Marcin Juszkiewicz - programming

Released sources of my Protracker module player

2009-12-17T19:12:00+01:00

I just released sources of my Protracker module player. What this application is and what it can do you can read in one of my older posts: I wrote module player in Qt.

What are features:

UI created with Qt Designer (so it is easy to change if you want)
separate UI for desktop and other for Maemo5 (automatically selectable during build)
Maemo5 uses 3 stacked windows just like UI Style Guide requires
uses Phonon to play (with GStreamer modplug plugin underneath)
fetching modules from modland archive
author/song selection
playing next song on song end (with looping on author)
seeking (works only in desktop version)

Things to do:

error handling (especially fetching related)
moving of download progressbar to QDialog
playing counters
favorites
playlists

Everything licensed under LGPL v2.1 — same license as Qt uses. That because I used many Qt examples as base for my application.

How to get it? I made repository on Github — go there, fetch, try, comment, share improvements.

I wrote module player in Qt

2009-11-30T18:14:00+01:00

It was over eight years ago when I wrote application last time. Since then I had my hands in countless programs, libraries etc. but never wrote something new from scratch. Until recently…

Some time ago Mickey Lauer presented his module player for iPhone. I like the idea and started thinking about creating such one for my devices. After some discussions about Modland music collection with him I started coding.

To make things as simple as possible I used Qt framework with Phonon for playing (GStreamer modplug plugin underneath). Current version maybe is not so beauty but it is usable and works fine. Application will be GPL — I used code from Qt demos, read random snippets of code from other programs etc.

Things already implemented:

playing local modules
fetching modules from modland archive
author/song selection
playing next song on song end (with looping on author)
seeking
volume change (will probably get removed from UI)

Things to do:

error handling (especially fetching related)
download progressbar
playing counters
favorites
playlists
small screen usability (stacked windows/tabs)
and others…

Current UI

For readers: what is a real name of Lord Performer? :D

Am I programmer?

2008-05-10T10:10:00+02:00

Many people think that I am programmer… But what is definition of programmer?

Wikipedia says: “A programmer is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software.”

My last desktop program was Multiview for AmigaOS 2.04+ which ended life in 2000 year (after over 3 years of development). Then I changed platform to Debian GNU/Linux and started to mainly use software instead of writing it. Of course during studies I wrote some code in few languages (C, C++, Z80 Asm, PIC16 Asm/C/BASIC and maybe some other) but none of them was something to be used by normal people.

For few years my work title was “PHP programmer” (with some variants) but writing code for websites is different thing then for desktop computers.

Eric Sink wrote one day great post about programmers and developers. According to this I am rather developer then programmer.

My programmer part of me know how to fix code written in PHP (used this language for few years to get paid), Python (but never got proper amount of knowledge about it) and few others — one day I had to debug small application written in 8086 assembler which I saw for first time — and all I had was source code printout.

But I also many times worked with clients to get informations what they really need to be done in project and those discussions changed many aspects of first draft of specifications. Then transforming specs into design and finally into code which gives working service at the end. Providing help to few ~60 years old ladies which use CMS written by you can be hard job — especially when documentation is not yet created so no one else know each system parts.

But there are many work titles to choose from: Programmer, Developer, Engineer, Software (Engineer / Architect / Developer / Designer) so I probably will stay with Developer and will not try to explain too much what exactly I am doing for living :)