by bayasaa

This is a big day for what started out as a small spare time project (and which it still is, in fact). This morning, iTunes Agent passed the milestone of 1 million downloads! That’s quite a lot of downloads!

The popularity of the project has been increasing greatly over the last 12 months, going from an average of 7-8000 downloads a month, to near 50 000 every month. This is a great motivator, and one of the keys to driving the project forward.

I am currently working on version 2.0, and while there’s been talk about the new version for quite a while, it is now on the horizon. Hopefully an alpha will be ready for testing in not too long

Thanks to all who have supported the project, either with contributing code or assisting in the support forums – and not to forget, those of you out there using the application!

I’ve just released version 1.3.4 of iTunes Agent. This is a minor bug fix update which should resolve issues some users have experienced on 64-bit versions of Windows.

The new version is available from http://ita.sourceforge.net/download.html

iTunes Agent is currently looking for a dedicated .NET developer to join the team. You should be an experienced software developer, but years of professional full time experience is not a requirement – talented students are encouraged to get in touch.

Requirements:

• Experience with .NET and C#
• Be familiar with portable media devices in general.
• Be familiar with the iTunes software.
• Open source enthusiast – understand the value of contributing to the community.
• Ability to work independently and organize work through digital communication
• Excellent English language skills, both written and verbal.

iTunes Agent is an open source project, built solely on the efforts and dedication of volunteering open source enthusiasts. The project has seen a big increase in interest over the last couple of months climbing from an average of 8.000 downloads per month till around 15.000 downloads per month during May, June and July 2010. The total downloads since the project’s birth has recently passed 400.000 registered downloads on Sourceforge.

We are now looking for a more continuous resource to help improve the application and deliver quality to our users.

If you are interested, or want more information, please contact sfkarbo@users.sourceforge.net.

It’s been a busy Spring for me, but luckily it has partly been caused by several great travels! This time the destinations were New York and 2x Prague.

In April me and a colleague traveled to New York for the Sentiment Analysis Symposium. What a wonderful city New York is! I had extremely high expectations before traveling across the sea and I can honestly say that they were all satisfied. From the “Admitted” stamp landed in my passport until I stepped on the plane to go home, it was all a great adventure.

Stepping off the train at Penn Station in the middle of Manhattan, is like stepping into a dozen of movies and TV series. You feel you’ve been there before, but at the same time it’s all a completely new city and you can just feel all the discoveries waiting around the corner.

We had taken a couple of days extra in addition to the days for conference preparation and we got to see most of the typical tourist sights, and got to walk our feet sore through Central Park and an endless number of kilometers through the streets and avenues of Manhattan.

On Saturday night we also got to see a comedy show at Dangerfields which was a great experience – except for when the comedians learned that we were from Norway and of course would not let that go for the whole show…!

We also got 5 days extra of forced vacation due to the ash clouds which were causing problems for the air traffic in Europe. Even though we had to get some work done during those days we also got to see a little more of the city.

New York is definitively a city I am going back to.

Then it was off to Prague. During May I have been there twice, once for pleasure and once for business. From April 30th till May 3rd me and five friends spent the weekend, but unfortunately I got sick the second we arrived and spent a major part of the weekend in my hotel bed with a fever. But the rest of the guys seemed to enjoy themselves and luckily I felt well enough to enjoy a meal and a beer or two with them during the day.

Luckily I have been to Prague before, so I did not miss a lot of sight seeing.

During my second visit, last week, I was feeling much better and got to enjoy the city in between Apache Lucene EuroCon. The conference was full of good talks and it was very inspiring. Definitively hope the conference will be coming back next year – hopefully in another great European city.

So this Spring has been great for traveling, and hopefully I manage to find the time for at least one more trip somewhere abroad before the year ends – would not mind some beach and warmth when the dark days are starting to creep up on us here up here…

Version 1.3.3 of my open source iTunes enhancement, iTunes Agent has just been released.

The new release is a minor bug fix update which solves a couple of issues users have been reporting on multi-device synchronization and constant re-synchronization of certain files.

For more information and download, check out the project web site at http://ita.sourceforge.net.

A new version of iTunes Agent has just been released. The new version is a minor update bringing a couple of enhancements to prevent misconfiguration which has caused problems for some users.

I hope this new version will continue to satisfy your media synchronization needs between iTunes and your portable media players!

Download and more information is as always available over at http://ita.sourceforge.net.

Happy holidays, everyone!

I’ve found my way home to my parents for a couple of days to relax, eat great food and enjoy the holiday

I hope you will all have some good days and a good New Year’s celebration, before coming back to work in January with a few kilos extra and energy for a new exciting 2010!

Now I am just waiting for dinner and Santa to show up later!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/powi/ / CC BY 2.0

Well, not quite yet – but we’re getting there! And meanwhile, I always love to trawl through the Internet on December 1st to find all the goodies hidden in the forest of Advent calendars out there

I usually focus on the Norwegian ones, but if you’ve got tips about any international calendars, feel free to post the address in a comment. Here’s the list of calendars I’ve come across and found worthy so far

Norwegian:

• Elkøp
• Gamer.no
• Bokklubben
• Filmweb
• Komplett.no
• PS.no (special offers only)
• Spill.no
• Gjerrigknark.no
• Stormberg (special offers only)
• NSB (Norwegian National Railways) – Possibly the best at getting me in the Christmas mood so far

It’s about time I write a post about one of my newest projects, Codemunchies.com, which I started together with a friend of mine, Aleksander, a couple of months back.

Codemunchies.com is a blog focusing on development related topics and so far we’ve had a good coverage of Google Collections and Guava as the first big series of articles.

We wanted to start the blog to have a place to share our ideas and experiences with other developers and hopefully also create a place for fruitful discussions around practices and specific implementation.

Head on over to Codemunchies.com to check it out. Subscribe to our RSS and make sure you follow us on Twitter and Facebook as well

I’ve got 20+ Google Wave invites to hand out, and if you haven’t already gotten one you should drop a comment with your e-mail address and I’ll send one your way.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/liako/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Google Wave is Google’s new communication and collaboration platform, where everything is organized in “waves”. It shows a lot of promised and I’ve already put it to good use for announcing events and communicating with friends.

It’s not quite there yet, where it will take over the majority of other social media, IM and e-mal – and it might never get there, but it shows great potential and you should be a part of it

If you’re already surfing, add me: jaran.nilsen@ and add googlewave.com