RigelianThe upcoming release of Rigelian will focus on the artist view: a more image based view, improved handling of artist images and the addition of artist biographies and similar artists. Biographies and similar artists will be retrieved from last.fm, which offers an api for this. To abstract the networking part I created a new package…
To make the development process more reliable, I added 4 of the open-source libraries on my GitHub account to Bitrise. For small developers they offer a free service to have automated build pipelines for different platforms, including the Apple ecosystem. Every commit will now trigger the build pipeline including running the test set (if present,…
I just completed the last bits-and-pieces and posted the new 2.0 version of Rigelian to the AppStore and into the review and approval process. When I started the development of Rigelian over 2 years ago, I had a couple of things in mind. The main goal was to create the best remote control for mpd-based…
It’s 2020 and we’re back on extending Rigelian with support for Kodi. Added recently are the ‘play random album’ and ‘play random songs’ functions. Turns out that adding 100 songs in one command is very slow on Kodi, so I had to limit that to 20 songs to keep the performance acceptable. Also the sortation…
When compiling the c-based library libmpdclient, I ran into the problem that it contains some #define statements which have to be set during the build. It took me while to find out how to set those when building the package with Swift Package Manager. In the end off course the answer was right there in…
After some initial try-outs with the swift package manager some months ago, I came back to it today to see if it’s possible to run it side-by-side with cocoapods, and gradually migrate packages over. To begin with, I took out the libmpdclient sources of the mpdconnector framework, and put it into a framework of its…
Most Rigelian support questions are related to cover art not displaying correctly. Unfortunately mpd supports cover art retrieval only in recent versions (since 0.21) and the support is still basic. To let the users get the best cover art under these constraints, the cover art assistant in Rigelian is updated with new functions, like selecting…
Recently version 2.17 of libmpdclient was released which adds support for binary responses, like for the ‘albumart’ command that was added to mpd a while ago. Using this new library version Rigelian can now read local cover art without requiring a http server on the player. There are still two major limitations with this approach:…
With macOS Catalina Apple has released catalyst, which makes it possible to port an iPad app to a Mac app with limited effort. A few months ago I had a first look at this, but ran into too many problems. Yesterday I tried again with the latest versions of all frameworks, and was able to…
In iOS 13 Apple introduced a set of around 1.500 symbols (icon images) which are easy to use in an app. This makes live, at least on iOS 13, easier so I started migrating to these symbols where possible. To keep it backwards compatible, I’m extending UIImage for every image that I migrate: extension UIImage…