Lightspark 0.4.4 released

Archi­tec­ture of the pro­posed upcom­ing Advanced Graph­ics Engine

Lightspark 0.4.4 has been released today. Thanks a lot to all the peo­ple that made this release pos­si­ble. Beside the usual amount of bug fixes sev­eral new fea­tures have been included

  • Local­iza­tion sup­port (using gettext)
  • Action­Script excep­tion han­dling support
  • More robust net­work handling
  • Streams con­trols (Play/Pause/Stop)

It should be noted that, although now video streams con­trols are sup­ported they’ll be not usable in most YouTube videos as mouse event dis­patch­ing to con­trols is still clob­bered by miss­ing mask­ing support.

Lightspark now sup­ports local­ized error mes­sages, but we miss trans­la­tions! So I’d like to invite any user (non devel­op­ers included) will­ing to help Lightspark to con­tribute the trans­la­tion for his/her native language.

I’d also like to give some insight what is being worked on for the next release (0.4.5). First of all the plug­inized audio back­end is now mature enough to be merged upstream, this is the first step toward sup­port for mul­ti­ple audio back­ends. That said any­way Lightspark will always focus on func­tion­al­ity and not on the amount of back­ends offered. We’ll work to offer a very small num­ber of fully work­ing backends.

In the mean time we’re also dis­cussing a new faster and more pow­er­ful graph­ics archi­tec­ture. My pro­posal is a mixed software/hardware ren­der­ing pipeline, some­how inspired by mod­ern com­posit­ing win­dow mangers. Sta­tic (defined in the SWF file) and dynamic (gen­er­ated using Action­Script code) geome­tries will be ren­dered in soft­ware using cairo and exploit­ing the thread pool to be scal­able on multi core archi­tec­tures. The result­ing sur­faces and decoded video frames (if any) will be uploaded using Pixel Buffer Objects to offload the work to the video card (this usu­ally involves a DMA trans­fer). OpenGL will then be used to blit the var­i­ous ren­dered com­po­nents on screen, while apply­ing fil­ters, effects and blending.

That’s all folks. As always test­ing from as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble is crit­i­cal for the suc­cess of the project, so please try out this release and report any crashes/weird issues and any­thing you don’t like. I’d like to put an empha­sis about this: never assume a bug is already known. If you hit a crash take a look at launch­pad bug tracker. If your issue is not already reported, please do it!


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Getting things GNOME and Remember the milk: call for testers!

Aloha planet,

as you may know, Get­ting Things GNOME is a todo-manager soft­ware that, among other things, can syn­chro­nize the things-you-really-should-be-doing-instead-of-reading-this-post with var­i­ous sources.

One of its most pop­u­lar fea­tures is the abil­ity to syn­chro­nize with Remem­ber the Milk.

For the next release of GTG, I’ve writ­ten a new ver­sion of that syn­chro­niza­tion, with fea­tures a vari­ety of nice things. Among those:

  • back­ground sync (set up once and for­get about it)
  • sup­port for RTM recur­rent tasks
  • roll­back­ing of par­tial syncs
  • on-the-fly sync from GTG to RTM

Before releas­ing that, how­ever, I’d like to do have it well tested,  to ensure that no harm is done to your pre­cious todo items, so.. I’m look­ing for testers!

If you have the 5 min­utes nec­es­sary and you’re inter­ested in try­ing new stuff even before it hits a PPA, execute

tar czf gtg_backup.tgz .local/share/gtg/  #just in case, backup of your gtg install (if any)
sudo aptitude install bzr
bzr branch lp:~gtg-user/gtg/all_the_backends_merge_requests  gtg_backends
cd gtg_backends
./scripts/debug.sh -d #this lauches a debug version of GTG that doesn't touch your own GTG tasks

And go to Edit->Backends to start (your exist­ing GTG tasks won’t be touched, so you’re safe).

You’re more than wel­come to play with the other back­ends as well (and report bugs, as they should be ready for being released as well). Those are, at the moment:

  • twit­ter
  • identi.ca
  • tomboy
  • gnote (needs devel­op­ment ver­sion of gnote)
  • launch­pad
  • local file

If you find a bug, please report it to https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gtg (link­ing this post).

If you don’t fine any, leave a com­ment here, so we can know that we’re good (^_^).

Thanks!

