SmallTune

I would like to give you a small update, so you can get to know what's happening behind the scene. I'm currently rewriting the whole program from scratch. The reason is simple: I switched from Delphi to Free Pascal (Lazarus). Why? Well, obviously Embacadero (or CodeGear, Borland, Inprise, whatever) doesn't care about hobbiest. There is no free version of Delphi any longer. Rumor has it, that there will be a new, free (or cheap) version this year, but I won't wait.

With Free Pascal, I'm using a quite powerful compiler. Where Delphi can only compile for native Win32, FPC supports Win32, Win64 (wuhuuu), MacOS, Linux, Windows CE ... damn, even Game Boy Advanced, Nintendo DS, Haiku aaaand iPhone.

So, yes, this compiler is quite powerful. Of course, this costs something. Size, to be precisely. An empty FPC app is about 40 kB larger than an Delphi app (17 kB compared to 55 kB). I guess, this is prize I have to pay. And I will, of course.

I closed the latest poll about the module system. It seems as if almost 98% of you really like the idea, so I'm going to implement the system in Free Pascal. Because I have to dig into the new language and IDE, the release of the new version might get a bit delayed. I'm thinking of end of february, begin of march. We will see... ;)

About two weeks ago I created a mindmap I'd like to share with you. It shows the main workflow of the upcoming version of SmallTune. It's only a glimpse of what it should be capable of, and it's fairly incomplete. I created it by using FreeMind, an Open-Source Java-based Mindmapping-application.

You can get the Mindmap in various formats by clicking on the links below:

PNG-Version (64 kB, 2038x651)
SVG-Version (71,8 kB)
FreeMind Project (7,58 kB)

Simply use Rightclick on the link => "Save as..." to download the corresponding file.

Currently, I'm working on the new Module-system. To provide the maximum flexibility, I'm working with Interfaces (see on Wikipedia or at DelphiBasics.co.uk ).

Using Interfaces means that you can write Modules with Delphi, C++ or even C# (although the .NET-Library will be needed on the clientsystem when using C#). Each Module will be hosted at modules.smalltune.net (doesn't exist yet) and will get a unique GUID which identifies the Module. I plan to include a download function, so that you can browse and download the corresponding Modules out of the program, so you don't need to surf to this page. But this is more likely to be a "nice-to-have". The folder structure of the Module system will be very logical, and the program will alert you, if there is an essential Module missing.

Btw, the new version number will be 0.5.0 :)

Luckily,

I was able to recover the lost documentation from my Database-Backup. You can use the Doc as usual.

Unfortunately, after an update, I lost the whole online documentation for SmallTune. There might be a PDF on my computer, which contains the doc. I will check this later...

Sorry for any inconvenience...