Overview of Mal Updater 3.x

Kotori said:
Basically, you update any details like episode score etc and they are queued to be synced with MAL next time you go online.

Kotori said:
forgot to add:

- New plugin for custom lists, like what videogames you've played, tv series/movies. Not related to MAL but probably useful to most users :)

NicoH said:
but if a torrent contains special letters my MALU refuses to dowload them

Kotori said:


need a sample/example

Kotori said:
Join here for 3.x discussion, I'll post some info there soon

https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/mal-updater3

shakor said:

Can you provide a download link for the new release?

shakor said:

Google Groups shows me an empty forum due some javascript errors.

Kiorika said:
Please make the file dialog and text separately. To make it easy to translate into other languages.

eileen12 said:
yo my MALU v2.95 has started to show error 403 (Error During Service Check)
So i guess There may be some problem with the site.
well........
great app
would be really happy if the v3.0 comes out soon!
though !!
THNX !!

Kotori said:
- G15 applet: 50% (mostly the same I'm using for MyImgur and other apps, so no major stuff to do)

Kotori said:
Yup, for G15/510, possibly works for others too. I use this for a couple other apps already, so with malu I will use this for PlayNext and other stuff.

Kotori said:
Tomorrow

Lirina said:


April's fool? Not that I want to push you or anything, I know you have a real life, but would be good to have an update.

ColdXClue said:


Yeah, as soon as he posted "Tommorow" I was kinda disappointed, because I was kinda hoping for a serious answer. I'm not gonna lie I would even pay for Version 3.0 if you decided to charger for it which I think you should so that the program can improve more which I really would like to see Malupdater do.

Kotori said:


I don't think anyone would pay for a Windows version, but when I have the Android port ready there will be a "Pro" version with unlocked features for 2-3 euro, hoping I can earn a bit from that.

Kotori said:
Hey, new version is coming out soon, im working a lot more on it lately and I'll have an alpha version to test soon. I'll brief you a bit on what's changed etc, post your comments about it here maybe.

- New UI. Well, sort of. Things moved around, some removed, some added, different buttons and functionality. Trying to make it advanced but simple to use, with the things you use the most at very easy ready, and the rest sorta hidden but easy accessible if you need them. Some more features in the list itself as well. Less popup windows. No Aero glass thingie or wasted space around. Themes wont work cause, it's just too much work to do something at the moment. I can't define some things to be themeable just to later remove them or add new ones, limiting UI changes to some predefined options because of themes like it is at the moment. So my idea for a new theme engine is a fully customizable one in the future. I am recoding the entire UI towards that, in a way like.. hm, you can sort of program the skin, decide whats on the screen and assign this or that to call x method and such, sort of like winamp and foobar do I think. Something like that will work well cause then I wont be limited in what changes I do in the future to the main UI.

- Online/offline modes. well well, offline mode hmm.. that's a bit hard to decide how it will really work and I'm doing lots of changes everyday. MALU atm uses both the MAL API, and also some of the old ways how it worked before the API. That is, it logs in as if it was a browser, it picks a cookie, and then loads pages etc just as if it was a browser doing so. That way I have access to quite a few things far beyond what the limited API provides. Things like, being able to send a post about a certain series/episode straight from mal updater, checking if threads about a certain episode already exist and a link to it, some extra data about a series like last forum threads, members, last updates, recommendations, links, check for new messages, and other features I'd like to add. But then I'm thinking .. hmm, what is it most people actually use out of those things available only through the old ways? what others would they like? and out of those who use them, are they actually a meaningful number to keep it? If I remove those features, then I can make malu work straight with just the API. The problem with browser emulation login etc, it.. it's slow as fuck. Logging in, getting a cookie, checking it's still valid, make up for changes in login forms (some ppl had weird problems to login because of some ISPs doing some weird redirection post-login and other weird issues). Retrieving data from a series page is also really slow. That delay when you start a series in the player, and you see the window popup and "Loading..", 99.9% of that time is just retrieving all the html data, it's fucking slow really. The posterior parsing is lightning fast, but retrieving the data that is slow, and it's annoying.
But it was the only way before, and still nowadays it provides with some things the API never covered. So, I don't know. I have no hopes in the API being extended or anything related to it fixed anymore from MAL side, so dunno what to do about it. The other "online" part is the pre-login process, where malu checks with -my- server if you are running the latest version of the client and if there any updates, also maintains an online-users number, and checks how many people are watching the same anime at the same time. That sounds mostly useless, but I have some ideas to add to malu in the near future that would make use of that, to have some kind of side community based solely on MALU and some features available through being online interacting with other users etc. So that might remain, or be gone for now, I'm not sure.

