Category: Tech

What is going on with FreeGuide?

I thought I’d write a little bit about FreeGuide, since I’m planning to link this page off the FreeGuide page.

I’m the lead developer on FreeGuide, and having just started a new job (which so far is excellent) my free time is seriously limited, especially as my commute is 1.5 hours at the moment. I expect as I settle in I’ll find more time, and I also hope my commute may reduce in a few months. In the meantime I’ve had to fall back into maintenance mode, but fortunately there are several contributors stepping up to add long-requested features. The most prolific contributor has been Alex, who has been working on a number of excellent new features in our development branch. That branch started when Risto refactored the code into an MVC style and optimised the display to speed up massively operation with more than about 10 channels.

That branch has been around _far_ too long, as it’s a maintenance headache to look after 2 quite different branches, and it causes confusion when people send in patches against old code.

I really want to make the development branch reasonably bug-free and then declare it stable and retire the 0.8.x branch once and for all. I hope we can do that pretty soon.

Meanwhile, Alex is adding more features, the most notable of which is the plugins system. That will eventually allow you to download and install new listings grabbers without upgrading FreeGuide itself, and plug in loads of other things like exporters, recording schedulers, and loads more. Also excitingly soon to go in is the recording scheduler system developed by Reuel and integrated by Alex.

I want to make 0.10.x stable next release, then get those features in (probably under a 0.11.x name), stabilise them, go through the TODO and make a _short_ list of things to do before 1.0, do them and NOTHING else, and then finally release 1.0. It would be great if the plugin system turned out to be flexible enough to handle all the new thigns people suggest, but if not I plan to keep the 1.0.x branch stable long term, and allow further changes in a 1.1 branch.

The features I think are needed for 1.0 are:

  • Recording (through a TV card) while FG is running
  • Scheduling recording
  • Coloured favourites
  • A manual and help

Hopefully not a lot else…

Google

Can’t decide what to think about Google. I was very suspicious about gmail, and this whole portal business is very boring, and _so_ corporate, but you really can’t argue with sponsoring open source contributions, can you? If doing this kind of thing starts being seen as the way to impress the developer community (and therefore recruit the geekiest geeks) then everyone wins, and world domination is one step closer.

Beginning blog

I’ve decided to start writing a blog, not least to convince people that although my work on open source projects (especially FreeGuide) has slowed down, it has not slipped out of my mind. Quite the opposite: I’m finding my lack of time very frustrating, especially when the train journey in to work every day gives me time to think of lots of excellent ideas, none of which I am going to be able to put into practice. I’ll log them here, and maybe someone else will do them. If not, I’ll do them when I retire.

I’m hoping to keep this blog as technical as possible, with only occasional daliances into personal matters, since it does my head in to be reading something like Planet Gnome and have to read about people’s cats being sick etc.