Archive for May, 2010
Lightspark 0.4.0 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Insane Projects, Lightspark, Uncategorized on May 30, 2010
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
Lightspark 0.4.0 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Insane Projects, Lightspark, Uncategorized on May 30, 2010
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
Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#1)
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME!, Google Summer of Code on May 28, 2010
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 ^_^
Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#1)
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME!, Google Summer of Code on May 28, 2010
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 ^_^
Lightspark News: Progress on stability, Codenames and Logo Poll
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Projects on May 23, 2010
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.
Lightspark News: Progress on stability, Codenames and Logo Poll
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Projects on May 23, 2010
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.
Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#0)
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME!, Google Summer of Code on May 23, 2010
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.
Getting Things GNOME! — GSoC review (#0)
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME!, Google Summer of Code on May 23, 2010
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.
Going to Guadec!
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Meetings and nice people on May 20, 2010
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
Going to Guadec!
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Meetings and nice people on May 20, 2010
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