This website is going to disappear in the next 48 hours and will reappear on Wednesday or Thursday with a brand new look ... and lots of interesting toys for you to play with.

Please stand by and sorry for the interruption.

We thought that Sparks! 1.7.19-beta for Windows would be out yesterday, but there's a few more bug fixes (and related testing) that need to get into the product before we put this one out the door.

The number of changes in the version are quite substantial. Feature wise, the only major things missing are OPML Export and BitTorrent support (both of which we consider critical).

There's a fair number of mopping up exercises to be done bug wise, especially with making radio recording more reliable.

We're in the process of shutting off the comments system for this weblog. All future comments can be directed to the Discussion Forums.

We've added Starfrosch to our "useful resources" section the sidebar of our weblog. Starfrosch provides a community for adding and listening to legal music tracks.

You can add their OPML directory to Sparks! by:

• Import > Import OPML directory
• Selecting List the directory in Sparks!
• Entering http://www.starfrosch.ch/starfrosch/opml/netaudio_stil.opml

It will be possible to drag and drop this to Sparks! soon.

Here's a screenshot of 1.7.16.1-beta running on the Macintosh — we hope to have this out for you later today. Note Safari running as the browser there. This makes the Mac version of Sparks as powerful as the Windows version.

There's was a serious hack required to get Safari embedded; this hack won't be needed in the next few weeks. The result of this hack is that the Safari window won't be displayed when Sparks! doesn't have focus — hopefully this will not be too much of a problem for you.

The Mac version previously had crashing problems associated with the old HTML control we were using. This should go away now.

We had a major breakthrough on the Mac — we now have the Safari browser embedded in the application (as opposed to the lousy pseudo-browser that comes with wxPython). There's a few issues and it's not quite seamless (it's 95% though) but we hope to get this all ironed out.

Screenshots later today.

The next version of Sparks! will have "Go back one page" and "Go forward one page" buttons.

BBC Radio: It looks like BBC did a major set of changes to their radio feeds. We'll do some research and get back to you later today.

Podcast Directory: there's information, such as pointers to other OPML directories, that are missing from our directory. We're going to try to get this back in.

Right now in front of me, Sparks! 1.7.16 is running on Windows, Linux and Mac. We've made a number of changes to improve and make more reliable the Linux and Mac versions, but there's a still a fair distance to go before we're totally happy. This is what's in the works:

• We want to release the Linux version as a "turnkey"; that is, you install and run. No more dealing with installing various subpackages — there's just too many incompatible versions of wxPython out there.
• We're compiling wxMozilla for Linux right now.
• There's almost an wxPython-embedable version of Safari for the Mac. Almost. Stay tuned.
• Until the browsers are working on the Mac and on Linux, we're not going to stress the blog reading cabilities of Sparks!

We can receive e-mail today but for some unfathomable reason, we cannot send it. Hopefully we'll get this fixed this morning.

Update: fixed.

If you're a regular reader of this blog and don't have a del.icio.us account, consider getting one. We hope to be do tighter integration to this online service post 1.8.

Once you get an account, please drop us an e-mail if you want to find out more.

The 1.8 version of Sparks! will be the non-beta version. Here's what left to be done before we're out of beta (excluding bug fixes, which are always on the list):

• Smart downloads: the Sparks! application will download all the supporting files and applications (mplayer, lame, many DLLs) it needs from the BlogMatrix server if the user doesn't have them. If the user is using a modern Pentium chip, the appropriate version will be downloaded (rather than the generic version that will work on all platforms)
• Multiple attachments/enclosures per entry: currently Sparks! only supports one enclosure per entry. This what the RSS spec requires, but many users find this inadequate
• Improved subscribe dialog: this will make it clear whether the item being added is going in My Radio, My Podcasters or My Weblogs; and also give the user the option of doing something else (treating the URL as a OPML file, for example). This will make drag and drop a lot sweeter
• BitTorrent support: enough said
• OPML export: for sharing your blogroll. Expect a lot more to come here.
• Some usability tweaks for the Podcast/iTunes/Windows Media Player code
• Integrated documentation (Updated 2005.01.24)

We hope with the 1.8 release we'll have very stable Linux and Macintosh releases also. With Linux, we especially hope that we can make a version that doesn't require the user to download a half-dozen support packages.

Here's what's coming up in the next version of Sparks! (Monday, hopefully):

• The Download Manager is gone — all its functions are now integrated directly
• UI simplification; in particular, there is no seperate concept of a "Playlist" for Podcasts and Radio Stations — the Playlist is the category the podcaster/radio station is placed in.
• Some significant performance enhancements (we've been testing with 2500 blogs in Sparks!)
• The "iTunes" and "Windows Media Player" items are much more functional
• A lot of non-used or obsolete functions have been disabled internally, increasing performance and reducing resource needs

Here's a few screen shots from 1.7.10-beta

1. The "search list" above the browser displays everything appropriate from the part of the tree you've selected. That is, if you've selected an item in "My Radio", all the interesting items from "My Radio" will be displayed here.
2. These two buttons let you switch back and forth between "browser only" and "browser and search list" mode. When the application initially starts it will be "browser only" until the first item is selected in the list -- this is to allow a full welcome page

1. Notice that the item labels have changed and there's no "expires" column (because it's not important to the weblog reading part of the application)

1. All OPML trees will load on a single click (rather than a double click as required before)
2. Note the Radio Station-appropriate column headers. Also note the sorting order which can be changed by clicking on a header.

I'm sitting on the next release till tomorrow morning. It's very interesting ... slick, maybe even.

With a little luck, there'll be a new release of Sparks! later on today. Maybe even for the Mac if things go all right!

Here's a screenshot of Sparks! showing a Persian blog (and listing a Japanese blog a little further up).

Notes from user Ryan on getting Sparks! to encode radio as MP4 files.

Don't worry about the genre thing. It's very minor. I've seen LAME crash before on non-standard genre fields. Besides iPod's don't support id3 tag sorting for m4b files, they are lumped into the Audiobooks category...

Anyway, I experimented with the wave to mp3 option and am happy to report a successful test:

I used the following string in the dialog:

e:/faac.exe -o test.mp4 --artist $mp3_artist \
--title $mp3_title --genre $mp3_genre $FILEIN

I renamed test.mp4 to test.m4b and it played perfectly.

Sparks! did generate a Download Failure error message (log file attached), but everything is ok with the file.

The Advanced Encoding Settings has a field for setting the extension (and thus we'll be able to just use $FILEOUT) but it's not hooked up yet. Next version

FAAC crashed on my first two attempts for the followings reasons:

1. I used $FILEOUT instead of test.mp4; $FILEOUT appends .mp3 to the filename (as you indicated, the 'extension' box isn't presently hooked-up)
2. I tried test.m4b instead of test.mp4; FAAC crashed on this because, like .mp3, .m4b is not a supported extension of FAAC (though I've read there are re-compiled versions of FAAC that do support m4b.)

It seems as though FAAC is the real barrier for me here. I don't know if you really want to support m4b in Sparks! (I don't know how requested this feature is among podcasters). In which case Sparks! could perform the renaming of mp4 to m4b. Otherwise, I'll keep digging around for an AAC command-line encoder that supports m4b. Thanks for the additional mp3 tag variables!

As mentioned, you'll have complete control over the output extension. We'll also be providing a download site with precompiled versions of tools such as FAAC soon.

We've updated the Advanced Encoding Settings documentation.

1.7.4-beta won't be available for about 20 minutes while a small installer bug is fixed. It's back.