Tuesday, July 24, 2007

UKMP 1.5 is out and it's looking sweet

Big thanks to Roope Rainisto from Nokia for helping out tune up the interface. The song list now sports thumb interface for selecting songs. Looks better too, have a look at it yourselves:


Another big thing that's been asked for is kinetic scrolling. After trying it out for a while, I am very impressed by it. Yeah, I know, here is another developer again boasting his ego, but I am not applauding myself for that. Kinetic scrolling is really sall thing to add technically once you have smooth scrolling anyway. But the thing I've been thinking about now is that Nokia should implement that same thing to the web browser. It would be so much better to use that to scroll around the page. Let's say you've read the article through. Wan't to go up to the beginning of the page? No probs, just flick the finger quickly and it will scroll to the top in a split sec. Want to scroll in a controllable fashion, scroll with your finger and stop it before raising it from the device surface.

One more thing I have forgotten to write about is that this version also supports wma files and might also support aac files as well as some bug fixes related to continuous playback.


You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer

As always, you can check out the new features from the video below:

Thursday, July 05, 2007

UKTUBE 0.6 out, UKMP 1.4 out (in beta)

UKTUBE 0.6

Uktube 0.6 adds support for streaming of videos. You no longer have to wait for the video to finish downloading, as UKTUBE will just buffer the first one megabyte and then start playing.

I also added delete, which deletes the file, takes it out of the dropdown and selects the next video.




UKMP 1.4

UKMP 1.4 has major feature of supporting video. Now, basically that means that it also needs mplayer. As UKMP and UKTUBE are bundled together you would need mplayer for uktube anyway, so I don't see that as too much of a problem. What makes this really beta quality is that ukmp cannot make thumbnails of the videos by itself. It relies on UKTUBE to make thumbnails for the videos it downloads. If Serge (ssvb) can compile mplayer with support for -vo jpeg, I can add the thumbnails automatically on start.

Have a look at the video to see how watching videos works on UKMP at the moment.




About the release:
I managed to squeeze out the major bugs from UKMP 1.4 and UKTUBE 0.6. I'm about to leave for a week long vacation, so I felt that even though I would have wanted to give both of the apps some more polish, I just didn't have the time to do it. In any case, I'm relatively happy on how the new features turned out.

1.5 of UKMP will focus on improving the UI to look better. Thanks Roope Rainisto for a very good suggestion on the songlist part. I will implement that to the 1.5 version.

You can download the latest version of UKMP and UKTUBE from here:
http://maemo.org/downloads/product/ukmp

and remember that you need to have python and mplayer installed. If you don't have them, install them first from here:
Python
mplayer