Since losing the original source for Alarm Clock and other projects of mine, back when my old computer died horribly, I'd not done anything with the project. After all, who wants to start over, or with a missing history for a project? (Yeah, yeah, I whine too much.)

Well anyway, over the last few days, I decided that I might as well get over it and recover what I can. Fortunately because of how .NET is, I was able to more or less create a new project with the old code, although dealing with the WinForms Designer in Visual Studio was pretty tricky. Eventually I had things to the point where they were before the crash.

Now, I'm taking things past there.

The original idea for Alarm Clock was to create a cross-platform "radio" alarm clock that would let you go to sleep and/or wake up to your music collection on the computer. However, some mistakes by yours truly prevented the program being able to run on anything but Windows, mainly, a reliance on Windows Media Player for the radio functionality, and P/Invoking the PlaySound API in Win32.

Fortunately, with Mono 2.0, there's now a System.Media.SoundPlayer that works on any Mono-running platform. And I've been tipped off to Banshee, a .NET media player that currently runs on Linux and OSX, which means that all-important radio functionality can soon work outside of Windows as well.

Since Banshee doesn't yet work on Windows, I've decided to create a common interface for radio functionality, and create two assemblies, one for WMP and one for Banshee, that will implement said interface. Although this next release won't feature Banshee support, at least non-Windows users will be able to use Radio Alarm Clock (the new name; it's slightly more descriptive). I figure I should have the next version out by the end of the weekend.

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