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!








Plug-ins