2.4.1 out now

New release today, originally I needed to do a release to fix a couple of issue with Jaikoz on Leopard, But I ended up doing a bit more

For brand new new installations (doesnt apply to upgrades) users will not see as many columns loaded by default, and on OSX they fields won't be colour coded. This is an attempt to make it a bit easier for users to not be confused by Jaikoz on first viewing. The Autocorrecters default configuaration now does remote corrects (such as Correct tags from Musicbrainz) as well as the local corrects.

Windows users will now see that their foreign language metadata can be viewed correctly in Windows Explorer.

Some options such as the View Artwork Fullsize and View Online were previously only available in the contextual (popup) menus, these have now been added to the top level menu as well.

The keyboard shortcuts have been standardised, and shortcuts moved to the most popular tasks.

You can now drag and drop a field onto another field.

More details at
http://www.jthink.net/jaikoz/jsp/news/build1046.jsp

Fixed the pesky IndexOutOfBoundsException Error

There has been one bug that some of you encounter the IndexOutOfBoundsException error. This has been very difficult to track down, I thought I had solved the problem in the last release but it was still happening occasionally. Anyway, I'm now confident this has been completely solved ready for the 2.4.1 release out soon

Musicbrainz and the BBC

You may know that the BBC uses Musicbrainz on the Music part of the website. Seeing as the BBC is probably the most repected broadcaster on the planet this is a great vote of confidence in the accuracy of the Musicbrainz data, good news for Jaikoz !

But I didn't realise until the summit last week that BBC employees add data into the database as well

http://wiki.musicbrainz.org/BBCTeamsEditingMusicBrainz

and it seems like their involvement is going to grow and grow, good news for everyone.

Musicbrainz Packages

It was great to meet some of the people behind Musicbrainz - a really nice bunch of guys. I have a much better understanding of what they are trying to achieve.

On a more technical level they have big plans for the database, the most important for Jaikoz is the concept of release packages. At the moment album are often released slighty differently in different countries - and sometimes there are multiple releases in the same country, each occurence of this generates a new release in Musicbrainz. But these releases are not tied together and there is no way to accurately distinguish between two versions of the same release and two completely different releases. As a user I normally want to see only one occurence of each release, and I want to see the one for the country I live in, Musicbrainz is going to introduce the concept of a Package to tie all the variation of one release together.

Musicbrainz summit

I'll be going to the Musicbrainz Summit in London this weekend, so should be interesting to see what they are going to be doing this year and see what it means for Jaikoz.

Fix for Leopard

A few of you have had an intermittent problem with Jaikoz v2.4.0 starting on Leopard, the error seen is shown as Unexpected Problem: n >= n where n can be any number and was linked to what additional devices you had attached to your Mac. This was due to a problem with a GUI library used by Jaikoz that has now been fixed. You can get a patch from the fixes page.

New native dialog support in Leopard

As well as the Java 1.6 release on Leopard the default release for Intel and PPC adds support for some native OSX features that are not available on the Tiger release . In Jaikoz 2.4 I made use of this to display a search box that looks like a native Search field


whereas on Tiger it looks like a standard OSX entry field



In the next release I hope to make much more use of these features, whilst maintaining Tiger compatability.

Apple release Java 1.6 on Leopard Intel

Apple has just released JavaUpdate1 - Java 1.6 for OSX Leopard (Intel). I tried it out with Jaikoz and it seems to work ok but I havent tested it extensively. If you install it using SoftwareUpdate Jaikoz will not use it by default but you can try Jaikoz with this if you wish as follows

• In Finder right click Jaikoz and select Show Package Contents
• Select Contents
• Right click Info.plist and select Open With Text Editor
  
• Find the line 1.5+ and change it to 1.6
• Save Changes
• Start Jaikoz in the console windows you should be able to confirm if it is using 1.6

Using 1.6 does not add any new features new Jaikoz, but it should increase its responsiveness.

Why have I created a Jaikoz Blog ?

Whilst the forum is a useful way of informing current users about new developments it has a few drawbacks.

• It doesnt discuss what I'm doing between releases, it is focused on new releases and the issues between them.
• It isnt so visible to new users of the site
  
• It isnt easy to browse chronologically
  

I'd like to keep you uptodate on what Im working on, and other things of interest, please feel free to comment.