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Lightspark 0.4.3 final release

I’m offi­cially announc­ing Lightspark 0.4.3. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing fea­tures as been added since the RC and a good amount of bug fixes thanks to user reports. The aggre­gate changelog since 0.4.2 is huge! Here it is:

  • Liq­uid lay­out support
  • Faster ren­der­ing of the input layer
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 videos
  • Smoother play­back of audio and video
  • Fall­back on Gnash for older clips

Many users asked why vimeo, hulu and many oth­ers video shar­ing sites don’t work while youtube does. The answer is, although flash based video play­ers looks sim­ple a lot of action script code is actu­ally being exe­cuted under the hood. Sup­port for youtube has been a pri­or­ity given it’s huge pop­u­lar­ity but I’d like to clar­ify that lightspark is not a youtube spe­cific hack and that over time sup­port will come for any site.

As a way to help new devel­oper join my effort I’d like to launch a “site adopt­ing” cam­paign. Devel­op­ers that are will­ing to work on lightspark, but are scared by the com­plex­ity of the chal­lenge can choose a site using flash that is important/useful for them and work to imple­ment the needed fea­tures. To help them I’m most always online in the #lightspark IRC chan­nel and avail­able to tutor them.

As a clos­ing news, after the last post a radeon user helped to shed some light over the ati related issues. radeon users are urged to upgrade at least the mesa 7.8.2 to try lightspark as the sup­port for the needed GL fea­tures got def­i­nitely bet­ter. Keep report­ing bugs if any­thing is not work­ing even after the upgrade. More­over, I’ve dis­cov­ered today that fire­fox older than ver­sion 3.5.11 will not work as it misses a needed plu­gin inter­face, so keep your sys­tems updated!


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Lightspark 0.4.3 RC1

Today has been pub­lished the first release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.3. Source tar­balls are avail­able as usual from launch­pad. Pre­build pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick are avail­able from the PPA as usual.

The new fea­tures in this release are

  • Faster ren­der­ing
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 video (using FFm­peg)
  • Smoother audio and video playback

Be sure to try this out and report bugs in launch­pad and our irc chan­nel (irc://irc.freenode.org/lightspark). Users of radeon cards (and the open source radeon dri­ver) are espe­cially invited to try lightspark. Many radeon users com­plained about crashes and weird ren­der­ings which are often caused by miss­ing fea­tures in the dri­vers. It would be nice to gather as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble on working/non work­ing cards to open a unique bug report upstream.

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Getting Things GNOME!          —          GSoC review (#11)

Hello planet!
I’m back from GUADEC. It was my first con­fer­ence about open source and it was great.
I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing the talk by Guil­laume Desmottes about Telepa­thy and Epiphany, which can be great to extend GTG pos­si­bil­i­ties in col­lab­o­ra­tion.
The talk by Jake Edge about pro­mot­ing free soft­ware projects was also very inter­est­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the young Lightspark project (that went com­pletely unno­ticed for a few months before show­ing up on planet GNOME).

Thanks to the excit­ing talks and peo­ple at GUADEC,   the GTG team (even the peo­ple who were not there!) has been work­ing fer­vently on a nice rewrite of some parts of GTG core, along with a lot of unit-tests. Hope­fully, a lot of bugs will be closed thanks to this, and GTG will be nicer to code.

Some of the GTG peo­ple at GUADEC. From left to right: Bertrand Rousseau, Karlo Jez, Lionel Dri­cot and me.

As for my Google Sum­mer of Code on Get­ting Things Gnome sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends, this week has seen:

  • a port of my Evo­lu­tion plu­gin as a back­end (that was the last one planned)
  • refac­tor­ing of the Twit­ter plu­gin to get autho­riza­tion through Oauth (using  the tweepy library, thanks Tante for the hint)
  • docs, docs, docs

Next week, I’ll keep doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing. I should also write a guide on how to write new back­ends. See you next week!

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Lightspark 0.4.2.3 bug fix release

Just a brief announce­ment for release 0.4.2.3 of the Lightspark project, the mod­ern, open source flash player

This release will not show off huge user vis­i­ble chang­ing but fixes a num­ber of sta­bil­ity prob­lems, give it a try.

The cur­rent focus of devel­op­ment is test­ing lightspark’s VM against the Action­Script test­suite pro­vided by tamarin. In the mean­while I’ve also found a way to reduce lightspark mem­ory con­sump­tion while increas­ing per­for­mances, but the solu­tion is not sta­ble yet for prime time.

Stay tuned.

,

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Getting Things GNOME!         —         GSoC review (#10)

I’m at GUADEC!

It’s been awe­somely great so far. I’ve finally met the guys I’ve been work­ing with and new peo­ple from all over GNOME. Thanks to them and to the talks I’ve been fol­low­ing we have new ideas for GTG! I’ll tell you about them as they get a lit­tle more pol­ished, but they will involve Telepathy.

