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Hmm, no updates for almost a month. That probably isn’t good. I probably say that all the time and do nothing about it.

So, a new release of Comical. In fact, I think there has been two releases since I lost wrote about it. The previous version added support for archiving and browsing said archives and various other things. This release is mainly a maintenance that fixes a few things.

One problem was a (handled!) crash when moving through a comic archive after renaming a comic - I forgot to update the state of some variable, so easy enough to fix. Another one wasn’t my fault, but the fault of Awkward Zombie’s web-server being incorrectly configured and probably lending itself to a security issue by using a space in its HTTP Name/Value pair headers.

View: Comical

Come and git yer new releases…

Comical

This was released a few days ago, but I’ve just updated it as I made a bit of a whoopsie. Comical is a web-comic viewer that supports a database of configurable comics.

My Blockbox HTPC software had a plugin that supported the viewing of comics but testing was time-consuming as it required Blockbox to be restarted and such. So I moved the code into a separate application to facilitate development - except getting the updated code back into the plugin required copy and pasting. Bleh, I refuse to do that. This was quite a while back, and in-case I decide to finally give WPF another chance, I’ve rewritten the code and placed it into a class library so it can just be referenced just like a standard DLL.

It now uses an XML file to define comics which means anyone can just edit the file to include new ones. Because it’s an external file, Comical supports automatic updating of the file with a click of a button.

Another new version of Comical will be released in a couple of days when I’ve further fleshed out the XML elements.

View: Comical

FileOps

This was originally released back in 2004 and then updated last year, and now finally there’s a new release. The main reason why I updated it - and fixed a couple of things - was because I made a little change to the way the Join feature works. When joining multiple files, it now pre-allocates the disk space the combined file will take before it starts joining; this had led to an insane speed increase in joins.

Ideally, I’d like to rewrite FileOps from scratch as I’ve long since changed my coding style and the source is actually using .NET 1.1 structuring that I don’t particularly like. But I’m not going to as I don’t know if enough people use it to warrant such a task. I’ll just continue modifying the current code base incrementally; there are definitely little bugs and a weird work-flow present.

View: FileOps

Here we go, another version.

Due to the feature requests I was getting and the fact that Stream Keeper (temporary title) could be quite a while away, I finally went and added configurable settings. I regarded YouChoob as more of a tool than an application, so I wanted to keep it minimal. Not any more, it seems.

More importantly, I figured out a way of getting batch downloading working in a good way despite the app’s one-at-a-time download design. The batch window also features monitoring functionality in that it’ll keep an eye on the clipboard and add any new YouTube.com links it finds; this allows you to use your browser to Copy Shortcut/Link/Whatever to quickly queue a lot of links with minimal effort.

Check out YouChoob below for more information, specifically its change log.

View: YouChoob

Today I noticed while I was messing about with YouChoob downloading some videos, that the thumbnail preview for the currently downloading video wasn’t appearing. After mooching through the code I found out why: any URLs that have the &feature or &related components in them causes the video image generator code to generate a wrong link to that video’s thumbnail image.

Now all extraneous information in URLs are stripped away when Download is clicked. I’m not really sure, but I think this might also fix a problem - as reported in the forum - where YouChoob says a URL is invalid. I say not sure because I personally can’t re-produce the problem.

Speaking of the forum: I set it up some time last year but it wasn’t actually officially open to the public. Because of this, I sort of forgot all about it and only recently noticed that some postings had been made in there. Oops. I’ve replied to a couple of posts as a starter, but it’ll officially open once I’ve finished setting it up.

View: YouChoob : StreamKeeper

Taking my sweet, sweet time with updates, it seems. Raiding in WoW is picking up pace and it’s goooood stuff.

But anyway! YouChoob! A new version, no less. Not that there are many changes, or anything. A few months ago I put in support for batch downloading videos (using its very own window) but I ran into a slight problem in that I couldn’t think of a good way of integrating it with the main download window. In fact, whenever I loaded the source into Visual Studio to continue it, I just groaned and worked on another application instead.

Rather than just indefinitely delaying the next release, I disabled the batch stuff and added support for downloading high quality versions of videos. In fact, there are three quality tiers, which are…

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Woah, wait! I’m not going to blather on about Chrome like a lot of people are currently doing. Okay, I’m not going to slag it off like a lot are doing, and I’m not going to praise it as the best browser in the world. Like a lot of people are also doing.

What I am going to say is in regards to the WebKit engine contained within.

