Progress report
February 22nd, 2010 - SeverinIn the past months, I kept promising that I would eventually write a blog post about about what has been going on related to the development of LottaNZB and what you can except in the next couple of months.
More than a year ago, I announced that we’re evaluating SABnzbd as the new LottaNZB backend, replacing HellaNZB that hasn’t been developed for years. Although we’re not close to a release of LottaNZB 0.6 yet, I’m glad to tell you that the migration went really well so far and many things have already been accomplished.
SABnzbd 0.5, which LottaNZB 0.6 builds upon, has been released today. Congratulations to the whole SABnzbd crew who’ve made this possible! They’ve also revamped the project homepage and a wiki provides detailed information for anyone who’s interested. I’m also grateful that the SABnzbd developers (especially ShyPike) were so open to suggestions regarding API improvements by third-party developers like me. LottaNZB will directly profit from this healthy collaboration. Fortunately, JCFP has already set up a PPA, making it easy to install SABnzbd on Ubuntu machines and automatically keep SABnzbd up-to-date.
While I’ve been focusing on carefully creating a new modular and extensible backend for asynchronous communication with SABnzbd, allowing access to all interesting data in a convenient way, handling configuration files etc., we’ve now moved on to the UI that makes use of all the new infrastructure. The screenshots below showcase the current code in the main branch (already more than 1000 revisions) as well as several experimental branches by me and Marcel. Everything is still work in progress and many things are still incomplete and subject to change. Of course, we always appreciate fresh new ideas regarding UI design.
Right now, we’re only working on getting the basic features in place that are essential for the release of LottaNZB 0.6. With all the handy features SABnzbd provides (RSS feeds, categorization, scheduling, sorting, etc.) we won’t run out of work for later versions of LottaNZB.
At this point of time, it’s impossible for me to say when LottaNZB 0.6 will be released. 2010 is definitely a target though. 
As soon as LottaNZB 0.6 reaches something between alpha and beta quality, we’ll provide a PPA with daily builds of the latest LottaNZB code and some source tarballs now and then so that courageous people can give LottaNZB 0.6 a spin and provide us with valuable input in the form of bug reports and feature requests.
Stay tuned!
February 22nd, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Great news!
It looks really nice. From the screenshots it seems to be pretty usable!
I’ll jump right into that svn
Keep up the great work!
February 22nd, 2010 at 3:43 pm
Nice work!
February 22nd, 2010 at 5:48 pm
@VuDu: It may look nice, but it’s still highly unstable and clearly not recommended for production. Also many essential things are still missing or only available in experimental branches. For example, the installation (setup.py) hasn’t been ported yet and will probably lead to unexpected results. As it’s an Open Source project, anyone is free to branch the code and run it just for kicks, but I strongly recommend you to wait for another month or two. It would also make me sleep better.
February 23rd, 2010 at 8:10 pm
Great work, looking forward for the betas
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:02 pm
I can’t wait to be rid of HellaNZB, the word Hell in the name really is quite apt!
March 19th, 2010 at 10:46 pm
Looks awesome, but i hope you wont remove the option to connect to external or local hellanzb running daemons. Looking forward to check out the betas.
March 19th, 2010 at 11:24 pm
Hi serrghi, LottaNZB 0.6 won’t support HellaNZB at all. However, it will be possible to connect to any instance of SABnzbd running on the local machine or any other machine on the network.
April 5th, 2010 at 4:39 pm
Can’t wait for lottanzb 0.6 as I have already moved to sabnzbd.
How’s the progress? Yeah I know you devs hate being asked this all the time
April 8th, 2010 at 11:26 pm
Hey Severin,
I’m a bit of a pyGtk guy myself (wrote the original GDM2Setup tool) and was wondering the best way to get in touch about doing some dev work? Drop me an email with some info when you get time
April 18th, 2010 at 9:03 pm
I just luv lottanzb. its the best software you can get for downloading nzbs. Even under Windows I was unable to find comparable software (even under paidware!)
I am glad that lottnzb will stay from its gui and is only going to change the backend
April 22nd, 2010 at 12:35 am
While searching around for a nice desktop GUI to SABnzb, I found this really promising project! I think it was a wise decision to move away from HellaNZB and go with something more updated.
Thank you for bringing all the time and effort into this project and I’m really looking forward to a smooth 0.6 release!
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:11 pm
I know this might be a longshot, but I just wondered if there were any news? I am currently testing Ubuntu 10.04 and it is all great, but it will all be in vain if it is not possible to get my .nzb`s. It would be reassuring to know that the project is still alive. Anyway this looks great, so keep on trucking!
April 22nd, 2010 at 11:46 pm
@lifeofguenter and M1AU: Thanks alot for the great compliments! I really appreciate it.
@mips and Anxious But Happy as All Hell: I can assure you that the project is still alive, even though the pace of development was a bit slower during the past months because my studies are keeping me busy. Some parts of the software have clearly become more mature since the last progress report and I’ve continued to work together with the SABnzbd crew to fix bugs that also affect LottaNZB 0.6. A new progress report is in the pipeline. Thanks alot for your patience.
May 13th, 2010 at 6:53 am
First of all I love your application and I have an suggestion for you to improve it: please add an option to shutdown computer after download completion!
May 13th, 2010 at 9:15 am
@Name: By coincidence, LottaNZB 0.5.4, to be released within the next few days, is going to have a similar feature that lets LottaNZB prevent the computer from being suspended as long as there are still active downloads. It’s not exactly what you want, but it’s better than nothing. Next, as SABnzbd 0.5 already has the very option you’re suggesting, LottaNZB 0.6 will most certainly allow you to access it. Stay tuned!