over my post history. I'm lots of talk

Problem is that I write code 8 - 10 hours a day for a living, so getting up the interest in writing code for fun is a challenge to say the least

He has done most/all the mundane work which is what usually kills me, so i'm hoping that I can build off his baseline. But until I actually post source updates or builds, don't rely on me for anything more than coding advice and design input

-dave

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aychamo

This is due entirely to iTunes. (Trust me, I hate having to reimport things all the time too) iTunes stores their playlists as only a reference number to a song. Like, say you have five Beatles songs in a playlist, the only thing iTunes will have in the playlist's data is, for example: "54, 3298, 109, 11, 3939." If you add even a single song or whatever to your library, iTunes seems to rearrange all of the numbers, and then the reference numbers the playlist points to are no longer valid. I mostly like the importer thing because I'm happy I can have a program run that long automatically without it crashing LOL)

So if you change your musc in your iTunes database, and then add some songs in the playlist, and if you *only* re-import your playlists, the files that the playlist points to may no longer be valid. So if you looked in the AMP database for songs that iTunes had previously tagged as 54, 3298, 109, 11, 3939, then it may point to three songs by Britney Spears and another two by NSYNC. And then you will kill me for those songs being played!!

lol

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aychamo

Hi Dave!

Yep, you can just remove the line, and it will import the entire library as a playlist. If you want to add a "Song" view, like on the iPod, all you really need to do is add another Array Controller to the NIB file, and bind it to the managed object context, but leave it's "Content Set" blank, and set it to the AMPSong entity. Then, create an outlet for it, and sort it by the key "name" on startup.

[Raceer had a nice idea to have the "Artist" button actually cycle through Artist View -> Album View -> Song View, where it would show all artists, all albums, or all songs, etc]

That will then be an array controller with every song in it, sorted by name. You can then add another table view, and have the data for the table view be bound to the new array controller to the key "name" of "arrangedObjects".

The other array controllers, where you go through Artist -> Album -> Song are all bound to each others content sets. This way, when you select an Artist, and make it go to the album view, all of the data in the album view array controller is set by the artist array controller. That is what, in effect, filters the data to only show the current artists' albums. And the same way for the song data from the album. If you create a new song array controller with the content set to blank, there will be no "filtering" so all songs will be listed!

re: my code; AMP is actually pretty much my first real project in Cocoa. It was a learning experience to say the least! It's funny, because if you look at the timeline of AMP, and see what features were in there first, and what was added later, you can see how the later stuff uses a lot better ideas. I was looking through it the other day, and saw a few whole chunks of code I could delete out.

I really should have organized the methods better, and broke it up into smaller files (lol @ 55 methods or whatever in one big file.) I figured I could try to make the "foundation" of AMP as stable as possible, and then go w/ plugins from there.

I'm still hoping to work on AMP. I just hope with some other developers out there that we can get some patches sent it, and some other nice stuff going on.

Re: 800x600; I really think that it would be a huge PITA to try to make AMP work for both 800x480 & 800x600. The best I could do would be make AMP be centered in 800x480 on the 800x600 screen, and the other stuuff would stretch, but not the UI.

To be honest though, I still don't have my Xenarc (would you believe it got stolen in the airport out of my families bags?? I have to order another one.. Hello mp3car.com store!)

Does 800x600 look fine on it? Does it look oddly compressed? If 800x600 works better on the Xenarc, and *everyone* is capable of running it, then maybe AMP should be coded in 800x600, and drop the 800x480? I just figured the x480 because it's the native resolution. Does it look weird in 800x600??

BTW - I was working on a differential diagnosis thing tonight and I had this idea for a nice little FrontRow style animation that would go between windows, like in FrontRow (when you select something, and the screen rolls out). I've got it running in a test program, so I'll try migrating it over to AMP real quick and see how it goes.

(If you look in the source, you can see some Fade routines I was playing with, but it was really weird and wasn't 100% reliable)

And thanks for the kind words!
Aychamo

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JakobMetzger

"Praise Aychamo"!!

aychamo

Hey guys!

You've got to check this version out!

http://www.aychamo.com/amp/AMP.zip

It's essentially the same as v1.0, so I didn't change the version number. As I posted above I stumbled onto a way to do some pleasant screen transitions, sort of like FrontRow. I've implemented in the main menus, where I thought it was appropriate, without "over-doing" it. Let me know what you think! There's four of them, and they get picked randomly.

NOTE: If you run this on a large monitor, you'll see strips of black on some of the animations. This is only because of your monitor being at a high resolution! Drop it down to 800x600 and play with it. I think it's pretty dang neat, without being to gaudy or whatever.

Let me know!

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aychamo

Jakob! God of Photoshop!

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VMI 02 GTI

First off, this is awesome software and I am psyched about running it.

As far as the 800x600 goes, I don't have a Xenarc, and after trying the MacVroom hack for DisplayConfigX, my monitor still will not allow adjustment to anything other than 800x600 or 640x480. I don't know if others have this problem...it makes no sense to me why a monitor with a native resolution cannot display at that resolution

In short, I would love an 800x600 version so I could finally give up FrontRow. Thanks and keep up the great work!

Edit: I now realize I am the 30th or so person to ask for this...all the more reason to do it!

Jirka Jirout

I have looked at the code and have few comments...

The whole app is very "fat" and monolithic. This is not just splitting the code into multiple files, this is mainly the almighty AMP_AppDelegate class and static structure of the application. Instead of a sort of "server" or a host application providing the modules with general services, the delegate handles everything internally.

Communication with plug-ins using disk files, huh. Why not the distributed notifications? Or why not load the plug-ins as bundles and use regular notifications?

The size/resolution - IMHO it should not be that difficult to make the app more or less screen size independent if this were handled programmatically. Of course it would be more difficult to lay out the interface to look nice.

Subclassing NSButton just to get rid of the focus ring, why? If you want to get rid of the focus ring, send this message (-setFocusRingType:) to all subviews of the window's content view when the window becomes visible and you won't need to worry about using proper classes.

Using CoreData - that looks like a very good idea. I am using the standard defaults system and have problems when I want to implement multi-user settings (depending on who drives the car). With CoreData, this could be much easier.

MP3Car.com