LottaNZB

It’s been two months since the last progress report. We’ve got quite some feedback by people who look forward to the upcoming version of LottaNZB and can hardly wait. Of course, all of this is an encouragement for us to keep going and deliver you the best version of LottaNZB ever, based on a new and powerful backend.

In other words: The project is alive, even though the pace of development was a bit slower during the past months because 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 collaborate with the SABnzbd crew to fix a bug that also affects LottaNZB 0.6.

Much has happened in the world of SABnzbd. After a long time of intensive development, SABnzbd 0.5 has been released. Congratulations to everyone who has made this possible! The most important changes include:

• Multi-language web interface
• Start-up wizard (LottaNZB aims to make this even easier)
• QuickCheck: On-the-fly check of downloads
• Configuration changes take immediate effect
• New skins, better RSS support and sorting capabilities
• and last but not least, an extensive API for third-party applications like LottaNZB!

The new version of SABnzbd will not be part of the Ubuntu 10.04 repositories, but a source tarball as well as a PPA maintained by JCFP are available.

Also, the SABnzbd crew has moved from Assembla to Launchpad, allowing more people to get involved with the development and contribute translations. I’m particularly happy about this, as it makes collaboration even easier. Unfortunately, the existing bugs have not yet been imported by the Launchpad crew, but it’s work in progress.

Now, let me present you what steps have been made towards the release of LottaNZB 0.6.

The dialog displaying information about an individual download has finally been merged into the main branch of the project. Marcel de Vries did a great job! The dialog is now also capable of directly opening the directory that contains the download. In the future, we aim to make it even easier to access the downloaded files. Suggestions are always welcome!

On the other hand, I’ve been working on the Preferences dialog. It’s a pleasure to present you some of the new features. A new capability has been added to SABnzbd that allows LottaNZB to know if utilities for verification and extraction of downloads (par2, unrar, unzip) are available on the system SABnzbd is running on. This allows LottaNZB to display a helpful message if this isn’t the case:

Next, the ability to create, edit and delete servers has finally been ported to the SABnzbd API. What’s special about it is that any changes made in LottaNZB will instantaneously take effect and will be visible in SABnzbd’s web interface and vice-versa. The following screencast (which unfortunately contains some German labels) demonstrates this:

OGV version, if you don’t like Adobe Flash (who does anyway?)

What’s important to say is that this kind of responsiveness and tight integration with SABnzbd will be present all over the application.

A major chunk of work remaining to be done  is the user interface for setting up LottaNZB, but some progress has already be made on this as seen in the previous progress report. And of course, lots of testing will be necessary before the release of LottaNZB 0.6. Plug-ins might not be present in LottaNZB 0.6 in order to prevent the release from being put off even further. This means that some functionality like support for categories or Newzbin might not be available in LottaNZB 0.6, but it will of course be accessible through SABnzbd’s web interface.

Stay tuned!

Update: As pointed out by zerwas, SABnzbd 0.5.0 actually is included in the Ubuntu 10.04 repository. However, LottaNZB 0.6 will depend on SABnzbd 0.5.2 (that is yet to be released) because this version includes a fix for the bug mentioned at the beginning of this post. Also, I didn’t notice that the release of SABnzbd 0.5 was already mentioned in the previous progress report. Please excuse this redundancy.