Archive for May, 2010

Lightspark 0.4.0 released

Just a quick update. I’ve released ver­sion 0.4.0 of Lightspark, a free flash player imple­men­ta­tion. This release was focused on improv­ing sta­bil­ity, so all the crashes found by many testers should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for test­ing, sev­eral issues were related to par­tic­u­lar graph­ics hard­ware and I would have never found them with­out your col­lab­o­ra­tion. Please keep test­ing and report­ing any issue.

Now focus shift on YouTube sup­port, which was lost after one of the last update of YouTube’s infra­struc­ture. And believe me, we’re not far! I’m attach­ing a screen shot of the cur­rent sta­tus (in GIT mas­ter) as a proof. Full sup­port will be deliv­ered with release 0.5.0

,

22 Comments

Lightspark 0.4.0 released

Just a quick update. I’ve released ver­sion 0.4.0 of Lightspark, a free flash player imple­men­ta­tion. This release was focused on improv­ing sta­bil­ity, so all the crashes found by many testers should be fixed now. Thanks a lot for test­ing, sev­eral issues were related to par­tic­u­lar graph­ics hard­ware and I would have never found them with­out your col­lab­o­ra­tion. Please keep test­ing and report­ing any issue.

Now focus shift on YouTube sup­port, which was lost after one of the last update of YouTube’s infra­struc­ture. And believe me, we’re not far! I’m attach­ing a screen shot of the cur­rent sta­tus (in GIT mas­ter) as a proof. Full sup­port will be deliv­ered with release 0.5.0

,

22 Comments

Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#1)

news dis­patch:

I’ve just been informed that a Get­ting Things GNOME! plu­gin is being added to Kupfer! That’s great.

The real post:

For the Google Sum­mer of Code, the time to start cod­ing has offi­cially arrived.
My work is about adding yet another fea­ture to the per­sonal orga­nizer soft­ware Get­ting Things GNOME!, that will let you syn­chro­nize your tasks in a vari­ety of online and offline back­ends (Remem­ber the milk, Launch­pad...). Details are here.

This week, I’ve been work­ing in:

  • how back­ends are enabled and disabled
  • a sig­nal­ing frame­work for back­ends changes
  • a nice ui for man­ag­ing back­ends (which took most of the time)

Here’s how you add a backend:

And here’s how you con­fig­ure it (yes, a lot of things are missing):

I think the UI is com­ing up pretty well: you can see which tags are asso­ci­ated with each back­end and edit them, rename the back­end, add and delete any num­ber of backends...

Next week, I’ll focus on hunt­ing bugs down and writ­ing the ui for a series of back­ends para­me­ters (file­names, authen­ti­ca­tion via web pages, pass­words stored in the gnome-keyring).

The UI needs a lot of makup still (images, align­ments etc..):  they will come in due time ^_^

6 Comments

Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#1)

news dis­patch:

I’ve just been informed that a Get­ting Things GNOME! plu­gin is being added to Kupfer! That’s great.

The real post:

For the Google Sum­mer of Code, the time to start cod­ing has offi­cially arrived.
My work is about adding yet another fea­ture to the per­sonal orga­nizer soft­ware Get­ting Things GNOME!, that will let you syn­chro­nize your tasks in a vari­ety of online and offline back­ends (Remem­ber the milk, Launch­pad...). Details are here.

This week, I’ve been work­ing in:

  • how back­ends are enabled and disabled
  • a sig­nal­ing frame­work for back­ends changes
  • a nice ui for man­ag­ing back­ends (which took most of the time)

Here’s how you add a backend:

And here’s how you con­fig­ure it (yes, a lot of things are missing):

I think the UI is com­ing up pretty well: you can see which tags are asso­ci­ated with each back­end and edit them, rename the back­end, add and delete any num­ber of backends...

Next week, I’ll focus on hunt­ing bugs down and writ­ing the ui for a series of back­ends para­me­ters (file­names, authen­ti­ca­tion via web pages, pass­words stored in the gnome-keyring).

The UI needs a lot of makup still (images, align­ments etc..):  they will come in due time ^_^

6 Comments

Lightspark News: Progress on stability, Codenames and Logo Poll

One of these will be the offi­cial logo of Lightspark

First of all, thanks a lot to all those brave enough to try out this project. I’m sorry about all the (fre­quent) crashes but, with the help of all the peo­ple who filed bugs on launch­pad, the sta­bil­ity of Lightspark is improv­ing very fast. Please keep test­ing and report­ing any issues. The next big release, 0.4.0 code­named “Aeo­lus”, is planned for the first week of June. The focus for this release is the sta­bil­ity of the plat­form and no major fea­tures are being imple­mented. The release is also going to include a brand new logo! The call for logos of the pre­vi­ous post gen­er­ated a lot of very nice works, and it was very hard to choose between them. In the end I man­aged to keep only two of them, and now it’s your turn! Vote for the one you prefer.

