Update, no new version yet, but coming soon...

As you probably read in my previous post Amazon pulled their older Web Service interface, and upgraded to the new Amazon Associates Web Service 4.0. This of course broke all previous versions of Fetch Art.

Initially I figured this would be a quick fix, and estimated maybe four weeks of development (understand I have a real paying job during the day, and a family, so my time to work on Fetch Art for free (donations accepted ;-) is limited.)

However as you can see it's been seven weeks since my initial announcement about Amazon taking down their older Web Services and still no fix has been released. Well the reason is the change hasn't been as simple I as expected. This is both good and bad.

It is bad, because it means more work for me, and more time you have to wait. However it is good, because it is forcing me to really rewrite some large areas of the code that have caused bugs and performance issues in the past. So when the new version is out, it should be better then ever.

I have completed a lot of work, and developed a prototype that is successfully getting art off of Amazon. However, because of my changes, I have to rewrite the code that saves the art to iTunes now.

The big question of course is... when will a new version (even a beta) be available?

My target release date (may be a beta, not a final version if I run into unexpected problems) is for June 23rd. If I have enough time to get some of the new features I want into the code, I may call this version 2.0, however, if I don't get everything in there in time, I'll probably call it 1.5.

What are some of the changes I'm working on? I hesitate to list them, because if some of them don't make it you'll be disappointed, but since I cannot offer you a working application, I'll go ahead and list them. Just understand, I may not be able to get all of these changes in time for the next release. These are the current features I am trying to include while I am re-writing the software:
1) Faster performance by improving the AppleScript code
2) Removing Perl code (which has been a source of bugs and incompatibilities with Mac OS X updates) should increase reliability across future versions of Mac OS X
3) Support for searches on Amazon Japan, France, and Canada as well as the ones the previous version supported which was U.S., UK, and Germany
4) Better support for unicode characters

Sorry I don't have more to offer you right now. Just know that any extra time I get, I'm working on this.

Amazon Pulls Web Service Fetch Art Uses

Well, Amazon has disabled Fetch Art starting in April 2008.

You can see their message here.

So in order to get Fetch Art working, I have to migrate to their Web Service 4.0 interface.

It will take some time to migrate the code to the new Amazon Web Services, however, I do plan to work on it ASAP.

Thanks for your support!

New Fetch Art 1.4 Compatible with iTunes 7.5 and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I just completed work on fixes for the latest Mac OS X 10.5 and iTunes 7.5.

Download the latest version from VersionTracker here.

FetchArt incompatible with iTunes 7.5

Ok, I've been getting some comments and email asking when the new version of Fetch Art will be out that is Leopard compatible.

I did spend some time over the past weeks debugging the issue. It all comes down to a simple line of AppleScript that as far as I can tell based on the Leopard developer documentation, should work just fine.

The is the line that should work:

     set data of front artwork of trk to imageData

To test this, we can try this tiny AppleScript I wrote below. If you want, you can just copy and paste this into a new script file in the AppleScript Editor (don't even need to use Xcode.) This small code sample was modified from an example provided by Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes.

You need to do two things to run this script. Start up iTunes and select a track, any track. If it doesn't have any album art already, that is probably better. You'll also need a .pict format picture file. Not sure if you have one? Here, grab this file.

Then when it asks you to pick a file select your .pict format file.

try
 set ourImage to read (choose file) as picture -- must be a pict file
 try
  tell application "iTunes"
   set ourTrack to item 1 of selection -- need a track selected in iTunes before running this
   tell ourTrack
    set data of artwork 1 to ourImage
   end tell
   display alert "it worked"
  end tell
 on error
  display alert "Error copying artwork to iTunes." as warning
 end try
on error
 display alert "Error reading file." as warning
end try

You can also just download that script from my server here.

I foolishly updated all of my computers up to iTunes 7.5 (even the two that I did NOT install Leopard on) and this script will NOT run correctly on any of them. So it appears to be more of an issue with iTunes 7.5 then Leopard.

If anyone who still has an iTunes prior to 7.5 can test this script and let me know that it actually works, I'd love to get that feedback. It's possible I've introduced an error in this script, since I cannot test it myself.

If any developers know why this line of code has stopped working, I'd love to hear that as well.

For now I'll be doing more testing, and posting to the developer forums, etc. to try and resolve this. I may even submit this as a bug to Apple.

Fetch Art Not Yet Compatible with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

Just to follow up. I finally got Leopard installed on all of my Macs, including my only Intel one generously purchased through donations. And I can say that Fetch Art does not work with Leopard.

It will take me about a week (with Thanksgiving coming up, maybe a bit longer) to debug and release a new version.

Keep watching this space for updates.

BTW for those of you like me who hadn't updated Adobe Phototshop since version 7, well it doesn't appear to work under Leopard either, so I guess all of us holdouts will be buying that Photoshop 10 (CS 3) upgrade.

Fetch Art Not Yet Tested with Mac OS X Leopard 10.5

Just a quick heads up to all my users, I have the new Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on order from Amazon, however, I haven’t received it yet.

Because I don’t have it yet, I cannot verify if Leopard breaks anything with Fetch Art. I’ve gotten a few emails from users who have had trouble running Fetch Art after upgrading to Leopard.

So… until I can test it out, I cannot say if Fetch Art is compatible with Leopard yet.

Please feel free to leave comments on this blog reporting success or failures with leopard and as soon as I receive my copy of Leopard I will post here with my findings as well.

Want to beta test?

With my last release, version 1.3.11, almost all users have reported that Fetch Art is working for them.

A few people, however, are still reporting errors. If you are interested in beta testing the next version AND you currently have a problem running the 1.3.11 version, then you can try downloading my new 1.3.12 beta version.

If you are able to run 1.3.11 fine, then do NOT try this beta version. It may contain new bugs, and it may download inaccurate art.

If you install this and get an error message, please try to email me a screenshot of the error. I really would like to see the name of the track it was attempting to download as well as the error message, so try to move the error dialog up or to the side so I can read both dialogs if they overlap.

If you see the unicode error (i.e. tracks that have special characters or accents) on the 1.3.11 version, please try this new beta version and if you still see the error, send me a screenshot that includes the track name. One of my goals with the next release is to fully support all characters and accents supported by iTunes.

Thanks!

Beta download