As you may suspect, I spend a lot of time in front of the computer.  While I'm working I like to listen to music.  Some people find it distracting, but I find it adds to the enjoyment of coding - like caramel sauce on ice cream.  When I'm not listening to RadioParadise I have a few other sources of great new music.  One of them is All Songs Considered hosted by Bob Boilen on National Public Radio.  The show is available as a podcast and is one of those feeds that if you're like me - you keep every episode.

NPR: All Songs Considered (http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510019)

Happy listening.

I've made a few changes in the site in preparation for the new release.  I've changed the blogging engine to DasBlog.  I also upgraded the forum engine to the current version of Community Server.  The nice thing about the upgrade is that it adds support for OpenID.  In the process I moved the forums from happyfish.info/blog/forums to http://happyfish.info/forum.  The download page will be moved to within the blog itself shortly.

OpenID represents the future in single sign-on for the web and I would encourage you to get an OpenID of your own.  If you have a Yahoo mail account or a Blogger account, then you've already got one.  If not, I suggest MyOpenID as your provider.  It's a full fledge implementation of the protocol with all the bells and whistles run by a source I trust.  I'll be posting more about OpenID and lots of other changes through the summer.

Despite not a lot of action on the site a lot is going on with HappyFish behind the scenes.  I've laid out some ambitious goals for features in the next version.  Much of it centers around more data storage options and being able to access HappyFish from a variety of locations while still keeping your feeds and item history synchronized.  I'm also carefully planning out the changes to device support that will make it possible (and hopefully relatively easy) for others to start writing device specific plugins.  I did not expect all of this work to take so long when I started the revision last year, but since the current release is more or less stable I'm taking the extra time to get this one right. 

In the coming weeks and months you'll see more activity.  Changes will include the release of weekly or nightly builds of HappyFish, a call for participants in a limited beta review program, a new wiki, and revisions to the HappyFish Web site. 

Thanks for using HappyFish.

There still a lot of work left to do but I wanted to post a screen shot of how things are progressing...

Things are progressing more slowly than I had hoped on the new version due to some consulting work I've been doing on my off hours.  However, I have been making some progress and wanted to post a few screenshots of some of the new features.

Here's the new system tray context menu showing the oft requested hide on start and close options. The "Hide On Close" function was a default, non-configurable behavior in one of the previous versions of HappyFish but caused confusion among some users who had not seen this feature before.  Adding it as an option (that is off by default) should strike a good balance.  "Hide On Startup" is another one that I'd received several requests for (and wanted myself).

Another feature that I and other users wanted was a way to protect items from being deleted - whether automatically or manually.

I've also included a few other options to spruce up the interface and make it more user friendly like including favicons in the feed list.  These turn out to be useful visual cues when you're scanning along list of feeds.  As always though you can still click anywhere on the feed list and begin typing the name of the feed to move the focus to that feed.

Expanded ID3 tag editing options is another frequently requested feature - and it like the others is a good one.  I've also included the ability to apply ID3 and filename rewriting settings as well as automatic deletion preferences globally. 

Download control has also been improved with more feedback from the download panel.  In the new version the transfer rate and percent complete are displayed in the list.  I've also added the ability to reorder queued items.  Dragging and item to the top of the queue will make sure it is given the next open slot for download if you've reached the maximum simultaneous download settings.  You can also force any item to start downloading even if you've reached your set limit.  I've also improved the responsiveness of HappyFish to canceling stuck downloads.

So that's just a few of the changes along with many under the hood improvements to increase the overall stability of HappyFish.  Although I still have more to do the work is progressing.  I don't really have a timetable on a release of the next version but I think the improvements I've got in store will be worth the wait. 

Thanks for using HappyFish.

I haven't done much lately in the way of posting on the blog and wanted to quickly give you HappyFishers an update on where things are headed.  It has been about two and a half years since I started writing HappyFish, and what started as a messy little tool shack has grown into a decent sized application.  During the transisiton from the .net framework 1.1 to 2.0 I did quite a bit of clean up and restructuring of the code.  However, at its heart, HappyFish was (and still is) a disorganized tool shack.  What that means for you are a few lingering bugs or poorly patched ones and for me a code base that is difficult to maintain and extend.  I am in the process of rewriting HappyFish the way it should have been from the beginning.  I've wanted to do this for a while and finally feel that the current release is stable enough to last for the rest of the year on its own so that I can devote my attention completely to the rewrite.  I started this process a month ago and have made great progress, but it's slow going.  It will be worth it though.

In the meantime, tell a friend - or even a total stranger - about HappyFish.