Hello and welcome to the first edition of my development updates! FMP continues to be my main gig, but I’ve been branching out to other things.
FRESHMusicPlayer
FRESHMusicPlayer for Mac and Linux
I’ve made some pretty major progress with FMP fmal! I’ve started porting SIADL to Avalonia, the UI framework I’m using. It almost looks like the Windows version of FMP now.
There’s still a few things that are off, such as the Navbar buttons on the top and the volume slider, but we’re getting a lot closer.
Since all of these styles are colors are implemented in a separate library, it should be a lot easier for me to make new SIADL apps.
The only things left to implement are the tag editor, searching, notifications, and the mini player. If everything goes to plan, I should be able to release FMP for Mac and Linux in a few weeks. It’s super exciting seeing FMP actually running well outside of Windows!
FRESHMusicPlayer 11
I haven’t started working on FRESHMusicPlayer 11 yet, but I do have a roadmap now. For this release, I’m hoping to improve the core music playing parts of FMP.
- Fullscreen view
- Gapless playback
- Equalization
- Speed/pitch adjustment
- “Skip protection”
Keep in mind though that I usually don’t end up implementing everything from the roadmaps. They’re just things I’d like to have.
Future of FRESHMusicPlayer (for Windows)
Some people have asked me why I’m still maintaining a separate Windows version of FMP, even though FMP fmal already runs perfectly on Windows. There’s a few reasons why I don’t want to drop the Windows only version just yet:
Updater
FMP uses Squirrel.Windows to handle its updates. It’s an amazing library that allows FMP to have a buttery smooth updating experience, but unfortunately, it works with .NET Framework only, with no apparent plans to add .NET Core/5+ support, which means that I’ll need to find a replacement. For now, I have my eyes on osu!lazer’s roadmap, where they also have plans to replace Squirrel with their own updater in a few months. If I can’t adapt their system to work with FMP, though, I might be able to create my own system.
Missing features
Although Avalonia is already really good, there’s still a few missing features that don’t make it as nice as WPF. For example, type to search in lists isn’t currently available, and as far as I’m aware, there is no support for Right To Left.
Resource usage
This one isn’t as big of a deal has the updater; Because Avalonia and .NET 5 aren’t preinstalled on everyone’s systems, they have to be bundled with FMP. The resulting executable is around 60MB big (compared to the current < 5MB).
My current plan is to maintain both the Windows and cross platform versions of FMP for the next few months, and then reconsider dropping the Windows only version.
Squidphotos and Condownloader
I’m soon going to start working on cross platform versions of Squidphotos and Condownloader and hope to release them this month or next month!
That’s all!
Thanks for reading!