Next Tuesday (July 28th) starting at 14:00 GMT (7:00 am MST) the Exaile team will be hosting the very first Exaile bugday. Our goal will be to hammer out as many bugs as we possibly can. SiDi has set up a Launchpad Group that will have it’s own branch (based from the 0.3 trunk) so that people wanting to participate will be able to commit their changes.

In order to attend, please join our IRC channel at irc.freenode.net/#exaile. Even if you don’t plan on fixing any bugs, it should be a good time (that is, if you’re a nerdy Exaile user).

If you have questions and are too lazy to get on IRC, please email our mailing list: exaile-users@googlegroups.com

Exaile development has been very active in the past few weeks. We are working very hard to make our August goal. As well as picking up mathbr as a developer, we’ve had quite a few contributors adding/fixing a lot of things. If you’re like me, this screenshot makes you drool (click on it to get a larger view):

The super sexy contextual information panel you see on the left there is being done by Guillaume Lecomte. The new rating widget you see in the popup menu was done by Steve Dodier. Steve has been submitting patch after patch getting things fixed and new things added.

Exaile 0.3 is looking better than ever. I’m excited!

Don’t worry, we’re still here, and still hard at work. I thought I would give an update since it’s been quite a while since the last one.

We’ve decided that we’re going to shoot hard to get a 0.3 release ready for the August Ubuntu feature freeze. This may mean that 0.3 doesn’t have all the features that 0.2.14 had, but I feel that it’s got enough. However, as a trade off, 0.3 will have a lot of other features that 0.2.14 never had.

Currently, there appear to be a lot of people already using 0.3. User contributions to Exaile itself are higher right now than they’ve ever been. There are currently 27 user contributed or developer written plugins in the repository.

One of our awesome users contributed a patch that enabled rating tracks by just clicking on the appropriate star in the playlist, much like Rhythmbox does. I’ve tried to do this myself a few times and have never had much success. Gone, now, is the old rating dropdown, which leaves us with a lot of free space in the upper right of the UI. We haven’t even discussed what might go there, but perhaps an equalizer interface would be useful (please please please don’t take this as law, we really haven’t said so much as two words about this).

Mathias Brodala has been a friend of the project. Initially, he did German translations, and then he was given the job of being the translation manager. Recently, he’s been learning Python and contributing with code. Mathias, I didn’t even know you knew how to program. What a pleasant surprise :)

Anyway, that’s it for today. Things are moving along quite nicely. Hopefully we can make our August goal.

Yesterday “Adam Olsen” added me as a friend on Facebook. He is also a programmer. One of the other developers on the Exaile team’s name is “Aren Olson”.

Coincidence? I think not!

After beating Enigmo in the iPhone, I was eager for more. I’m a sucker for these type of games. I downloaded the demo of the Windows version of Enigmo 2, and, to my delight, it works great out of the box in Wine! It’s got tons more doodads and etc than the iPhone version, so I’d say it’s a perfect upgrade path if you like that game.

The installer works fine, but I recommend launching the Enigmo 2 application after you have installed it with a command similar to this:

wine explorer /desktop=Enigmo,1024x768 'c:\\Program Files\\Ideas From the Deep\\Enigmo 2 Supernova\\Enigmo 2.exe'

Enigmo 2 appears to have a maximum resolution of 1024×768, and this command will allow you to run it in a Window that size.

It even works on my HP Mini 1030, which doesn’t have the most fantastic video card in the world :)