Archive for September, 2010
Lightspark new release and Advanced Graphics Engine progresses
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on September 25, 2010
A new point release in the 0.4.4 series has been released yesterday (0.4.4.3). There are not many effects visible to end users, beside a small fix to restore YouTube compatibility. Under the hood much work has been done to support policy files one of the security oriented features of the flash platform.
I’d also like to give some insight about what is going on the advanced graphics engine branch. The roadmap is being walked without major issues. Now the texture real estate for graphics elements is allocated from a single large texture, geometries are drawn asynchronously using cairo on the CPU side and the resulting raster data is uploaded to the right chunks of texture using PBO based transfers that are (hopefully, this is dependent of the OpenGL implementation) handled through DMA by the graphics card.
The new engine is not yet on feature parity with the old one, but to showcase the new possibilities i’ve added support for color gradients. It’s also interesting to note that, after the first rough measurements, the new engine is fairly faster than the previous one.
Another advantage of the new design is that OpenGL code will be pretty much condensed in a few locations. Moreover, it will be used only for accelerated blitting, compositing and upload of data to video memory. This opens new interesting possibilities for other graphics backends.
As a closing news on Friday I had the first chance to physically meet another member of the lightspark community, namely our Debian packager Didier Raboud, as we discovered we are both working at EPFL. It has been a nice coffee-based meeting and we had a change to shake hands and discuss about some long term plans for the project.
Lightspark new release and Advanced Graphics Engine progresses
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on September 25, 2010
A new point release in the 0.4.4 series has been released yesterday (0.4.4.3). There are not many effects visible to end users, beside a small fix to restore YouTube compatibility. Under the hood much work has been done to support policy files one of the security oriented features of the flash platform.
I’d also like to give some insight about what is going on the advanced graphics engine branch. The roadmap is being walked without major issues. Now the texture real estate for graphics elements is allocated from a single large texture, geometries are drawn asynchronously using cairo on the CPU side and the resulting raster data is uploaded to the right chunks of texture using PBO based transfers that are (hopefully, this is dependent of the OpenGL implementation) handled through DMA by the graphics card.
The new engine is not yet on feature parity with the old one, but to showcase the new possibilities i’ve added support for color gradients. It’s also interesting to note that, after the first rough measurements, the new engine is fairly faster than the previous one.
Another advantage of the new design is that OpenGL code will be pretty much condensed in a few locations. Moreover, it will be used only for accelerated blitting, compositing and upload of data to video memory. This opens new interesting possibilities for other graphics backends.
As a closing news on Friday I had the first chance to physically meet another member of the lightspark community, namely our Debian packager Didier Raboud, as we discovered we are both working at EPFL. It has been a nice coffee-based meeting and we had a change to shake hands and discuss about some long term plans for the project.
Lightspark 0.4.4.2 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Uncategorized on September 12, 2010
Another week, another bugfix release for Lightspark! Apart from restoring the support for YouTube this release features the new plugin based audio framework that makes it possible to support other backends beside PulseAudio. At the moment both an ALSA and OpenAL plugins are being worked on.
As always you can grab the release here on Launchpad
Lightspark 0.4.4.2 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Uncategorized on September 12, 2010
Another week, another bugfix release for Lightspark! Apart from restoring the support for YouTube this release features the new plugin based audio framework that makes it possible to support other backends beside PulseAudio. At the moment both an ALSA and OpenAL plugins are being worked on.
As always you can grab the release here on Launchpad
GTG for old fashioned people
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME! on September 6, 2010
This insomniac night I’ve added a little nice thing to Getting Things GNOME, which is the possibility to export and print a to-do list in a PocketMod format. This is nothing more than a little foldable booklet, so that you can carry around your grocery list without needing anything more technological than a pen (you can also use strawberry juice to mark your tasks, which is way more recyclable and a little gory).
This all comes from a bug reported by Jan Girlich, so kudos to him!
Obligatory screenshot:
By the way, GTG export plugin supports templates, so creating your own webpage/pdf/t-shirt with your own tasks is easy. I’ll be glad to help anyone interested in that.
GTG for old fashioned people
Posted by Luca Invernizzi in Getting Thing GNOME! on September 6, 2010
This insomniac night I’ve added a little nice thing to Getting Things GNOME, which is the possibility to export and print a to-do list in a PocketMod format. This is nothing more than a little foldable booklet, so that you can carry around your grocery list without needing anything more technological than a pen (you can also use strawberry juice to mark your tasks, which is way more recyclable and a little gory).
This all comes from a bug reported by Jan Girlich, so kudos to him!
Obligatory screenshot:
By the way, GTG export plugin supports templates, so creating your own webpage/pdf/t-shirt with your own tasks is easy. I’ll be glad to help anyone interested in that.
Lightspark 0.4.4.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on September 2, 2010
Hi,
version 0.4.4.1 of the lightspark player has been just released. It’s mainly a bug fix release, the most relevant news are:
- Fixed a crash when using flashblock
- Restore support for YouTube
Moreover, from this release large downloads are cached to disk to reduce memory pressure.
As you may have noticed lightspark is now on Flattr and the last few posts about lightspark included the “Flattr this” button. Moreover, the Flattr-foss project (that suggest free software to be supported using flattr) has recommended Lightspark for september. Thanks a lot to the Flattr-foss team for their interest and support! Many people flattered lightspark the last month and that is really appreciated. I’m not of course talking about the (little) money, what is awesome is the large support received from the community and even the smallest donation is greatly motivating. Thanks to everyone
Lightspark 0.4.4.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on September 2, 2010
Hi,
version 0.4.4.1 of the lightspark player has been just released. It’s mainly a bug fix release, the most relevant news are:
- Fixed a crash when using flashblock
- Restore support for YouTube
Moreover, from this release large downloads are cached to disk to reduce memory pressure.
As you may have noticed lightspark is now on Flattr and the last few posts about lightspark included the “Flattr this” button. Moreover, the Flattr-foss project (that suggest free software to be supported using flattr) has recommended Lightspark for september. Thanks a lot to the Flattr-foss team for their interest and support! Many people flattered lightspark the last month and that is really appreciated. I’m not of course talking about the (little) money, what is awesome is the large support received from the community and even the smallest donation is greatly motivating. Thanks to everyone