Minitube

You may have noticed that your beloved Minitube is not working anymore. Don’t panic! Version 0.6.1 is here to help you. Many thanks to Guillaume Girard for reporting the problem and suggesting a fix. Mac builds will arrive in a few hours Mac builds are up.

Minitube has been reported to work on the brand new Nokia N900. This phone sports the Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system. Cool!

Version 0.6 is out now! This cycle has seen an increase of contributions from various people around the world. In particular Kiwamu Okabe, from Japan, magically appeared on Gitorious and added HTTP proxy support and a Japanese translation.

I think I’m going to take a break and slow down development a bit. I have a couple ideas for two new projects and I’d like to take the time needed to experiment. It is always Qt stuff. After years of server-side programming and Web development I guess I found my real interest: I just love to design the UI of native applications.

Marcel Hilzinger wrote a very positive review about Minitube. Thank you!

Minitube landed in the FreeBSD ports. Yeah!

In other news, among various blogs talking about Minitube, Tony Iliakostas wrote an outstanding (Mac-oriented) review of Minitube.

And now for the bad news, Google banned the Minitube project page from their search results, maybe because lots of people are linking to it. Way to go, Google!

Grab it now!

I just discovered that the (quite obscure) PLD Linux distribution and has been quietly packaging Minitube since the very beginning. Also SourceMage Linux has a Minitube 0.3 “spell” available.  These add up to Gentoo, Fink, ArchLinux and Pardus. Very nice!

PS. My secret dream is having Minitube in Debian. /me crosses fingers

I just finished to add Google suggest support into Minitube. It was quick since there is a Qt example available that does just that. I guess everybody knows what I’m talking about. When you type a keyword a little popup appears under the search box with the most popular keywords matching what you have typed.
The implementation is a bit buggy but already usable, the code is available on Gitorious. I’m not sure if additionally showing the user’s own previous searches would be a good idea… maybe not. Both from a privacy and performance point of view.

In the meantime, Stefan Brueck has been working on building Minitube on Windows. He has an experimental build, that basically does everything apart playing videos ;)

Not a bad start for this development cycle! Once the completion stuff is really perfect, I think I’ll work on some minor polishing and release 0.5 right away.

The latest weeks have been exciting. The development of Minitube is such a gratification for me. I’ve been following Qt development for literally years and from time to time experimented with C++. But I never had something really useful to do with it. I mean, until now.

The response to Minitube has been overwhelming. Lots of downloads, emails, comments, two people volunteering for translation and even a 1€ donation ;)

But the most exciting thing for me is the inclusion in some Linux distributions, namely Gentoo and ArchLinux. Also the Fink project added Minitube to its repository. I’m very pleased to be able to give something back to the Free Software community.

These days I’m readying the code base for the 0.3 release. So stay tuned!