Sunday, July 07, 2013

UK Public Radio Browser - Alpha

A couple of weeks back the excellent Radio Downloader application became no more due to the author being asked by the BBC to remove the application from his site, reasons are unknown but guessing it could be due to the BBC planning to offer next year radio programmes for download on a 30 day availability basis.

Excluding the download feature this applications had alot of useful features to help keep track of radio programmes the BBC has broadcast so I didn't missing the start of a new radio series.  When these features now unavailable and not finding an alternative I've attempt to build my first app using Visual Basic 2012 Express.  Today I'm releasing a very early alpha release and what I've coded over the past few days.

It's been tested on Window 7 with .Net 4.5 framework installed, it won't install on my XP PC with checks pointing to the Visual Studio Express 2012 installer not being compatible with XP, so think minimum is Vista or above.

Go to the link below, on the file menu is a download option to get the zip file, extract to a temp directory and run setup.exe

UK Public Radio Browser v001.zip
See recent post for latest version

Currently Features
A - Z of all currently programmes
Find programme from A - Z list
Favourites
Open Favourite in web browser
Send to external command (example provided on notify details in dos prompt)

Proposed 
Add A - Z to web browser
Scheduling
See if the install can be improved, currently the install is hidden in the depths of the user data
Alter sections that are currently double click to select (A-Z programme list, Favourite programme list)

1 comment:

Malcolm said...

Hi thanks, looks interesting but,
I ran setup.exe offline and first thing it wants to do is connect and download some NET4.5 EULA from Microsoft !
Running Vista here (on a laptop that is already stuffed full!) and I thought I already had Net installed, do I really want more M$ stuff ?
Is this safe ?
,,, wishes for a portable version ;)