The first beta is here! It's 0.1-beta0, which isn't really logical after 0.0, but ... version numbers are pretty arbitrary anyway. So ... what does the label "beta" actually mean? It means that this release more or less defines the feature set for the first "actual" release of boxen. I still want to have a couple of smaller features in the stable release (especially for the new spectrum tab which lacks a lot of the features you would expect from a spectrum analyzer), but nothing really groundbreaking. It's now time to fix the remaining bugs and optimize what is there.
So what's new? A "new" tab where you can open new tabs. boxen now uses an interface concept that is very similar to a modern web browser, like Chrome or Opera. I didn't initially plan to do that, but it makes a lot of sense to me and I really like how it works. The "new" tab is a bit spartan at the moment, so don't expect much. But it's there for future growth. Tabs have in general been improved, they gained an icon and they now resize when there are lots of them.
One big new feature is video playback. Now ... this is really, really unfinished. Please don't expect anything. It doesn't resize, there's no fullscreen mode, it crashes the decoder often, audio and video lose sync often, it's a very rough sketch. I have it in there so I can debug it. Depending on how well it goes I will probably not include video in the first stable release. You can enable the video tab in the Player settings (option "Enable video tab").
MIDI input is also new, and it's mainly lacking customization options. Right now it looks like this: any control change message changes the volume, note C-2 rewinds, D-2 pauses, E-2 plays, and F-2 forwards to the next track. I'm planning to let it be a nice gimmick for now, and implement a proper MIDI routing UI for 0.2.
From the release notes:
14 June 2011: Version 0.1-beta0
[+] Icons
[+] "New" tab
[+] About tab (in settings)
[+] Auto-resize for horizontal tab strips
[+] Spectrum analyzer
[+] MIDI input
[+] Video playback (highly experimental!)
[*] Updated cairo graphics library
[*] Settings are now saved in the local application data folder
[*] Increased timeout value for watchdog to 30 seconds
[*] Rewrote boxen's signal/slots mechanism
[*] Clicking on "new" tab or settings tab when it is active switches back to previous tab
[*] Lots of internal changes
[*] Some small graphical tweaks
Download: boxen download page