Projects

(April 23, 2006)

When I’m not working for money (i.e. leave home and go to that office for approx. 9 hours a day), I work on some of my »pet projects«. Four of them are hosted at SourceForge.net and thus available to a larger audience. The other ones are smaller, one-day or one-week projects or stuff made for a certain subculture, the demoscene.

The major projects

Impressive

Creating nice presentation slides usually isn’t a problem, thanks to very sophisticated LaTeX styles. However, the presentation itself tends to be anything but sensational. Impressive fills this gap: Technically, it’s a fullscreen PDF viewer that uses OpenGL for rendering. The use of graphics acceleration allows for some effects that are impossible with commodity PDF viewers, such as smoothly animated, alpha-blended page transitions, a host of useful marking funktions and a smoothly zooming overview page, in case you get lost in your presentation. Be prepared for some serious jawdropping :)

Status: ACTIVE, but moving slowly

Visit the official homepage:

http://impressive.sourceforge.net/

rePear

This is for the other iPods (classic, nano, photo, …) what rebuild_db is for the shuffle: It allows the user to manage the playable files as files, not some abstract entries in some abstract music manager like iTunes. However, since the real iPod’s firmware is a little bit more sophisticated (and restrictive) than the shuffle’s, usage is unfortunately not as easy as it was with rebuild_db :(

Status: INACTIVE, due to obsolescence

Visit the official homepage:

http://repear.sourceforge.net/

rebuild_db

The iPod shuffle is a really cool device, but unlike other flash-based MP3 players, it doesn’t play files that are simply copied to its filesystem. Not everybody is happy with iTunes either, so it was about time for a tool that enables the iPod to play files from anywhere in its data area. rebuild_db scans the whole device for playable files and creates a fake iTunes database for the iPod shuffle so it will play back the files.

Status: INACTIVE, due to obsolescence

Visit the official homepage:

http://shuffle-db.sourceforge.net/

MPUI

MPUI is a very useful Windows frontend for the well-known media player MPlayer. It wraps MPlayer completely, the user only sees a normal Windows GUI that looks a bit like the good old Windows Media Player 6. The cool thing is that the MPlayer/MPUI combo can play most of the common media formats (including DivX and H.264) without the help of external codecs, even though they’re only 3.5 MB in size!

Status: INACTIVE, due to obsolescence

Visit the official homepage:

http://mpui.sourceforge.net/

(Note: »iPod« and »iTunes« are registered trademarks of Apple Inc.)

4 Responses to »Projects«

Post a Reply

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

Captcha:
 

By submitting the comment, you agree to the terms of the Privacy Policy.