That’s right, a couple of weeks ago new versions of SeriesFinale were released.
There was a long absence between these and the previous releases. The truth is that it has become more and more difficult for me to find the motivation (and time) to do work on an application for platforms I am not currently using. Still, I have had some emails from people showing their appreciation and Juan has also helped a lot (he is the reason there is also a new N900 release).

If you’re following the development of SeriesFinale, I have recently moved the repository over to GitHub (like I did for most of my projects). GitHub is so much faster than Gitorious and has nice features such as an issue tracker. Before you say it, although GitHub is not Open Source software, we’re talking about a hosted solution for Git repositories from a very cool company and I had no intentions of hosting Gitorious on my own anyway.

So what’s new in SeriesFinale? I need to differentiate between the platforms’ versions first.
Harmattan (N9) is on the 0.6.9 version and many bugs were solved like:
* Marking all episodes from the episodes’ list menu (nd#1)
* Episodes’ overview height (nd#9)
* Updating the shows season list
* Add a close button to show info dialog
* Add mark none action to the episodes’ list menu

There are still some issues when scrolling the lists which I’ve looked into and could not find any solution, I am convinced it actually has to do with the Python bindings of QML…

Fremantle (N900) is on version 0.6.10 and has less visible changes but the threads, languages and sorting functions were improved.

Adding the the new Harmattan version to the Nokia Store was also a challenge (it kept being rejected due to tiny details) but it eventually went through.

Be sure to test and vote for SF on Fremantle, or, in case you have an N9, get the new version from the Nokia Store:

Today is the last day of 2011 and it is once again when people look back in time and realize what they have done throughout the year and if they stuck to their promises. I don’t give that much importance to events like new year’s eve or even my birthday but I decided to write a blog post and to think about what happened on 2011.

As promised before, here is the first release of SeriesFinale for MeeGo Harmattan.

Yup, after some months, here is a new version of SeriesFinale.

This new version doesn’t have many new features but brings an important one related to my previous blog post: the context menu.
When long-pressing a show or a season, a dialog will be shown with some actions. On the show’s context menu (or context dialog?), the user can update it, delete it, view its info or, more importantly, mark the next episode to watch as watched. On the season’s context menu, it can be deleted or, as many users have requested, mark all episodes.

Here are a couple of screenshots:

Of course that by only seeing the screenshots you don’t get the same feeling has when you quickly open the dialog and mark the next episode to watch so give it a try.
It it already in Extras Testing and if it works well for you, please vote for it to get into Extras.

The Future

This summer I bought myself an Android phone. That’s right, because of pure curiosity and with the help of Nokia’s decisions regarding MeeGo, I bought a Samsung Galaxy S.
I’ve been using it ever since as my main phone but I didn’t want to leave SF unattended yet. There are a couple of things more that I want to do and I’ll keep an eye on the download statistics to try to guess how many people is still interested in this app.

I haven’t yet found a full replacement for it on Android. I’ve installed a few apps that either don’t work well, require login or are bloated with features making it harder to use so I don’t know if I’ll end up contributing to some FOSS one or developing an official port of SF. Do you think that developing an official version for Android makes sense?
Also, people have asked me for a Symbian and Blackberry versions of it but I just don’t own any phone with these systems.

As for SF on the N9/N950, a release could be out there soon so stay tuned.

Yesterday was a holiday so I got some time to hack a bit in SeriesFinale.
One of the things I wanted to do was to have a context menu for shows and seasons. Something to apply individual actions like deleting, updating, viewing information, etc when there is a long press on a tree view’s item.

Finally I could get a little time to finish SF 0.6.8 release.

In the last release of SeriesFinale some nice new features were introduced like live search of TV shows but there was a problem: I messed it up. Basically, you could live search but once you pressed on a show, a different would be selected… good job, I know…

Anyway, the live search is fixed in this new version.

It also has some new cool changes by Juan:
* Covers are now kept back when the application is upgraded
* The database is now saved automatically every 5 minutes
* To prevent database corruption, the database is saved in a temporary file and if everything when well it is then moved to the right file name
* It now checks if other instances of SF are running and hangs newer instances until the old ones are finished
* Buttons whose actions depend on the connection are now only visible when the device is online

Since last version, it is possible to navigate to the next and previous episodes when viewing an episode details but one thing that was a real pain was to have to go back to the full list of episodes in order to mark them as watched so I’ve added a menu that lets users check the episode as watched.

The episodes’ titles are now also stroked when they are watched:

If you use the extras-testing repository, be sure to give it a try and vote to promote it.

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!

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…)