Category: FreeGuide

Really encouraged to receive this:

Hello Mr Balaam,

A quick email to thank you for giving the world the brilliant Freeguide.
(I saw in your blog that you have a high volume of email - no reply needed).

I tried Digiguide for a while, loved the principle, found the interface too cluttered. Went back to downloading pages from here and there, and dipping into the Radio Times timeline, which is not quite customisable enough.

I happen to live in a place where I get an unusual mix of channels - UK free satellite + UK terrestrial +Irish terrestrial. I'd never found a single listings service which covers the options.

Then, by chance, I found Freeguide, and I love it. I couldn't ask for more (except, perhaps, for customisable colours for program categories :-) ) Incidentally, one of your blog entries wondered how many painless installs there currently were. Here's one more to be counted (WIn2K, Sun Java v5Update6)

I don't know much about software, but I'm sure this must have taken a vast amount of your time. Thank you for every moment of it. This program will be useful every day, and I'll be passing it on at every chance I get.

Best wishes
Nick Nixon

Christian and others have pointed out lots of problems with the source code layout in FreeGuide. The biggest problem is that each plugin has its own source tree which makes it very difficult to set up in an IDE like Eclipse. I knew it needed doing, and the other night I couldn’t sleep and I felt like making it happen. Since SVN is so much better than CVS for re-arranging source code (because you can move files and keep their history) and because sourceforge are now offering SVN, I decided the right thing to do would be to migrate to SVN before making the changes.

So far, I have managed to get all the source code to build from the command line (instructions here: freeguide-tv.sourceforge.net/dev/index.php/Build_from_SVN) and I’m working on making the Ant build work again, although there’s still a bit to do there.

My aim is for it to be extremely easy to start developing FreeGuide: just download or check out the source code, fire up your editor or IDE, compile and run. That means FreeGuide needs to handle loading plugins from either JARs or directories (without being told which to do), and it needs to know where to look for its lib and doc directories if they are not specified.

Soon, it will Just Work. Then hopefully this will encourage more developers to get involved.

Meanwhile I’ve decided if I want to build up some momentum I need to balance my limited time between code and email, instead of just fire-fighting the email all the time. Some individual users may not get their questions answered, which I hate, but in the end it would be worse if the project lost interest and faded away. I need to inject some excitement!

Forgot to mention: I got my first non-anonymous donation to the FreeGuide project – Steve Fuller sent in a donation along with a request (but with no implication of linkage ;). Thanks Steve! It never ceases to amaze me how Americans will donate to projects like this. My feeling about British people (certainly myself) is that I would always think if I were going to donate to something I’d make it something “important” like Christian Aid, but actually I do think Free Software is important too (actually in order to achieve some of the same goals that Christian Aid have…). The idea of mixing philanthropy with self-interest, which seems to be natural to Americans, can feel a little dirty to us Europeans, but actually that is stupid.

Anyway, enough philosophy: Steve, your donation will be used to buy myself something nice (e.g. a GameCube game or some online poker money) and it has significantly encouraged me to get stuck back into FreeGuide development (see the previous post … guilt is rising). You never know, it might even subconsciously encourage me to get to your specific feature request sooner ;).

(The feature request was allowing favourites to match on programme descriptions and other, more specialised fields. I am wondering about how to keep the UI simple for this, but it should be do-able given some time to implement it.)

I have very little time for FreeGuide at the moment. Part of the problem is that there are lots of boring bugs to fix instead of interesting new features, and it’s hard to motivate myself to get into it. I am really keen on making it Just Work every time, but since other people have been working on the code and quite a lot of it is unfamiliar, it’s a lot of work to work out where to look to fix a problem.

Hopefully when I’ve purged this poker thing from my system I will find time to get into the latest TODO list. At the moment all my FreeGuide time is going into trying to keep up with helping people on the mailing lists. Joe Blow is doing a fantastic job of providing an initial response to lots of mails, but often people are encountering weird bugs that need a developer to get involved. It would be great if some of the other people involved in development were able to help out, but it’s quite a thankless task, and takes away time from developing…

It’s frustrating when quite a few of the bugs we have are things I fixed in a previous version that have crept in with new implementations of existing functionality. It’s taken ages to get FreeGuide stable, and recently it seems to have taken some steps backwards. My feeling is that the percentage of people who are able to install it with no problems and download listings straight away has gone down considerably. I _really_ want to fix this.

That’s why the TODO list for 0.10.4 is pure bugs. We need to make it _work_ before we make it do new stuff. Otherwise people are just going to walk away.

Saying that, the addition of a new experimental vertical listings view by Christian is really exciting. I haven’t even found time to try it out yet: I must examine my priorities. FreeGuide has always been my “main” project but I have been neglecting it as time presses in.

The Boy (as I call him) is doing well and has slept well the last 2 nights, giving us a break from the all-over-body pain of extended tiredness. If this is part of a trend towards more sleep, I may get more time to make FreeGuide better.

So I’ve put out FreeGuide version 0.10pre2, and then a little bug-fix release because the Linux RPMs were broken. By calling this 0.10pre2-2 I managed to annoy my faithful Gentoo packager Christian, and myself, but at the time it seemed too much hassle to bump everytjing up to 0.10pre3.

The next release, 0.10.3, is going to be stable, and everyone is finally going to be using and testing our latest code stream. We’ve had a few bugs reported again 0.10pre2, and we’ve already got a couple to fix, and then we’re going to push it out asap and get everyone migrated up.

I hope people will like the new version – it’s a lot faster, and the UI experience is better (in my opinion). I just hope there aren’t too many wrinkles in the upgrade path.

Alex has written some good upgrade code, but some of the concepts have changed, and I’m not entirely happy with the depths you have to delve into the Options screen just to play with your XMLTV grabber, but most things should “Just Work” for normal users.

After 0.10.3, I really want to get recording working, using Reuel’s plugin. If anyone wants to send me a UK digital TV card, you can be sure it would be put to good use…