Since last night, SeriesFinale version 0.6.6 should be available for those who have the extras-devel catalog.

This version’s highlights are:

* Live search of shows. Finally it includes a way to quickly filter shows, this is especially useful for those who have a large number of shows in the list.

* Quick access to the next/previous episodes. This was another request from a user, when viewing an episode, add a way to quickly go to the previous or next episode. I have added this by panning/dragging horizontally in the episode view, dragging left or right will bring the next or the previous episode, respectively.

* Switched episodes’ “watched” check-boxes to the right. After adding the portrait mode, it was clear that having the episodes’ check-boxes on the right made more sense for right-handed people. This is now the default position, nevertheless, a new option was included in the settings dialog so users can choose to either have on the right or left.

* Last but not least, Juan has made SF more reliable and fast by saving the database and settings only if they have been changed.

We will keep the list of bugs and feature requests in mind for the SF development (for both Maemo and GNOME) so, you are welcome to submit more.

If you use the extras-testing catalog, be sure to try this new version of SF and vote for it when it appears here.

As promised in some of my previous posts about SeriesFinale, I have finally ported it to GNOME.

For the ones who don’t know about this pet project of mine, SeriesFinale is a TV shows browser and tracker application that was originally developed for Maemo Fremantle. While I use it all the time in my N900, I have been asked to port it to GNOME and I also thought it’d be a good thing to have it in my favorite desktop.

The source code for the port can be found in the “gnome” branch of the SeriesFinale project in Gitorious, hopefully I’ll find time to clean the code a bit and prepare Debian and RPM packages. This means that you can try it and install it from source by cloning the git repository, pulling the “gnome” branch and install it “the Python way”:

# python setup.py install
(warning for non-Pythonistas: there is no setup.py uninstall but you get to see where the files are copied to by running this command)

If you find some bugs, you can file them in the Maemo Bugzilla for now (be sure to specify the platform).
Let’s see if we come up with some sort of synchronization for SF in the future so you don’t have to be marking your episodes twice.
For now, if you want to start with the SF information you had on your N900, just copy the series.db file under “~/.osso/seriesfinale” in Maemo to “~/.seriesfinale” in GNOME.

Here is a screencast to show you how it looks like:

SeriesFinale for GNOME from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

Hope you enjoy SF on GNOME!

Last week was a busy one with more than one day and a half devoted to meetings besides the usual hacking in MeeGo and SeriesFinale (yeah, I could still devote a couple of hours to keep the work on the GNOME port) but a great weekend was waiting us.

On Friday, after work, we went to Brión (close to Santiago de Compostela) for another Igalia Winter Summit. The trip was quite interesting with me sharing the car with Victor, Claudio and Guillaume, which is a funny thing because in a company with a majority of Spanish members, none of us is Spanish

The first night was composed of hard, philosophical discussions, card games, general get-together and, for some of us, 4 hours of sleep.
On Saturday, Piñeiro (AKA A.P.I.) and Martin Robinson gave a talk about how they got to Igalia, that is, where they come from and how they got into this life of a Free Software hacker.

After lunch, I had a brainstorming with a few other Igalians about Grilo and SeriesFinale’s (unrelated) world domination plans.
This year is also Igalia’s 9th anniversary and some of us were having our companions joining in for the anniversary dinner on Saturday night, so, we had a magician performing impressive card tricks and a Queimada.

For this summit, a few of us had a new challenge, to give the first concert of the Igalia Blues Band as kind of a spin-off of the concert given in last year’s GUADEC (or GCDS). So, Andrés, Claudio, Piñeiro and myself practiced, when we could, the five songs we selected for this after-dinner show. After the concert, we continued with a “less official” setlist where I performed an disastrous alternative version of Bad Things (opening song of the True Blood TV show).
It was quite nice. I think we entertained the people and everybody seemed happy.

