Flame is another take on Rendezvous Browser - Paul and I decided that grouping by service wasn’t particularly useful, frankly - we’d rather group by person / machine, and see all the machines on the local network, and the services that they were advertising.

It’s written in Python - once upon a time there was a version written in CamelBones, but it wasn’t very good, and so I used the re-write of it to learn Python and PyObjC, which is very slick indeed. It sat in my repository for waaay too long, and finally Paul and I have managed to get a release out the door. Flame 0.1 was released on 2005/03/09, and its official web page is hosted by Paul, because he’s better at these things than me. We expect the user interface to get a lot of polish in the future - in particular, the inspector is basically just a dump of the Service object state, and could be waaay nicer. But what the hell, we wanted feedback.

Although not yet under any sort of sensible license, the source is available in the Flame section of my subversion repository and will require PyObjC 1.2 or greater to build. There’s a bug in 1.2 that makes it very noisy on the console, but it’ll work fine.

Flame is also available for the iPhone / iPod touch.

Other pages referring to Flame

• the spool that started it all
• the husk.org apps page
• the launch announcement
• my blog
• paul’s blog
• del.icio.us

ChangeLog

Flame 0.2.2 - 2006/11/01

• Fixed some bugs where services where being de-duped too enthusiastically
• 0.2.2 has a Leopard-only build that uses the system PyObjC and Python, and so is much smaller. But it won’t work on anything other than Leopard.

Flame 0.2.1

• Added a beautiful icon from Dario Villanueva
• Flame is now a Universal Binary

Flame 0.2

• We remove hosts with no listed services a few seconds after a rescan, to prevent empty host entries hanging around when you change network locations, or someone unplugs a machine.
• Added a couple more recognised services, mostly to do with the Airport Express.

Flame 0.1

• First release. displays hosts on the local network. Not really any ‘changes’, per-se.