Sansa Clip friendly version of jsiPodFetch
I just released version 8.52 of jsiPodFetch
The only change is that I reset some ID3-tags as I mentioned in this post.
Podcasts on the Sansa Clip
I bought a Sansa Clip
A ‘feature’ of the Clip became a major pain for my podcast listening though. It will take all MP3:s that has ‘podcast’ as category and treat them in a special way. It will do that even if they are referenced in a playlist. It is realy annoying to find the playlist created by jsiPodFetch empty on the player.
I ended up adding some code to jsiPodFetch that resets the ID3-tags on all MP3:s as they are copied to the plyer. Now the category is ‘other’, album is ‘jsiPodFetch’, artist is the feed name and title is the title taken from the feed instead of the original title in the MP3.
It fixed my Sansa Clip problem and it also makes the display on the player show the same episode titels as jsiPodFetch.
I will make a release with the tag resetting and a lot of other bug fixes as soon as I can set up a decent testing environment.
Support free software
Do what you can to support the free software you are using.
I estimate the user base of my free software to about 1000, but over the years I have only been in contact with a hand full of them. It would help me a lot with the future development if I got to know what the users want to have and what they don’t like about it right now. A friendly note or a feature request means a lot to me and I’m quite sure other developers feels like that too.
We, free software developers, spend a lot of time developing our software and some hard earned money to keep our websites and internet connections running.
If you like a product and want to support it go to it’s home page and check out it’s sponsors. That way the developer will get some money and the advertiser will get some traffic. It will benefit a lot of people. You don’t have to donate ‘real’ money but the developer will still get some monetary support and it’ll build your karma.
So the next time you use your favorite freeware; take minute and figure out how you can contribute to it.
I just released jsiPodFetch 8.05
I use an overridden button for the flat buttons in jsiPodFetch and I had forgotten to call InitializeComponent in the constructor that gets called by the designer. This has the nasty side effect of making the control disappear from the form.
The underlying error was corrected before I released 8.04 but I missed one form when I checked for missing buttons; The form to confirm a new feed.
Old users probably never noticed since they have their feeds configured already, but new users got a modal form without button or control box. Doh!
It is taken care of now and I hope I haven’t scared to many users away from it.
jsiPodFetch has a broken installer.
Update: Now there is a working installer.
The latest release of jsiPodFetch has a broken installer. I uploaded the previous version while I’m fixing the error.
I had forgotten to add some files to the install package. The application will load, but it will have a blank main window.
I am really sorry for any inconveniences this has brought you.
I will re-release 8.04 later today.
jsiSoft in Swedish
Today I launched the Swedish sister site of jsiSoft. It is at jsi.se and all of my software that is translated to Swedish will be published there.
At the moment the screenshots for jsiPodFetch are still in English but they will be replaced real soon.
jsiPodFetch 7.44 released today
I just uploaded a new release of jsiPodFetch.
CHANGE LOG
7.44
- Enabled two simultaneous downloads. Might be more in the future.
- Made it possible to stop copying files to the player while syncing.
- Feed URL is now emptied after a click on add.
- Fixed a bug that prevented some feeds to be verified.
- All actions should have a wait cursor now.
- A copy of the settings file will now be made when loaded successfully.
Broken settings in jsiPodFetch, revisited
In my last post I wrote about my corrupted settings file in jsiPodFetch.
In the long term I intend to save the state in a different way from what I am doing now. To minimize the discomfort if/when the current solution fails I started to make a copy of the settings file if it loads successfully on application start. So the worst case scenario of failing settings is now that the last session is lost. Previously there was a big chance of losing all state assembled since the application was installed.
Broken settings in jsiPodFetch
The settings file for my installed jsiPodFetch was corrupted today. I probably turned of my computer while it was still saving the file. Since I know the inner workings of the application there wasn’t much of a hassle for me, but since application didn’t start at all I thing other users will just stop using it if this happens.
At the moment I store my settings in a serialized class. One of the properties of the settings class is a typed DataSet. This makes the XML file bot big and vulnerable. I think a should move the per media data to something else than a DataSet and store that in another file. I should also try to use previously downloaded files to recreate state data if the file get corrupted again.
The solution I am thinking about right now will use a standard OPML-file for the feeds and a per feed file for media item state. I might just skip the OPML-file and search for the per feed files in the library structure.
Doh! Nasty bug in jsiPodFetch
The last release wasn’t thoroughly tested and this morning I found a nasty bug that prevents the application to start on its first run.
That is a god way to get rid of users, isn’t it?
I added code in the last release to check for the device name of the player. That way the application can find the player even if the drive letter is changed. If that happens I replace the last drive letter with the current drive letter in the player path setting. The problem is that there is no player path on the first run so I get an ‘index out of range’ exception early in the application.
It is fixed now so I will do a new release tonight or tomorrow. It will probably not be tested enough either, but at least it should not piss of new users.
