I just sent out an email to all my beta testers. Peel 2.0 is mostly feature complete so I’ll be focusing on fixing bugs and fine tuning it. Please use the feedback option in Peel to report bugs because otherwise they might go unnoticed.

If you applied for beta testing and didn’t receive an email please let me know.

Hope you like it!

I’ve been getting a few visitors through hiderefer.com lately. As a software developer I know what that means. Peel has most likely been cracked and is distributed through a website that routes every link through hiderefer.com or a similar site.

It’s no big news, Peel has been cracked before and I usually don’t waste my time looking into that. This time however I decided to disassemble the cracked version and see what had been changed. After collecting the data from otool I ran diff on both versions.

diff cracked original 
1c1
< /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Cracked/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture ppc):
---
> /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Original/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture ppc):
27066c27066
< 0001c754    bne    0x1c850
---
> 0001c754    beq    0x1c850
37227c37227
< /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Cracked/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture i386):
---
> /Users/hjaltij/Misc/Original/Peel.app/Contents/MacOS/Peel (architecture i386):
64993c64993
< 0001c2ec    jnel    0x0001c3e7
---
> 0001c2ec    jel    0x0001c3e7

That’s not much, only two changes and since Peel is a universal binary it’s just one line for each architecture. I’m no assembly expert but it doesn’t take much to see that a condition has been changed so it evaluates to the opposite of the original. I took a look at the method in Xcode and saw that it wasn’t actually doing anything critical. Instead the method checks if there is any license information in the user’s preferences file and reads it if so. So by inverting these conditions the cracker did not bypass the copy protection but instead made it so that if the user decides to buy a license he will have to enter it every time the application starts.

I’ve always thought that you shouldn’t spend too much time on copy protection because it will eventually be broken but it might be worth the while to see what the cracker did even if it’s only for a good laugh.

I frequently get asked what mp3-blogs I follow so I thought I should make a list of some of my favorite blogs.

These are the blogs I have in my Peel at the moment and recommend:

• B-Town Hit Parade (Icelandic)
• Einar Birgir (Icelandic)
• Fluxblog
• Gorilla vs Bear
• I Guess I’m Floating
• The Yellow Stereo
• Zýrður Rjómi (Icelandic)
• Big Stereo
• Headphone Sex
• Kickin’ the Peanutes
• Music for Robots
• Said the Gramophone
• Unipiano

I recently spotted Peel on the front page of Maclife. It’s featured in an article about 50 killer applications for under $50. It’s always pleasant to see your work featured and it really inspires me to work harder on version 2.0.

Speaking of version 2.0, I’m getting Beta 2 ready and I’ll soon send out an email to those who applied for beta testing.

I’ve been working very hard on the next version of Peel for the last few days. It’s been more than a year since I started a new fresh project for Peel 2.0 and unfortunately I haven’t focused enough on getting it done. I’m really feeling good about this now and I think it’s coming along strong this time. Here is a sneak peak of the current state of the app.

If you’ve used the current version of Peel, you should be able to see a lot of improvements.

Here is a list of few of my favorite new features:

• RSS Support
• The ‘web’ feature has now been replaced by a RSS-view displaying the post containing the song
• Folder structure
• Smart lists (two showed here, ‘Today’ and ‘Unplayed’)
• Clicking a song in the RSS-view plays the song
• Currently playing song is highlighted in the RSS-view
• Refreshing blogs has been sped up a lot
• Last.FM support

Hope you like it and don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you think something is missing.

Ps. It should be noted that this is not just a Photoshop mock-up and some of the interface elements will probably change.

Just updated Peel. Somehow a little bug that made the “Add to iTunes” function useless slipped into last build. More strangely nobody complained until just a few days ago.

I’ve also implemented a better registration method that only requires one click from the user. Since launching Peel I’ve been getting about one email a week from people who can’t register. Most of the time it’s because the they didn’t realize that the key needs a correct name and email to work. I’ve tried to guide them through the process as thorough as I can but sometimes that doesn’t cut it so I end up doing it manually and sending them the necessary files. I’m hoping my new registration method will solve this once and for all.

Fixed

• Adding songs manually to iTunes doesn’t work
• Sometimes HTML-tags slipped into the name (if no ID3 tag was found)

Added

• Better tag support. Now supports ID3v1 tags
• “One click” registration method

Head over to getpeel.com and grab the new version.