Chop Chop

On June 26th, MuttonChop 0.1.1 was released. This is the first point release of the software, and there were a few necessary steps to take before the point release could be developed, the most important of which is the shift to Automake for compiling the software.

Typically, when coding with Vala, I will write a small shell script named build to compile the application using the Vala compiler. While this is fine for small projects that will only exist within my home network, MuttonChop should be fairly easy to compile for non-Vala users. By using Automake, the Vala code for MuttonChop can be distributed as C code that is compiled in the "./configure && make" fashion. This allows the code to be more easily packaged for various Linux distributions that may or may not have the Vala compiler available.

Stop! It should be noted that I don't like Automake. I find it cryptic and difficult to work with. Fortunately it only needs to be set up once, and with the help of the Anjuta IDE, I set up a fairly simple Vala project with Automake and I then converted the project to use the MuttonChop Vala code.

Should They Be Separated?

One of the quirky things about developing MuttonChop is the inclusion of a web interface. To me, the Server and the UI are two very different entities and while I think the Server should ship with some sort of UI, I keep thinking that the UI should be a separate coding project.

When the project started, the Web UI was developed in step with the server so that I would always be able to access new server functionality right away. However, now that the server code development has matured, the major updates to the project will probably be in the UI functionality and it doesn't seem right to create a new server point release when the only update is to a CSS file.

Almost Mobile

While the web interface to MuttonChop certainly gets the job done, the UI doesn't scale well to mobile devices and thus was born the MuttonChop Mobile Web UI which is a drop in replacement for the default web UI. Unfortunately, quite a few mobile devices run Android or iOS, both of which have a really crappy non-compliant web browser, and since I don't own one of those devices, I made sure the mobile UI works with my n900. Wanna see some pictures?

The reason that you aren't seeing an image of my n900 is because the n900 was used to take the pictures.

• Browsing videos on an n810
• Browsing audio in a Tizen developer device
• The player on the Tizen device (the Tizen web browser does NOT render a working HTML5 range tag)
• The player on the Tizen device and a Neo Freerunner

The Future?

1. find a nice small playback device to run MuttonChop on
2. write a native-ish app (most likely in python and a as yet undecided GUI toolkit)

Now quit reading and go hack some code.

P.S. send me a picture of the Mobile UI on the n900.