GNUpod - News: Time to shake a leg

Time to shake a leg

Item posted by Heinrich Langos <hlangos> on Thu 23 Sep 2010 12:48:39 PM UTC.

It's been very quiet on "radio GNUpod" for a while. Mostly because it simply works for me.

Last week however I felt like making some minor changes and realized how unreadable some Perl code becomes if you leave it alone for a while. So I looked for an IDE that would help me to quickly jump around in the code and found EPIC, an Eclipse extension that turns Eclipse into a Perl IDE. And all of a sudden Perl became fun again.

This is also good news if you are waiting for support of the newer iPod models. Supporting the newer sqlite based file formats and even the 3. generation shuffle (the no-buttons clip) will necessitate some deep changes in GNUpod's soft and squishy guts (mktunes and tunes2pod mostly) and without an IDE I was very reluctant to dive into that piece of code.

The last thing that kept me from rewriting those parts of gnupod was the absence of pain. My 3gen nano works like a charm.
But... the latest iPod nano (the 2010 model) looks mightily interesting. As much as I detest the closed-and-welded-shut policy that they have in regard to 3. party software, that much I have to admit that I like their hardware and usability department. So I soon may have an itch to scratch after all.

In the meantime however I am preparing the 0.99.9 release.

Three new tools to replace gnupod_search: gnupod_find, gnupod_modify, and gnupod_delete. They are not yet feature-complete as they can't yet add artwork, but they are in the git repository and you can always download the latest development snapshot here: http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnupod.git/snapshot/master.tar.gz