nito blog

happy 2009 everyone! sorry for the delay between posts (as usual). We are very excited about the latest feature added to hawkeye, so we felt it definitely necessitated a post. Aside from some crucial bug fixes, our sole 1.2 and favorite new feature of hawkeye to date is the ability to encode Video Ringtones for the iPhone! This does require a jailbroken phone, but thanks to our favorite dev team (the iphone dev team of course!) The pwnage process is as easy it could possibly be, extensive information on how to use video ringtones is available at the relevant help page for hawkeye.

in other news, nitoTV is still chugging along but will probably see a while without an update while we try to throw our hat into the ring for iPhone development, as usual time is short to write an extensive post, stay tuned for more shortly…

alright here is the follow up post to the latest hawkeye release. there is a lot to cover in this post so it may have to be a multi part post (or at least edited and re-edited)

The first thing you will notice is the updated interface, for the most part it will echo the newer cleaner iTunes (i guess they did this new look with 7) There are also some new windows (chapter edit and subtitle palette)

chapter edit is a nice new edition. i’ll get this out of the way up front though, these chapters do NOT apply to iPod / iPhone playback, we hope to get to that in the next version.

these chapters apply to dvd authoring and file playback within hawkeye, you can bring up the chapters window from the file menu or from the contextual menu while selecting a file in the main table view. delete key will remove chapters and command + will add chapters during playback. if you want to add chapters while the file is not playing you can add them manually in the text field supplied on the chapters window. Make sure you format them properly 00:00:00

the subtitle palette is a simple palette with two text fields and color wells, these will be the stroke and fill color of the subtitles on any dvd you author after this point.

pre movies: these will play before any titles or the main menu of the dvd is played. An example would be any movie studio adding their own title movie prior to the presentation of the actual movie (new line cinema, miramax etc…), or maybe and FBI warning movies, things of that nature.

post movies: these movies will play after all the titles are finished playing on the dvd. (think dvd compression center video that used to be at the end of SEVERAL dvds, think old simpsons dvds)

more soon…

Alright the day is finally here, hawkeye 1.1 was unfurled today and we hope everyone is as pleased with it as we are. for now ill have to keep this initial release post short because i need to leave for work relatively soon, just wanted to get this post on here with the release info, i will post again sometime today or tomorrow with a big detailed list of all the new features and bugfixes, I will also be updating the screenshots on the website and hopefully i’ll have some time for some new video tutorials.

enjoy!

Wow, I didn’t even realize how long ago that last post was. it’s probably the reason I haven’t posted any updates saying “something will be out soon” since. I always end up being WAY off the mark when I make any type of prediction.

However, here are some new pictures, of the hawkeye that was mentioned all too long ago in that prior blog post (although it is far more than some bug fixes and new binaries, so it will prove to be worth that wait we hope)

The reason for the post now is I know for certain this version is inches from completion and just getting the finishing touches.

On a somewhat different note the time taken off from the re-write of hawkeye (among other things) was not time spent for naught, there are many skills picked up along that way that will make the new vision of hawkeye and any future project much brighter and hopefully swifter in development.

And as always thanks for your infinite patience with us, there is only two of us and we both have other full time jobs so it’s been tough lately, but we promise some great things to come… stay tuned.

yes we are still alive We’ve just been very busy with nitoTV work and some outside projects. We are close to a new hawkeye release (not the re-write which is definitely still coming) it will mainly have a lot of major bug fixes and some new versions of underlying binaries. i’ll post a more in depth update of things shortly, just wanted to pop in and let everyone know we are still hard at work and we haven’t forgotten about you.

we will also be (hopefully very soon) adding a new section for nitoTV on the webpage, it definitely deserves its own page on the website because we believe its a very promising project. We also hope to have some functionality interwoven between the plugin and hawkeye. Although that probably won’t come along till we finish the hawkeye re-write. PSP Commune is still under way too, too many things, too few people (only two of us) and WAY too little time…. more soon.

for a limited time we are offering HALF PRICE (30.00$) for koingo’s utility package (nine wonderful applications)

this promotion only applies to registered users of hawkeye (if you register after the promotion has started you are still eligible for the discount)

the web setup will be a bit smoother tomorrow when i have time to work on it, including an actual description of the package and the applications therein (been a busy week, had to move to a different house this week so its been hectic)

to get this promotion hurry to this link

Alright this was the much needed bug fix release of hawkeye. Found some nasty bugs way too long overlooked. There was a bug for iPod as well as Apple TV that would only used the advanced settings chose for the first file out of a selected list of files, this bug has been fixed.

In addition there were Apple TV bugs related to unsupported widths being generated this should now be fixed as well. When 640 was chosen as width for Apple TV it was actually generating 680 (stupid typo) this is now fixed as well. The max pixels for 29.97 FPS Apple TV material was also rectified as well (wasnt allowing 960 to be used as a width for 29.97 material)

A long awaited fix is here as well, if you have changed to the mini window while encoding it will stay mini for all the files queued up.

and last but not least the progress text bugs should be fixed or at least improved (you’ll know what i mean when you use it)

i had some hawkeye 1.1 news but that will have to wait till tomorrow because its 3:00 am and this release took longer than anticipated.. more tomorrow.

just found some bad bugs in the current version of hawkeye, got almost all of them fixed so there should be a bug fix related update late tonight/early tomorrow. i’ll keep everyone posted.

So the hawkeye re-write is underway (finally!) And has made some strong strides today. To be honest it’s actually a very good thing that the re-write has been shifted back this far because there was a lot more we needed to properly learn to undertake the huge process of re-writing the entire application. We want to utilize many of the core technologies that we didn’t with our older code. (core data to store the information, core image to do some nice image effects for menus and such, and maybe even core video if we have time)

Thus far im still going to hold off on saying exactly which new features are going to make it into the vast re-write. I will say at very least each individual file will be able to have its own settings and not have to be lumped in with a large selection of items. We will also be merging some of the settings together since they have a lot of commonalities.

There is still much to be done with respects to maintaining and improving the current functionality of the application (fix some of the continuity, make the work flow of the application more common sense, things of that nature)

Hopefully we’ll make enough progress this upcoming week to actually be able to put up some screen shots of the new version, i can’t make any promises but we’ll do our best.

In addition for those who are paying attention, we are still working on PSP Commune but have hit a few snags here and there so we shifted some of the focus to concentrate on both PSP Commune and the new version of hawkeye… stay tuned.

sorry everyone apparently when i posted the new version of hawkeye the other night it posted the wrong dmg. the zip file that updates through sparkle was the right version, but the main dmg download link was still v14. I am very sorry for this mistake and currently in process of uploading the new proper dmg.