As for my GSoC work, the first ver­sion of the Remem­ber the milk back­end is now com­plete. A cou­ple of small bugs still need to be fixed :)

Thanks to the first days GUADEC wifi, I’ve been able to test my back­ends on an unre­li­able link (now the net­work works perfectly).

We’ve also been hav­ing a small GTG hack­fest to fix the nas­ti­est bugs in trunk.

See you next week, and thanks for all the peo­ple orga­niz­ing GUADEC, giv­ing talks or just being here!

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Lightspark 0.4.2.2 released

Try­ing to keep up with the old rule “Release early, release often” I’ happy to announce release 0.4.2.2 open source flash player.

This appar­ently small point release actu­ally includes the biggest fea­ture plan­nend for the upcom­ing 0.4.3 release, namely Gnash fall­back on older SWF clips.  Lightspark cur­rently relies no Gnash for any Flash con­tent that does not require AVM2 (Action­Script 3) support.

I would also like to explain an issue that many users and testers reported. Fire­fox is not able to han­dle mul­ti­ple plu­gin for the same file type! Not even if only one of those plu­g­ins is actu­ally enabled. So, if lightspark is installed along­side adobe’s player or Gnash no flash con­tent will be dis­played. This is a fire­fox bug, I’ve reported the bug and pro­posed a patch that is cur­rently wait­ing the review.

The source of the release is as always avail­able on launch­pad. Binary pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick will be avail­able on the usual PPA (in a cou­ple hours from now, Launch­pad seems pretty busy at the moment). More­over, since the last announce­ment lightspark has been also included in the debian exper­i­men­tal suite (thanks to Didier Raboud and Luca Falavigna).

Stay tuned, and fol­low the roadmap

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Getting Things GNOME!        —        GSoC review (#9)

This week in “Get­ting Things Gnome!” devel­op­ment of mul­ti­ple backends:

  • As for yesterday’s post, we can now auto­mat­i­cally import (some) Evo­lu­tion mails in GTG
  • I’ve been work­ing on the Remem­ber The Milk back­end to speed it up. Since RTM allows only one API call per sec­ond, any­thing cacheable must be cached.
  • I’ve been test­ing and fix­ing the couchdb back­end. Now it syncs on ubuntu one with­out error on my machine. It would be great if some­one is will­ing to test it. Keep in mind that ubuntu one is sync­ing couchdb data­bases every ten min­utes or so. Instruc­tions on how to test are here.

Next week, I’ll be at GUADEC! I really don’t know if I’ll have the time to work on this at all, but if I do, it will be all about the RTM backend.

See you in Den Haag (or L’Aia, in Ital­ian. I won­der why..)!

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Automatically convert a new mail in Evolution to a GTG task

A GTG user, Dami­ano Ven­turin, asked me if it was pos­si­ble to con­vert a mail stored in Evo­lu­tion to a GTG task, as it can be done in mutt.

This is a pretty inter­est­ing ques­tion. There are two dif­fer­ent ways:

  • auto­matic con­ver­sion of new mails tagged in some way (e.g. “Note to self: go to surf tomor­row #TODO”)
  • man­ual con­ver­sion of the mail cur­rently being read

Both of them work. I’ll show you how:

Auto­matic con­ver­sion of new mails

  • Down­load this script, place it any­where you like and make sure you give it exe­cut­ing per­mis­sion (that is, chmod +x <script-name>)
  • Open Evo­lu­tion, in the mail tab
  • From the menu, select Edit->Message Filters
  • add a new filter
  • Edit the fil­ter such that it catches only the mails you want to trans­form in tasks
  • Edit the fil­ter such that it exe­cutes the down­loaded script

This screen­shot shows all these steps

Here, when a new mail con­tain­ing the text #task is received, the user is noti­fied via the usual noti­fier bub­bles and a new gtg task is created.

Man­ual con­ver­sion of mails

  • In GTG, enable the Evo­lu­tion plugin
  • In Evo­lu­tion, acti­vate the Mail-to-Task plu­gin (via the menu bar: Edit->Plugins)

Now, each time you want to import a mail in GTG, you should:

  • in Evo­lu­tion, from the global mail view (that is, not from an opened mail), right click and select “Cre­ate a task”
  • in GTG, syn­chro­nize with evolution.

The Evo­lu­tion plu­gin for GTG will soon be trans­formed in a back­end, which will make the syn­chro­niza­tion com­pletely auto­matic (remov­ing the need for the sec­ond step).

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