I have not had an Ocarina release in almost a year and a half. The last year has been busy (more on that later), but I haven’t forgotten about my pet-project!
I started working on a new rewrite of Ocarina in May 2013. I created previous versions by writing whatever features I felt like implementing at the time. There was no plan, and it didn’t take too long to transition into an ugly hackjob. I felt like the code would have been almost impossible to update without breaking everything, so I started fresh.
For the first few weeks I only worked on a design document. This allowed me to stay focused during development and gave me a chance to think out features before writing a lot of code. I really like this approach, and I recommend it to everybody before starting off on a project. I plan to keep this document updated as much as possible.
This is also the first version of Ocarina to have unit tests. I like these so far, since I can now focus on testing a single component without needing to have a functional GUI. I plan to keep these updated as much as possible, too.
Ocarina 6.0 is still Linux only and I don’t have the time, resources, knowledge or interest to support a Windows or OSX port. I am willing to work with anybody ambitious enough to attempt a port! Let me know …
Other notable changes:
- I continued to refine the UI (compared to Ocarina 5.10)
- I made the switch to GTK-MM and GStreamer 1.2
- I added support for “banned” and “favorites” playlists
- I created a .desktop file so Ocarina will show up in your “applications menu”