WebKit is supposedly the most standards compliant browser code-base out right now, but I, like a lot of people, have only ever seen it used within the Safari browser. Chrome may be a featureless skeleton of a shell (the screenshots look terrible, but actually look okay with Vista’s Glass replacing the blue background), but the WebKit devs must be ecstatic that people will actually be seeing their engine used in a browser that isn’t a rancid mess of an abortion. For that, Chrome is good.

While I’m here: Having the address bar contained in the tab pages is actually a good idea which doesn’t work too well in practice. Opera has this enabled by default and it’s, well, crap. I even had the same design in one of my apps back in 1999 - it made sense from a coupling point of view, but I removed it. One reason why is code duplication; having the same controls duped across tabs was just needless redundency. With browsers, it just seems to also “feel” wrong.

Anyway, that’s it. I basically wanted to say what a heap of shit Safari is and that WebKit is not Safari.

It seems like I lied about the blathering part.

Update: Lots of people are calling certain parts of Chrome invovative. For their information, the each-tab-as-a-process thing is from IE8. The “Incognito” mode is also from IE8 (which it calls InPrivate). The page with thumbnails of websites is from Opera, but Opera only shows pages you’ve specifically placed on the “Speed Dial” page. Chrome automatically showing it as a list of most-recently-viewed sites sounds like a problem, to me.

I’m impressed with Chrome’s start-up speed, that’s for sure. Hopefully it’ll get plugins and will become much more. I hate the current available web browsers and so I’m hoping Chrome may be The One.

Why do I even bother installing Wordpress updates? I installed 2.6 and it toasted the entire admin area so I couldn’t log in. Almost every update has caused the installation to spew, which is quite amazing considering that the files that get updated aren’t touched by us mortals. Lame-o!

Anyway, Romulator has been released. It’s an application that renames ROM files for the Gameboy Advance, Gameboy Colour, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable, and Wonderswan systems. It uses the magic of the CRC hash to work out which files are ROMs and then renames them according to a user-specific naming mask. Unlike other ROM renamers, there’s no need to put it into a specific system mode.

This release is v0.90 Alpha. There are missing features and I personally want to redesign its interface. Rather than delaying the thing for a billion years, I’ve decided to go ahead and just release it. I’ve done a load of testing and all that and it seemed to work without a problem.

While I’m here, WoWus v1.09 will be released soon which fixes a bug that can stop WoWus installing addons on some systems.

View: Romulator

I took a bit of a PC break, but now I’m back and working on a new application. The application allows the clustering of data (hence its name: Cluster), along with metadata, genres, and so on. Here are the reasons why Cluster is now in development …

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I’m doing a lot of interface work recently after having purchased a pretty awesome icon pack and creating that Vista-style gradient panel I mentioned a couple of posts back. Today we have a new release of Mass Extract, which incorporates these changes.

Speaking of the panel, I’ll be making the BiQubic.Suite .NET libraries available sometime soon. This suite includes class libraries such as (BiQubic.Suite.)Controls, (etc.)Filesystem, Media, Network, and so on, which provides various useful controls and methods for use in application development. This used to come in the form of the BiQubic.dll library that I linked with 98% of my dotNet apps and was a monolithic 280KB.

I couldn’t be doing with such a bloatfest and so I’ve split everything off into their own libraries and removed a lot of the rubbish that I barely used. I’m still organising the methods into their own classes and writing the XML documentation; once done, there will be a first public release. Source code will come at some point.

View: Mass Extract, BiQubic.Suite

For something that’s a small program, it certainly has had its fair share of development time. This time round it was merely a test-bed for an update library I wanted to write. Without really going into it, the updater ties into the software section of this site and queries it for any updates on behalf of the host application.

But when I finished that, I went and added a Vista mode to my GradientPanel control. The Windows XP look is starting to get somewhat stale, so I’m going to be going for the glossy Vista look where I can. Take a look here for a screenshot of the Vista-style GradientPanel in the new updater. The GP update came about due to separating the interface controls from my BiQubic.Functions library and placing them into their own.

But anyway! That’s why there’s a new version of YouChoob. Oh yeah, for those that don’t know: YouChoob allows you to download videos directly from YouTube and save them to your hard-drive or another location of your choice.

I’ve also got some news on BlockBox, but I’ll leave that until later. In the meantime, check out the BlockBox site to download it (its home-theatre PC software) and view some info on the new Windows Presentation Foundation version that I started the other day.

View: YouChoob