As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now. I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. … Continue reading “TRM, Picard and Picard on OS X”
As the TRM server is getting close to another pruning round it flaked out for a few hours today — its back up and running now.
I had hoped that we would’ve come along further in moving Classic Tagger users over to Picard, but instability problems of the wxWindows toolkit continue to plague Picard users. For some users it works great, for others it crashes every 30 seconds, and yet its stable for Lukas who is working on Picard the most. This makes using Picard very difficult and even harder to convince our users who love the track based Classic Tagger to move to Picard.
Given this, we plan to do the following:
- Extend the end-of-life deadline for TRM until the end of 2006.
- Migrate Picard away from wxWindows and start using the Python bindings for the QT toolkit.
- Revamp the user interface in Picard to support both track based tagging and album based tagging.
- Make the Picard user interface easier to use for new users and offer methods other than drag and drop to tag files.
We hope to complete all of this before the end of the year. But, should we not make that deadline, we’ll extend it again until most everyone feels that Picard has replaced the Classic Tagger. The key metric for turning off the TRM server is to watch the traffic to the TRM server slow to a near crawl so that when we do turn it off that only stragglers will be affected.
Tobias Rundström has volunteered to work on a UI mock-up of the new Picard UI that will be based on our Picard user interface brainstorming. Once he has done that we’ll post screenshots or maybe even an application for people to look at and give us feedback on.
Finally, the switch to QT will also have positive benefits for Picard on Mac OS X. The QT toolkit is considerably more stable on the Mac than wxWindows and that will enable us to finally roll out a Mac OS X version of the tagger. I understand that there is frustration about the lack of a tagger on OS X — Geof Morris has now even offered up a bounty for someone to develop a new UI for Picard for the Mac. But, there isn’t anything we can do for a few months — please sit tight. We’re aware of the situation and are as unhappy about it as you are!
Technorati Tags: picard, musicbrainz, trm