Beside aes­thetic things I’m also try­ing to define a bit the roadmap of the project. If the next release is only focused on sta­bil­ity, for the fol­low­ing one (0.5.0, code­named “Bac­chus”) I’m plan­ning work­ing Youtube sup­port which was lost after one of the updates of the video player.

I’ve also received a lot ques­tions and inter­est about port­ing Lightspark to other OSs and archi­tec­tures. The code is build using stan­dard tech­nolo­gies, such as pthreads and STL and should be quite portable, but some crit­i­cal code paths has been writ­ten in assem­bly to guar­an­tee atom­ic­ity or improve per­for­mance. I’ve very lit­tle expe­ri­ence with any­thing beside x86/x86-64, so I pre­fer not to port such crit­i­cal code. How­ever I will gladly accept any con­tri­bu­tions for other plat­forms, such as PPC and ARM. The good news is that a con­trib­u­tor man­aged to com­pile lightspark on FreeBSD/x86 with min­i­mal changes to the build sys­tem and a win­dows port is also planned. More­over, beside the Ubuntu PPA I’m main­tain­ing, pack­ages are being cre­ated for Arch Linux and Debian, thanks a lot to the community.

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Lightspark News: Progress on stability, Codenames and Logo Poll

One of these will be the offi­cial logo of Lightspark

First of all, thanks a lot to all those brave enough to try out this project. I’m sorry about all the (fre­quent) crashes but, with the help of all the peo­ple who filed bugs on launch­pad, the sta­bil­ity of Lightspark is improv­ing very fast. Please keep test­ing and report­ing any issues. The next big release, 0.4.0 code­named “Aeo­lus”, is planned for the first week of June. The focus for this release is the sta­bil­ity of the plat­form and no major fea­tures are being imple­mented. The release is also going to include a brand new logo! The call for logos of the pre­vi­ous post gen­er­ated a lot of very nice works, and it was very hard to choose between them. In the end I man­aged to keep only two of them, and now it’s your turn! Vote for the one you prefer.

Beside aes­thetic things I’m also try­ing to define a bit the roadmap of the project. If the next release is only focused on sta­bil­ity, for the fol­low­ing one (0.5.0, code­named “Bac­chus”) I’m plan­ning work­ing Youtube sup­port which was lost after one of the updates of the video player.

I’ve also received a lot ques­tions and inter­est about port­ing Lightspark to other OSs and archi­tec­tures. The code is build using stan­dard tech­nolo­gies, such as pthreads and STL and should be quite portable, but some crit­i­cal code paths has been writ­ten in assem­bly to guar­an­tee atom­ic­ity or improve per­for­mance. I’ve very lit­tle expe­ri­ence with any­thing beside x86/x86-64, so I pre­fer not to port such crit­i­cal code. How­ever I will gladly accept any con­tri­bu­tions for other plat­forms, such as PPC and ARM. The good news is that a con­trib­u­tor man­aged to com­pile lightspark on FreeBSD/x86 with min­i­mal changes to the build sys­tem and a win­dows port is also planned. More­over, beside the Ubuntu PPA I’m main­tain­ing, pack­ages are being cre­ated for Arch Linux and Debian, thanks a lot to the community.

, , ,

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Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#0)

Hello again, dear Planet!

This one has been a busy week in both GTG mail­ing list(s) and my lit­tle branch. I have one thing I would like your opin­ion on, which is clearly marked, so you can skip some parts.

You may not know that in the last month GTG lied on the sur­geon table to undergo a huge refac­tor­ing, mostly by Lionel Dri­cot. That made GTG faster and asyn­chro­nous in task load­ing. Just for a mea­sure of the improve­ments, we’ve low­ered the time taken to load 1000 tasks from 40 to less than 30 sec­onds, and we haven’t even started pro­fil­ing yet. The feels way faster than before, and we have low­ered our startup time. We have also gained a strong divi­sion between our core and our UI, which makes it pos­si­ble to write new UIs for GTG (that what Karlo Jez is doing for his GSoc, writ­ing a GTG web ser­vice). KDE UI, anyone?

Last Wednes­day has been declared “Get­ting Bugs Done” day, so we worked in fix­ing all the regres­sions intro­duced in the trunk after the refac­tor­ing. We have now a trunk that can be used nor­mally (if you don’t mind the occa­sional glitch). A few minor bugs are still unre­solved, but the only “big” bug remain­ing is the break­age of the plu­gin API.

