I want to apologize for the lack of posts here. I know that many people want to know the outcome of the Apple thing and the status of the two jeopardized programs. So, to finally break the much too long period of silence, here’s the current status of the projects:

The presentation program is online again under its new name Impressive: http://impressive.sourceforge.net. Currently, there’s only a rebranded 0.10.2 version, but I hope to move forward with a new version in the first quarter of 2009.

The iPod management tool has been renamed to rePear: http://repear.sourceforge.net/. Along with the rename, the brand-new and much improved version 0.4 has been released.

I find it unfortunate and unnecessary that the issue needed to be settled involving layers and lots of money. It would have been easier for both sides (and certainly more civilized) to simply write an e-mail to state the problem. I am willing to co-operate. You can still call your lawyers if I don’t comply, but I don’t see any reason why there should be money involved from the start.

Read more …

… from an experimental / example program. Click to read the full text:

(With this much text, it runs with approximately 15 fps on my Athlon64/3000+, GeForce 6800 machine.)

Remember what I said about the tedious job of maintaining software projects? This time, it even struck me twice: Just two days after the release of MPUI 1.1.1, I received a batch of bug reports and other suggestions, so I did another rework of MPUI yesterday. Next to half a dozen minor bugfixes, I finally implemented a »clip info« feature that relieves the user from the task of parsing the (sometimes cryptic) MPlayer output.

This morning, even before I left my bed, a good friend …erm… persuaded me to add a new feature to CENSORED: He is preparing a presentation to be held at the university. The problem is, the computer where he’s going to show the slides is not his, and it’s equipped with an ancient GhostScript installation. The 7.x versions of GS have some serious issues with rendering PDF files generated by pdf(La)TeX. For example, hypens (‘-’) are shown at completely wrong places. To overcome this, I added an option to »render« a PDF into a directory with one PNG file per page, thus allowing to generate images on one computer (that is equipped with a decent version of GhostScript) and presenting them on another one.