Dealing with Leopard Java Update 2

Those of you who use beaTunes on Leopard and installed the recent Java Update 2 probably have noticed that a couple of buttons as well as table headers look a little odd (behavior described here). Margins have changed and somehow the table headers seem to be painted twice. The latest beaTunes update should fix all these problems.

UnsatisfiedLinkError: beaTunes, Leopard and Java 6

A little while ago, Apple finally released Java 6 for Leopard. Unfortunately, the 64bit Java 6 does not support QuickTime for Java anymore. Why? QuickTime for Java depends on Carbon, for which Apple is dropping support in 64bit environments.

What does this mean for beaTunes? In the long term we will move away from the QuickTime for Java API on OS X. We already utilize CoreAudio in parts of the application, which will not be affected by Apple's discontinued support for Carbon based APIs. We will replace the remaining code that is still using QuickTime.

Are users affected by this right now? Yes, unfortunately they are. As beaTunes works quite nicely with Java 6 on Windows, the current OS X version of beaTunes (1.2.9) will also start with Java 6, if it is installed. And this will fail due to the reasons mentioned above with an UnsatisfiedLinkError. To fix this, one needs to edit the file Contents/Info.plist in the beaTunes application bundle and replace the existing JVMVersion string with the value 1.5* (instead of 1.5+)

We will release an update next week, which contains this fix.

beaTunes 1.2.6 is out

Right when we thought, that we had fixed all the issues caused by Leopard, it turns out that Leopard's version of CoreAudio tends to crash on files it decoded just fine in its Tiger incarnation. So this is why we just released beaTunes 1.2.6. It works around all the known CoreAudio issues and features an improved Windows uninstaller. We also did some additional cosmetic fixes specifically for Leopard.

Enjoy!

beaTunes 1.2.5 released

We just released beaTunes 1.2.5. This release fixes a couple of Leopard UI issues. Furthermore the delayed commit progress dialog now refreshes correctly, the recently-added-songs logic was improved and unnecessary fallbacks to QuickTime are now avoided. Mac users should definitely update.

Enjoy!

Leopard UI issues

We and some of you have noticed that beaTunes' UI doesn't look just right on Leopard. Specifically, the table headers are blank and the inspection titles are unreadable. We have already fixed these issues, but the release is simply not out yet. It is planned for Wednesday, 11/14/07.

If you want to try out the current OS X development snapshot in which these issues are fixed before next Wednesday, please download it from here. And yes, please keep in mind, it's a development snapshot, not a real release.

beaTunes 1.2.3 features delayed commits

Yesterday we put a minor update to beaTunes on our website. It addresses three different issues:

• UI improvements
• Leopard compatibility
• Delayed inspection commit

UI improvements: Language names are no longer shown in the system language, but always in English. We also added the most important languages to the top of each language combobox, to make their selection easier. Furthermore, there were occasional issues with displaying the Get Info dialog correctly on systems that used very long genre names. This issue is fixed. Another small improvement: In the Get info dialog for multiple items, the checkboxes are now automatically selected, once the user enters anything in the corresponding field.

Leopard compatibility: It turned out that due to changes Apple made in the Applescript subsystem, beaTunes wasn't working on Leopard. We looked into these issues and solved them. So there shouldn't be a big surprise in October, when Leopard finally sees the light of day.

Delayed inspection commit: Some users suggested that beaTunes should wait with committing changes initiated in the inspection dialog until the dialog is closed. This, so the reasoning, should allow a more fluent inspection. We listened and implemented the desired delayed commit. It's enabled by default and can be turned off in the inspections preferences.

We hope this update makes your beaTunes experience even more fun.