This is the week 06 status report for AudioMan and its subprojects.

What was done last week

I continued to polish the AudioMan and Quick Editor product packages: The Windows EXEs now have custom icons and names. The Durham Quick Editor has a logo, splash screen and help screen branded. Eventually I'll get a graphic designer to do a decent job on that stuff but the placeholders will work for now.

The AudioMan build scripts make consolidated reports for JUnit and EMMA across all AudioMan projects to give me overall metric totals. Some of those stats are on the left margin of the main page of this blog.

The Metadata core classes are shaping up nicely, just in time for them to be changed again to accomodate what I'm calling "content categories". For example for AudioMan I'll have the "audio" content category and I'll use this to grab audio attributes (which map to metadata properties) out of content types in that category.

All of the AudioMan UI elements will know they are working with content types in the audio content category, and can request an Artist Name property value from the content type whether its an MP3, OGG or WMA file. Of course I also want to allow people to define their own content categories for Durham just like they can create support for their own content types and metadata. Some ideas for other content categories: images, video, source code, office documents, etc...

If you aren't sufficiently confused about Durham's contentType/metadata/property object model yet, I'll write a blog post about it this week. If you're feeling really proactive you could just read the source code. :)

--

Speaking of content types, there's some interesting work going on with content types in Eclipse 3.1 to determine file types by the content of the file rather than file extension. From a quick browse of the API it seems like they are looking for specific binary patterns in the files to determine content type. This is very close to file metadata -- a step or two away maybe.

Unfortunately I don't think I will be able to use any of the classes because most of the interesting ones are in internal packages. Maybe I can still hook into the content type support to match content types to metadata types. Right now I'm using only file extensions and for some file types that's less than optimal. Audio doesn't really have that problem but video and images do.

What got bumped?

• Email results of the build to the releng mailing list -- figure out why Ant's <mail> task isn't working. I'll wait for the new build machine to be set up first. Update: Still waiting for my host to get set up.

Unsolved Problems

• If I bundle my RCP product into a Mac OS X .app directory can it still be updated through the Update Manager? I'm thinking no. I may not be updating Quick Editor or AudioMan via update manager anyway.

New things to do

• Use the new build machine for CVS and nightly builds
• Mac: package products in a dmg'd bundle
• Continue work on AudioMan's Collection Browsing perspective.
• Centralize the code that gets temporary copies of test files for unit tests.