Ocarina 6.0

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”

Download Ocarina 6.0 here!


Posted

in

by