Deck - Music Player for Music Lovers

Spotify Is Now Social

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 11:38:53 -0400

This is everything I want Deck to be some day. But better.

How to Automatically Sync Any Song You Download to iTunes

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:23:44 -0400

Tips’n’tricks with iTunes. I did not even realize iTunes had an “Automatically Add to iTunes”-folder.

How to Automatically Sync Any Song You Download to iTunes

Unfortunately iTunes still needs to run before songs are added to the folder as I understand it (see this Apple Support page for more details).

Album based Music Players for iPhone

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 08:40:30 -0400

There seem to be some album based music player applications appearing for iPhone.

This one has a neat tactile interface: Albums App and has just arrived.

But this one is not bad either: Attic

It shows you the albums you haven’t listened to in a while. It seems to be using the vinyl metaphor in its logo as well, that’s a bit of a bummer.

File them under “inspiration”.

Macworld reduction

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:14:16 -0500

We are offering a 20% reduction on the occasion of Macworld. Today is your last chance to take advantage of that.

Removed The Beta-logo

Sat, 06 Feb 2010 13:57:36 -0500

We removed the beta-logo from our website. The download is still the same version, but we’ll be releasing a version 1.0 very soon. Stay tuned!

Sliding Vinyl with CSS3 - ZURB Playground - ZURB.com

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 09:57:31 -0500

Sliding Vinyl with CSS3 - ZURB Playground - ZURB.com

User Interface inspiration.

Peel - Stay in the loop

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 09:05:55 -0500

Peel - Stay in the loop:

This is functionality I’d like to build in Deck sometime. iTunes would never do this.

Version 0.9.2 - New Blog

Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:18:19 -0500

We are now fully hosted on http://www.deckapp.com/. Let’s hope the move did not cause any embarrassing mistakes. Be sure to keep up to date with the Twitter Account and on our Tumblr blog.

So yes, I moved everything over to Tumblr. With a little help of wp2tumblr.py I got an effortless migration and on Tumblr I can edit the HTML so that it looks like the website. On Wordpress that was not possible without hosting it on my server. An effort I am not willing to go through.

Here’s the changelist for the current update:

Add a more descriptive tooltip to the Last.fm scrobble button in the toolbar.
Make sure double clicking from Queue View starts playing as well.
Disable start playing at startup. (This requires one restart after the upgrade)
The confirmation dialogs for licensing Deck are a bit nicer now.
BUG: Last.fm loved tracks were not queued while scrobbling offline.
BUG: Sometimes (after resizing, searching) the miniview left albums where they were not supposed to be.
BUG: Sometimes the status of the play/pause button was wrong in toolbar and in the HUD.
BUG: When holding down the option key on OS X 10.5 the application hung the system

Final is expected somewhere in the middle of january. After the holidays. Enjoy!

Version 0.9.1

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 12:29:51 -0500

A new version of Deck was released. It includes the following changes:

Deck now remembers whether it was in miniview or in maxiview mode
Make sure last track of album is scrobbled (Jeff Allen, issue 19)
When holding down the option key on OS X 10.5 the application hung the system
Switching quickly between miniview and maxiview could render the maxiview empty (Jelle De Laender)

Press “Check For Updates” everyone. In case things go horribly wrong you can still download the 0.9 version as well. I really need more testers. Get in touch if you’re interested!

Idea For Drag'n'Drop

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 21:44:00 -0500

I really want to implement drag and drop like this in Deck. For a future version, maybe.

(S ourc e )

Version 0.9

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:29:10 -0500

After one week of full time non stop coding and one more day because I missed my own deadline I have now put out version 0.9 of Deck.

That means that from now on it should be mainly bugfixing. All of the functionality that I want for version 1.0 is in it.

I am very happy with the way it looks at the moment. Hopefully all of you will be happy to use it as well.

Download it from the new website: http://www.deckapp.com/ or wait for the sparkle update to kick in.

Funny

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:45:26 -0500

It’s funny that I already did similar things back in 2004-2005 and made a program called CCTunes.

There are still people downloading it but it would surprise me if anything worked. The only thing that could still be useful about it is the documentation I wrote about the development of it all, with some XSLT techniques that you don’t come across very often.

Most of that was done on the train commuting from Gent to Antwerp. I have fond memories of those little experiments. That’s the main reason why I leave them online.

Initial Feedback

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:54:31 -0500

Well the initial feedback is in. And it’s mostly: “it’s ugly!”. That is a bit of a disappointment, but also a bit as what was expected.

Luckily the looks are part of the application that I still planned on devoting some time on. So expect the next update to look a lot nicer. The new icons are designed by my friend from Guidesign and there is even a new icon underway.

It will be better looking. Now let’s hope it will also be better!

Release Angst

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 21:14:45 -0400

So I overcame my release angst and sent out alfa versions to almost all the people that I think might be interested in testing something rather rough.

I was pleasantly enticed by a series of @codinghorror tweets that dissed iTunes. Exactly why I started programming on Deck for.

Many people seem to be getting fed up with iTunes. There are enough alternatives though and mine is just one of it. Hopefully Deck will hit just the sweet spot for some people that listen to music like I do.

Lifehackers 5 wishes for iTunes

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:41:34 -0400

Lifehacker lists the five features it would like to see in iTunes

It reads like the feature list I have on my roadmap for Deck. ETA: 2047.

Beta's are imminent

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:39:59 -0400

It is about time I get something out of the door. It will not be what I would like it to be, but it will be useful to some, ridiculous to others.

Whatever it turns out to be, I’m determined to release it. Those people that find it useful will have to pay for it to use it. Sorry if that doesn’t fit your mindset or budget. It’s a tough world.

Delay

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 18:54:22 -0400

This one here is to admit to the fact that I’ve made a classical error: I suffered from a case of featuritis and wanted to add just one more feature. Well… that was a miscalculation from my part. I’ve spent way more time finishing that feature than I anticipated I would and it’s still not finished. On top of that, it probably wasn’t wise to spend so much time on that feature since there are other features that were already there that could have used some more attention.

Oh well. What’s done is done. I’m still trying to finish a beta anytime soon that I am confident enough about to let it be tested by a wider audience. Meanwhile I’m finishing that feature.

Starting Unit Testing

Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:22:59 -0400

Just now I started investigating how to best do unit testing. Importing the iTunes dictionary is first up for unit testing because I seem to keep breaking it and it should be easy to do.

This is about my investigation tonight.

Miniview

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:15:31 -0400

The miniview is starting to look like it should, with nice in and out animations. And I got a good idea for the letterview from a friend of mine.

Of course this new feature introduced bugs too and it’s not finished yet so I’m not pushing it out yet. I’m aiming somewhere in about two weeks for the first beta-testers on that feature (two guys for now).

More Testing

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 10:40:59 -0400

Just sent off an alfa-version to two more users for testing. This week is all about finishing the last major feature.

There’s a uservoice-page too.