(Plug: if you haven't done so already, check out The Circle. It's completely decentralised, and so there's no central point to go after.)
Yeah, thanks for the tip. I was wondering where to go next for my music fix.
The Circle needs improvement, it's still a very small community (it's damn hard to even find someone in to talk to in chat) and is very buggy and limited. The Windows version chews resources like nothing on earth due to problems with threads in WIN32 (it uses about 95% of processor on my 1GHz machine until it crashes 15 minutes later). I'd like to see the text-mode interface improved a lot as well, as at the moment the only Unix machine I have access to is my webserver over SSH, but I guess that's of little concern if it's going to be the next great file sharing bohemouth.
Are you any good with Python, Jimbob? If so, the Circle people would welcome your improvements.
I'm new to Python; using for my computer modelling at uni, but I don't know much about TCP/IP or GUI stuff. Guess I could learn.
the TCP/IP stuff (UDP, actually) is fairly sophisticated, using a new theoretical technique to eliminate servers. Though the GUI stuff shouldn't be too hard.
Actually, I think it'd be a good idea if someone would neatly cut the guts of the Circle client from the UI part of it (perhaps abstracting the UI in an object); that way you could bolt different UIs onto it, code your own, or even run the engine on a shared UNIX box and the UI on your Wintendo or PalmPilot or whatever.
Hmmm...open source software does too much separation of UI from engine; it just gives you more space for bugs to appear, and more code bases that have to be kept in sync. Although I can see your point.
That's where encapsulation comes in. If the UI is wrapped in an interface with a set of functions/hooks, and so is the engine, they can be mixed and matched with ease, and the whole thing becomes more maintainable, with fewer bugs. (Trust me, I teach computer science.)
The whole idea of lumping everything together may make it quicker to code, but introduces more opportunities for bugs to appear. Which is probably why Microsoft's software's so bad.
Well, it's a good thing I downloaded all those obscure The The tracks from "The Pornography of Despair" the other day. A sad end to AudioGalaxy. I'll have to check out The Circle.