Here's the fre:ac status update for August, which was a very productive month for fre:ac development.

Besides great improvements for the OS X version, many smaller things that will benefit all users have been added, improved or fixed in the past four weeks.

The new features include the ability to preview output file names in the joblist (the corresponding column can be enabled in the configuration dialog), displaying cover art of the currently selected track in the title info area and tooltips in case text is cut off in drop down boxes and lists. See the screenshot to the right for a preview of the output file name and cover art features.

I also took a look at conversion performance and compiled optimized versions of all codecs for all supported operating systems. The new codecs will use only one CPU core, but still be slightly faster than the multicore versions used on Windows before, thanks to improved optimization in modern compilers. In addition, using only one core will make it easier to add support for true parallel conversion in a future release.

Finally, I reworked the internationalization system to enable language-specific punctuation and support for translating units of measurement. Language-specific punctuation means that you'll have to change only one place in the translation file to enable the use of language-specific colons or brackets (as used in Asian languages for instance) everywhere in fre:ac starting with the next snapshot. Similarly, translating units of measurement adds the ability to replace units like kbps or ms with localized versions (e.g. in Cyrillic script) throughout the application.

Regarding OS X, fre:ac now supports the common menu bar. This works transparently to fre:ac by automatically mapping the menu widget to Cocoa menus and menu items on-the-fly in the smooth class library. The toolbar icons are aligned at the center of the window in this case to make the interface more balanced with the menu bar gone. The screenshot to the right shows this new layout.

After finishing common menu bar support, I took a look at the remaining issues on OS X, namely performance and stability problems. I fixed lots of them, so the next snapshot will be about three to four times faster, have a more responsive user interface and will run much more stable than the 20140609 release.

You may have heard that Apple will change the signature requirements with OS X 10.9.5 and 10.10. The 20140609 snapshot will cause a Gatekeeper warning on those new OS X versions. I'm already using the required V2 signatures in my testing, though, and they will be used in the next snapshot which should be out before the new OS X releases.

For everyone who would like to compile fre:ac on their own, the next release will print detailed instructions including a list of dependencies when running configure to ease and aid the build process.

Unrelated to the fre:ac development versions, but still worth mentioning, I put together a translation kit for fre:ac 1.0.22. This makes translating fre:ac to another language easier by having all the necessary ressources in one archive together with an explanation of how to work with them. If you think you could contribute a new translation for fre:ac or update one of the outdated translations listed on the translation status page, please have a look at the translation kit!

Closing this months issue with more good news, the release of the next snapshot in September is now definite. It will be out in three or four weeks.