April 6, 2012
Signal 1.5 is up with some nice under the hood improvements that I’ve been looking forward to sharing with you:
Smart Player Launching
Signal is now a lot smarter about launching your media player if it’s not already running. If you connect a remote while the player isn’t running an idle now playing screen will be shown and the player won’t immediately launch. When you select a song to play or press a playback command this will kick off the player and display a message on the remote while the player is starting up. Previously Signal launched the player as soon as a remote connected and this could cause unexpected launches if you had a device in your network that maintained a long-lived connection. The new approach handles this better and generally just does what you expect.
Improved Album Art Fetching
When rapidly skipping through songs it was sometimes possible for Signal to display the wrong album art. It was also possible for cached artwork to be used if moving between songs with the same artist and album name but different album art images. Signal should now show you exactly what you see in the media player for both of these situations.
Automatic Updates
Signal can now update itself automatically in most cases. This allows for easier maintenance of headless machines and hopefully a few less update prompts for you to deal with. Updates are only applied if they will not substantially change the behavior of the app. For any release that makes a significant change the normal update prompt is displayed and you can choose whether or not to apply the update and when. For the curious I wrote a bit about the thinking behind this feature on my personal blog.
To support automatic updates on Windows Signal has moved from a per-machine to a per-user installation placed in the user’s local app data directory. This migration is handled for you automatically when updating to 1.5.
September 30, 2011
Signal 1.5 will be dropping support for Mac OS X 10.4. I’ve maintained this for a while since I know there are still a few people using it, but moving the minimum version forward will allow me to replace a lot of old code and make Signal even smaller and faster than before.
If you’re going to stick with Tiger for a while there are no worries, Apple is no longer updating iTunes on this platform so Signal should remain compatible for as long as you wish to use it.
August 7, 2011
Signal 1.4 is now available, adding a scrubber bar and touch input support for the volume control to the web interface. On iOS devices you can now slide your finger across these controls to easily adjust the volume and and playback position. On a Mac or PC you can move the slider with the mouse or jump to a specific position by clicking anywhere on the bar.
I’ve also posted beta 4 of OnScreen, which now automatically updates play counts and the “watched” state for items in your iTunes library. This is handy for marking podcasts, TV shows, and iTunes U content as seen when played through your game console or any other DLNA device. I’ve been plowing through WWDC videos on the PS3 and having OnScreen help keep track of which ones I’ve already seen has been really nice. Enjoy!
July 10, 2011
With the release of Mac OS X Lion drawing near I’ve been putting Signal and OnScreen through their paces on the new OS to make sure you have a smooth upgrade. Signal’s software update process required a couple of tweaks which are available in Signal 1.3.7. I recommend all Mac users update to this version before making the leap to Lion. No problems were found with the current OnScreen release so no update is required there.
With the Signal fix both apps are running great on the new cat. Enjoy the upgrade!
June 11, 2011
Version 1.2 of the RTI driver is now available, adding support for rating the current track, adjusting the playback position, and playing a specified media library path. Library path playback enables the creation of buttons to play songs from any part of the media library such as /Music/Artists/Oasis or /Music/Albums/Americana. Signal 1.3.6 adds support for playing a playlist the same way, so using the Play Library Path command with a value of /Music/Playlists/New Songs would allow you to create a button mapped to the New Songs playlist.
« Archive