We’ve just read about Apple’s patent application (that seems to have been filed on July 17 2007) to alter the volume of a media player based on the external surrounding.
It’s funny how this was suggested to the Rockbox project already back in September 2002 and is logged fine independently by archive.org – and in fact also on Sourceforge where we hosted our request-tracker back then.
This is not the first time we see this consumer electronics giant patent ideas we’ve already implemented or discussed publicly a very long time before in the Rockbox project.
Jonas “rasher” Häggqvist is the main man behind behind a distributed effort to gather a huge set of data on Rockbox builds of the past. Currently there are a number of build servers running “out there” providing info back to the master server about the bin size and ram size used by Rockbox builds (for a limited set of selected targets) of basically every single SVN revision since the dawn of time… Or more specifically almost 20000 revisions with rev 1 committed on January 17th 2002 (although the first files with contents were committed in r4, March 25th that year).
The repository was originally using CVS but was converted to SVN using cvs2svn in January 2007.
While this extensive work isn’t finished yet, you can already see the results appearing on Jonas’ site at:
Jorge “casainho” Pinto is known in the Rockbox circles as the main guy behind the “Rockbox Player” project which strives to build their own portable music player to run Rockbox.
They’ve made some progress latetly, and they’ve now run Rockbox far enough to display stuff on their screen:
After three months of work since the last release, we manage to keep the schedule and ship Rockbox 3.1. The list of news since 3.0 include the following:
A bitmap scaler was added to Rockbox, which means that album art no longer has to be pre-scaled to the correct dimensions on your computer. See AlbumArt for more information.
The calendar plugin which has existed for the Archos units for a long time is now available on all devices equipped with a clock.
The spacerocks plugin which was removed from version 3.0 due to a major bug has been brought back.
Optimised MP3 decoder on dual-core targets, giving several more hours of battery life in most situations.
Optimizations for AAC and APE decoding
Backlight fading is now available on most targets.
When recording in mono, you can now chose between recording the left or right channel, or a mix of both.
It is now possible to configure which items are shown in the Quick Screen.
Several new features were added to the WPS syntax
The build system received a major overhaul. This only matters for people who compile their own builds.
My personal contribution has been very tiny this time around and I’ve basically just built the release builds and admined the distributed build system somewhat.
With the newly established three-month release cycle in the Rockbox project it means we’re about to soon do a version 3.1 release. Planned to happen in a week or so.
In preparation for that, we just now branched trunk to a 3.1 branch. Help us polish it up, update translations and correct the release notes!
There have been fierce activity in the dusty corners of the Rockbox project known as the SanDisk Sansa v2 hackers guild (no not really but I thought it sounded amusing) and this has so far resulted in early code like LCD drivers and NAND drivers on three new upcoming targets: The e200, Fuze and Clip.
There’s still work to do before the celebrations can start for real, but it’s still nice to see good progress.
It does show a working LCD driver although of course the colours are all messed up due to some glitch still remaining in there…
It’s somewhat confusing with another model called M3, as Rockbox already runs on the iAudio M3 since March 2008. I think we need to refer to the Meizu M3 as MM3 or perhaps always with Meizu prepended or similar to differentiate between them properly.
There is code running. There’s a start on a LCD driver and there’s a working concept to put our own bootloader code onto the device that can load and start rockbox in a future.
Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte interviewed our own Paul “Llorean” Louden about the Rockbox project on FLOSS Weekly and we were a bunch of Rockboxers hanging out on the IRC channel #rockbox while it was streamed live. This will be in the FLOSS Weekly episode #43 that’s supposedly going to become available on friday the 3rd of October.
I think Paul did a great job explaining a lot of things, big and small, around the project and how it works and runs.
They started off the news about Rockbox 3.0 claiming it is based on Linux (which it isn’t and never was), only to mention that they failed to install on their ipod 3rd gen at their first attempt (but succeeded at a second attempt), whined somewhat on the installer and then again complained about the inability to install themes even though this is 3.0 yada yada yada.
All in all, pretty much a complete non-understanding for the hard work and endless time that hundreds of people have put into Rockbox. Nothing particular to hear or care about, just a bit annoying.
Ok so the guys on the