How do I use it

The tools are designed as library projects. Here are some suggestion how to use it:

• Simply include the whole project as library and use it. That's the safest way because you will benefit from future bugfixes and haven't to deal with anything else. The downside is that you're including all classes and won't even use some of them and your application is getting bigger.
• Is the same as first but you can simply delete unneeded classes before compiling. This way you can still update the project easily. You have to take care of class dependencies, they are documented at the bottom of every class javadoc.
• This one is drastic. Take the classes from the project and include them in your own project. Take care of dependencies (see second option). This way you would update the classes manually if you want to benefit from future updates.
• ... whatever you want. For my own project (banshee-remote) I use a custom bash script which is hard linking the needed files into the project. That way I benefit from updates and can commit changes from my own project easily.

State of development

I will introduce a class documentation tag (in the title of each class) which will indicate the stability of a tool so you can have some expectations and state information when using it:

• Alpha - class is still under development and probably will cause problems - not recommended for release use - use it if really like the idea and want to help improving it
• Test - class is finished so far an passed some plausible tests - be prepared to face problems and please report them if you use it
• Beta - class is used by myself and all teething troubles should be fixed - this is pretty stable - there still might be some errors on other platforms, please report them
• Release - class is used by other people and the started to report problems on other platforms - a class in this state will be (at least almost) final (I will think about using a final tag but I don't think that anything can be final...)
• furthermore + can be appended to each tag and indicates that the class is in this stage for quite some time and was improved so it became more stable - so Alpha is the worst tag and Release + means that you'll hardly find any bugs