Any­way, my branch, which is about hav­ing the sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends (Remem­ber the milk, CouchDb (ubun­tuone), lauch­pad, zeit­geist, twit­ter...), has seen a com­plete refac­tor­ing of back­ends load­ing and stor­ing, with the addi­tion of a back­end Fac­tory. We can sup­port mul­ti­ple instances of the same back­end, so right now you can save/load your tasks on mul­ti­ple files at the same time. You can “attach” to each back­end some tags, and the back­end will sync only those (say, you want on your work com­puter only the tasks marked @work).

I’ve also worked on lay­ing out a well doc­u­mented base class that each new back­end should derive, in order to make the cre­ation of new back­ends easier.

The more eye-catching part is that we are cur­rently dis­cussing a mockup for the UI to add and edit back­end. The cur­rent design is this one (Empa­thy inspired). I’d like to hear your opin­ions on that, whether you like it or not.

1 Comment

Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#0)

Hello again, dear Planet!

This one has been a busy week in both GTG mail­ing list(s) and my lit­tle branch. I have one thing I would like your opin­ion on, which is clearly marked, so you can skip some parts.

You may not know that in the last month GTG lied on the sur­geon table to undergo a huge refac­tor­ing, mostly by Lionel Dri­cot. That made GTG faster and asyn­chro­nous in task load­ing. Just for a mea­sure of the improve­ments, we’ve low­ered the time taken to load 1000 tasks from 40 to less than 30 sec­onds, and we haven’t even started pro­fil­ing yet. The feels way faster than before, and we have low­ered our startup time. We have also gained a strong divi­sion between our core and our UI, which makes it pos­si­ble to write new UIs for GTG (that what Karlo Jez is doing for his GSoc, writ­ing a GTG web ser­vice). KDE UI, anyone?

Last Wednes­day has been declared “Get­ting Bugs Done” day, so we worked in fix­ing all the regres­sions intro­duced in the trunk after the refac­tor­ing. We have now a trunk that can be used nor­mally (if you don’t mind the occa­sional glitch). A few minor bugs are still unre­solved, but the only “big” bug remain­ing is the break­age of the plu­gin API.

Any­way, my branch, which is about hav­ing the sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends (Remem­ber the milk, CouchDb (ubun­tuone), lauch­pad, zeit­geist, twit­ter...), has seen a com­plete refac­tor­ing of back­ends load­ing and stor­ing, with the addi­tion of a back­end Fac­tory. We can sup­port mul­ti­ple instances of the same back­end, so right now you can save/load your tasks on mul­ti­ple files at the same time. You can “attach” to each back­end some tags, and the back­end will sync only those (say, you want on your work com­puter only the tasks marked @work).

I’ve also worked on lay­ing out a well doc­u­mented base class that each new back­end should derive, in order to make the cre­ation of new back­ends easier.

The more eye-catching part is that we are cur­rently dis­cussing a mockup for the UI to add and edit back­end. The cur­rent design is this one (Empa­thy inspired). I’d like to hear your opin­ions on that, whether you like it or not.

1 Comment

Going to Guadec!


I'm attending GUADEC

I’ll soon be attend­ing my first big FLOSS con­fer­ence! GNOME devel­op­ers, enthu­si­asts, users and passer-bies, we’ll meet at GUADEC at the end of June, and we’ll see how gnomish the future is.

A big thank you to the GNOME foun­da­tion, that is spon­sor­ing me to stay at GUADEC and cre­ated this nice green badge full of happy peo­ple (or peo­ple push­ing up the GNOME logo? Maybe it’s falling down? Hope they’re fine).

Mean­while, I’ll keep try­ing mak­ing GTG more awesome!

update: Guess I’m still a begin­ner in blog­ging, since I’ve messed up the title. This is not my GSoC weekly report, obviously :)

No Comments

Going to Guadec!


I'm attending GUADEC

I’ll soon be attend­ing my first big FLOSS con­fer­ence! GNOME devel­op­ers, enthu­si­asts, users and passer-bies, we’ll meet at GUADEC at the end of June, and we’ll see how gnomish the future is.

A big thank you to the GNOME foun­da­tion, that is spon­sor­ing me to stay at GUADEC and cre­ated this nice green badge full of happy peo­ple (or peo­ple push­ing up the GNOME logo? Maybe it’s falling down? Hope they’re fine).

Mean­while, I’ll keep try­ing mak­ing GTG more awesome!

update: Guess I’m still a begin­ner in blog­ging, since I’ve messed up the title. This is not my GSoC weekly report, obviously :)

No Comments