The Doppler project is now publicly available on CodePlex. If you want to join in and help me develop Doppler please reply on the discussion forum at the project site:

http://www.codeplex.com/doppler

After a long period of no new releases we decided it was time for some action. It took too long to come up with bugfixes and rewrites so we decided to make Doppler open source and ask the community to help us to make Doppler even better.

We will host the source on CodePlex. I’ve created the project already and it will be available at http://www.codeplex.com/doppler, but until now it’s still not in a published state. Currently I’m in the progress if cleaning up things (there is a lot of unfinished code in there), the moment I’m done with that I will publish the project and people can join in and help us to make it a great tool!

The question I have for all you out there: what kind of license should we pick?

If you got the impression that nothing is happening with Doppler anymore… well, that’s not true. Some things that are in the pipeline:

1. Vista support (Vista is my main OS, I develop Doppler on Vista and obviously it also runs on Vista)
2. More languages: French, Slovak, Polish besides the already existing English, Dutch and Swedish (thanks to Bercik, Marián, Pouts and Per!)
3. Many many bugfixes and performance improvements.

Besides that, parallel on the Windows version of Doppler I’m also continueing on the mobile versions. I’m testing currently a build for Pocket PC Windows Mobile 5.0 (and Windows Mobile 6.0). Again, that version contains many improvements and bug fixes. Watch this space the coming weeks, new versions are on the way!

Doppler has been downloaded over 1 million times now. I’m not kidding. It shocks us. We never expected that when we started with developing Doppler back in 2004.

Now that Microsoft released the Zune in the US without podcasting support we see a new ‘market’ on the horizon (I put market between quotes as we don’t sell Doppler and as a result make no money out of it). However, that market we cannot reach because the Zune is not available in Europe.

The Zune comes with it’s own software, a bit like Apple iTunes, but as the Zune is not available we cannot test whole experience with downloading a podcast, adding it to a playlist and syncing it to a Zune device.

So our call to Microsoft:

Is there a Zune developer program? Is there a known API (what I found on my computer after installing the Zune software did resemble the WMP API in a way)? And is there a possibility for us developers living in Europe to be able to get hold of a Zune device so we can develop software that supports it?

Please take into account that we are a non-profit team. We make no money out of it, so we cannot invest in big contracts or deals. We basically just want to get hold of a Zune device so we can modify Doppler so that it works smoothly with it.

Well, it’s out there, our first CTP. Do not expect this build to be

1. Feature complete
2. Bug free

We’re running it ourselves on Windows XP SP2 and Windows Vista (various builds). It requires, as the previous beta versions, the .NET Framework version 2.0.

Download it from http://www.dopplerradio.net/doppler-30-ctp-2006-11-01-release/

If you found a bug, please email it to us.

A lot.

Among others I moved fulltime to Sweden. That took a lot of time. Time I didn’t and couldn’t spend on Doppler.

Still. I finally decided to freeze the features in Doppler. I was running a beta for several months already for with with I myself was quite happy, but was simply lacking ‘production quality’. Crashes (especially on Windows Vista) did happen regularly, but I got used to it. Still I didn’t want to put you out there in the frontline with that version.

I did some clean up in the code the last couple of days and removed some features I’ve been working on but I decided not to implement them in the end, as they would require full-time availability from us. Maybe in a future release, but not in 3.0.

So, what I will do: early next week I will post a so called CTP version of Doppler. Please realize: it’s buggy. It’s unfinished, but it works better than the last beta. If you want to post bugs, please be my guest, but I simply don’t have the time currently to reply to them all. I don’t like that, but it’s a fact unfortunately.

I have currently a few users out there running the pre-CTP version of the upcoming build and from them I get good reports back, so it seems a go for early next week.

Check out this space around Monday and Tuesday to find the link to the download of the CTP.

Already a while ago we set up a wiki which we created to start a manual for Doppler. Until now we didn’t post about it. Clem took action and he started to fill in the section regarding Doppler 3.x. Great work, thanks! Check it out.

We’re working on a new version of DopplerMobile (it’s beta 5, we’re skipping 4). DopplerMobile beta 5 will support a few features that require some additional testing with a small -known- group of people. If you are interested in helping us out with this, please drop us a line. We are looking for around 10 persons to keep it manageable.

What you need to participate:

• A Windows Mobile 5.0 Smartphone (e.q. QTEK 8310, QTEK 8300, IMATE SP5, IMATE SP5m, etc. etc.). Please take notice, we’re currently only testing the Smartphone edition. At a later stage we will release versions for other Windows Mobile devices. If you are unsure if you have a Smartphone: you can usually recognize a Smartphone by the fact that it has a keypad. Windows Mobile phones without a keypad are usually Pocket PC phones, for which we will release a version at a later stage.
• Either an unlimited data plan or a wifi connection (not a requirement for the final version, however it is recommended to keep the costs down)
• Some time to play around with it, and some time to report issues and/or feature ideas to us.

If you are interested to test this version, please contact us

Since a few weeks we started to record to which countries people downloaded Doppler. Right now we recorded 117 countries! WOW!

Just imagine, somewhere in Papua New Guinea there is someone using Doppler. Great!

click below to see if your country is in the list

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we where offered a package sended by Arvato Technology GMBH, but as we where not around (being abroad) UPS returned the package to the sender. As Arvato is a rather large company (understatement), we have no clue who to contact on this.

So, if you are working at Arvato Technology GMBH, know about this specific issue, or can bring us in contact with the responsible person, please contact us by email.