Igalia Blues Band (Claudio is not present because I couldn't find any picture with the four of us)

The next morning, Juanjo gave a presentation about the history of Igalia. It is impressive how the company evolved in these 9 years, from a group of Computer Science graduates from Galicia, into having 40 people across 8 different countries, always considering people as its main value and Free Software as a philosophy. I’m proud to be part of it.

The traditional group photo

The last SeriesFinale version was released before I went to GUADEC and then on vacation which means that it’s been a while since you have had news from this nice little app but today I’m releasing its 0.6.5 version.

This version has some nice new features apart from regular bug fixing and code improvement.
Juan has added the portrait mode (borrowed from the great gPodder) which surely pleases many users.

To control the rotation and other forthcoming preferences, I’ve rewritten the settings class and created a settings dialog:

Sometimes I get sick of getting the “Special” season on every shows, basically because I never watch those; so, I added a check button to the settings dialog where one can tell if the special seasons are to be considered or ignored, when adding new shows or updating existing ones.

But, if you’re like me and have a bunch of shows already added, it’d be a pain to delete episode-by-episode from the Special seasons in every show in order to delete these seasons… To solve this and to fill a missing/neglected action, I’ve added the “Delete Seasons” view which makes it easy to delete seasons.

Some problems with the threads have been solved as well, so, maybe weird issues like missing shows’ full title and stuff will likely be solved after this version.

Finally, a feature that has been requested a few times has been added: list shows by recent episode date. This means that now there are two filters in the shows’ view that list the shows by most recent episodes or by name. This is really useful because selecting the recent episodes’ sorting you can now update your shows’ list and the ones that got already aired, unwatched episodes will be listed on top of the list.

Here’s the changelog for this version:

* Add sorting shows by most recent episode or name
* Add auto-rotation support
* Add settings dialog
* Fix problems with threads
* Fix episodes highlight when checking/unchecking all episodes
* Rewrite settings
* Add special seasons addition preferences
* Make returning to the shows view faster
* Add delete seasons view

Soon, in a Maemo Extras repository near you!

(Oh, and the next time I touch SF’s code it’s very likely that it will be to port it to GNOME, so, stay tuned…)

It’s been a while now since I released the last version of SeriesFinale.
The truth is that I’ve been busier than usual these days and of course, this is reflected on pet projects.

As some of you may have experienced, there was a kind of a nasty bug in SeriesFinale’s last version: it wouldn’t update certain shows (when they had been added long ago)… and the good news is that this is one of the things that got fixed in this new version.

One of the good things Juan introduced for this version is how the next episodes to be watched are shown. Before, the episodes were shown according to their “first aired” date and in case of the same date for two or more episodes, the highest index one would be marked as the one to be watched. In this 0.6.1 version, the episodes are shown according to their number and season, so, if episode #3 has the same air date as episode #4, #3 will always be shown as the next one to be watched.

It is now using a priority queue to download the series’ covers and info that gives priority to the info. This means you won’t have to wait for the info AND covers to download when you hit the Update All menu but instead wait only for the info; the covers will then be downloaded in the background while you use the app normally.

I’m now introducing the new Russian translation, which Misha Ketslah had kindly sent to me a while ago but that I hadn’t had the time to integrate.

Here’s the list of major changes for this new version:

* Add Russian translation (thanks to Misha Ketslah)
* Fix updating of shows
* Use a priority queue to differentiate the downloads of covers or series’ info
* Use only one AsyncWorker at most to deal with the series
* Prevent the download and usage of images to generate problems
* Fix showing next episode
* Add TheTVDB credits
* Add THANKS file

So… what about that GNOME version, you ask? I’ve already started to port it to GNOME but couldn’t dedicate much time to it and taking into account that I’ll be on vacation very soon, it’s likely it will take a little longer. But I’m looking forward to use SeriesFinale on GNOME!

As for the N900 owners, I’ve just promoted the package to Extras-Testing so either use the Extras-Devel repo as usual or wait ~10 days for it to appear in Extras.