The other part of the changes that are for sure into 3.x, is offline updates. Basically, you update any details like episode score etc and they are queued to be synced with MAL next time you go online. Nothing major there, other clients already do this, so malu will as well.

- Sysinfo and music-playing-now plugins are gone. Useless stuff really, so begone ^^

- Importing/exporting settings. Self-explaining.

- Easy take-screenshot-of-video-player-and-upload-with-a-single-click, kind of. Nothing major there, but I think will be nice to have. I will reuse already working and pretty efficient code from my screenshotter app for it (http://eden.fm/tinypic-uploader/). I was a bit stuck with this in the past, because tinypic kept changing their code and they provided no open api to developers, and to make it worse they finally added a captcha for uploads. Fuck them. Imageshack... well.. slow.. ultra slow. They now have an API, it's so-so. I recently added support for imgur, and it's lightning fast, I really like it, so I will go with that for the malu plugin.

- Windows, more windows, more extra windows.. most gone. batch tags editor and season browser are now embedded into the main window.

- Batch tool to assign folders to the series, it's a big mess, I doubt many are using it right now. I'm making a big change into that, something actually useful and very easy and straight-forward to use and understand, it should be intuituve and not have users wonder "how the fuck I use this?"

- Scanning for new episodes on the hard disk. Right now you can only do this manually, and 2 ways. one way is faster than the other, and more accurate, but it can easily miss some valid matches. The other is a bit slower (still quite fast though imo), and finds more stuff, but also false matches. Also it doesnt detect if you have episodes 2,3,4,5 or x series, only the last one, so it be misleading in that you have more episodes than you actually do. I want to change that, mostly through an improved recognition engine. Also, the scanning for files and folders will be done in the background automatically. It will do an initial scan, and then keep monitoring from then on, all on its own and you wont have to click anything or wait for the scan to finish etc, will be quite on detect-as-you-go; but for that we need more accurate recognition first, so that you dont have to choose for a method or another.

- Airing shows. I added some options to that, so you can filter out those series not in your list. Also it's kinda integrated in the main anime list, so you won't have to switch tabs to check how long it is until the next episode of your fav. shows. I need a little help there though. The airing data is all edited manually through an admin control panel in my website. Basically, me and some others who helped before log in as admin and review a list of airing shows, and theres options to edit/add/delete and such. I'd need some more dedicated people to keep that list updated. Ideally this would be provided by MAL itself, but I don't see that happening.

Okay, I think that mostly covers it. There's of course a lot more behind but no need to explain a lot more.

So anyway, leave your comments and such, I read everything in these forums etc even if I dont seem active the last few months or dont always reply.

ps: oh yeah, I see the preview of the topic and thought to myself as well, "omg fucking boring long wall spam of text with barely any paragraphs , I wouldnt even read it myself", but anyway, there it is if you go through it ^^

ps2: ohh one more remark: no osx/linux ports in the near future, seriously, no. I dont have a mac. I know shit about linux programming. And I wont waste my time on something a couple people would use. it's not that I hate those platforms ^^

MadLane said:
don't know if anyone suggest it but more streaming websites will be good like(Kissanime, Anime Fave, Anitube..)

paralyz3 said:
Seems like Kotori is using Valve Time :)

Valve Time: "Soon" (1998), way before 2005
Actual Time: October 10, 2007

So 9 years aprox, we'll just have to wait for 2020 at the latest earliest~