iRATE radio

leŭksman

iRATE radio is a fine thing put together by some very fine people.

2006-03-04: I've acquired an Intel-based Mac Mini and have found, alas, that the current binary download dosn't work. Will want to fix that...

Disk image of the app, built from CVS 2004-06-28 (using SWT 3.0) (Distributed under GPL license; source is at the link above)

Contents 1 Plans 2 Major glitches 3 Minor glitches 4 Things that would be nice, when someone has the time

Plans

• Automate build & zip of Mac os X application bundle on Mac and Linux hosts (done)
• Automate creating .dmg disk image on Mac host (but maybe add in the readme or something)
• Automate .dmg disk image on Linux host... seems impossible so far. :(
• Web Start version for Mac... (hack version partly done)
• Make things oh so pretty -- bug list follows...

Major glitches

• Regular Quit command hangs the app, need to use Action/Quit (fixed)

Minor glitches

• Clicking column names doesn't set the list sorting (SWT bug #34160) -- worked around by adding sort submenu to the context menu
• Initial window too small (worked around by hardcoding a minimum width)
• Display corruption on buttons: (this has been fixed for Mac and Windows)
  
• Status bar and other bits not wide enough (this seems to have been fixed)
• Various operations like activating the application or resizing the window often interrupt playback.
• Asking for track info creates a new window, even if you already have one open for that track. (fixed in cvs)
• Menu bar takes as much as a second to show the menus again when activating the app. This seems typical of Java apps on Mac OS X, there may not be a good way around it.
• Status bar hints for menu items don't show until the menu is dismissed.

Things that would be nice, when someone has the time

• 'Credits' menu item should move to application menu, as the 'About iRATE...' item done!
• 'Quit' in 'Actions' menu is redundant, should be removed (once hang is fixed!)
• 'Settings/Advanced' perhaps should move to applications menu as 'Preferences', with the standard Cmd+, shortcut. Or, perhaps, a real prefs window should exist to replace the whole menu.
• Track info should be in the Actions menu as 'Get Info' with Cmd+I shortcut.
• There should be a standard 'Window' menu.
• It'd be nice to be able to do a 'Show in Finder' on the music files to be able to eg select and copy them easily. (I have a hack for this, but it's not checked in. Drag-n-drop of track files from irate to finder doesn't currently work, but is apparently the recommended way of doing this if it did. Might go ahead and hack it in as a mac-only feature, especially if the drag-n-drop continues to not work due to SWT bugs.)
• Being able to rate the current track or skip to the next track from the dock menu would be super nice. Done!