Archive for March, 2011
Lightspark 0.4.6.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 18, 2011
Version 0.4.6 was released no more than a free days ago, but unfortunately a change in the YouTube player exposed a bug that could cause browser crashes. Version 0.4.6.1 fixes the issue and updating is recommended.
I’d also like to share some though and explain why we need to make so many point releases to keep things working. Lightspark shares a lot of similarity with the Wine project in my opinion, as both projects aims at reimplementing from scratch a large (huge for Wine, of course) platform for third party applications.
The “advantage” for Wine is that executables for installed programs (e.g. Microsoft Word) change not so often, and usually updating is under the control of the user. A user that is interested in keeping Wine compatible with a certain application is, most often, free to delay the update until Wine catches up.
Lightspark, on the other hand, needs to execute contents (e.g. YouTube video player) that are mostly out of the user control and new, incompatible, versions of the contents may pop out at anytime and there is very little we can do about it.
The only way we can be faithful to the advertised “YouTube[*] support” is to improve our code whenever a breakage pops up. I understand this is also challenging for distros and packagers because the life span of our stable releases is linked to quite unpredictable events and I’d like to say “thank you” to all the people packaging lightspark for distros in the wild. Your work is exceptional.
[*] As a side note, although currently only YouYube support is stable enough to be used daily, Lightspark is not an YT specific hack. Support for other sites is coming along slowly given our limited workforce. I’ve done some work to have hulu working and I think we’re now 80% done in supporting it. If anyone is interested in contributing to lightspark to have Hulu (or any other popular site) supported, please drop by #lightspark IRC channel on Freenode
Lightspark 0.4.6.1 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 18, 2011
Version 0.4.6 was released no more than a free days ago, but unfortunately a change in the YouTube player exposed a bug that could cause browser crashes. Version 0.4.6.1 fixes the issue and updating is recommended.
I’d also like to share some though and explain why we need to make so many point releases to keep things working. Lightspark shares a lot of similarity with the Wine project in my opinion, as both projects aims at reimplementing from scratch a large (huge for Wine, of course) platform for third party applications.
The “advantage” for Wine is that executables for installed programs (e.g. Microsoft Word) change not so often, and usually updating is under the control of the user. A user that is interested in keeping Wine compatible with a certain application is, most often, free to delay the update until Wine catches up.
Lightspark, on the other hand, needs to execute contents (e.g. YouTube video player) that are mostly out of the user control and new, incompatible, versions of the contents may pop out at anytime and there is very little we can do about it.
The only way we can be faithful to the advertised “YouTube[*] support” is to improve our code whenever a breakage pops up. I understand this is also challenging for distros and packagers because the life span of our stable releases is linked to quite unpredictable events and I’d like to say “thank you” to all the people packaging lightspark for distros in the wild. Your work is exceptional.
[*] As a side note, although currently only YouYube support is stable enough to be used daily, Lightspark is not an YT specific hack. Support for other sites is coming along slowly given our limited workforce. I’ve done some work to have hulu working and I think we’re now 80% done in supporting it. If anyone is interested in contributing to lightspark to have Hulu (or any other popular site) supported, please drop by #lightspark IRC channel on Freenode
Lightspark 0.4.6 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 15, 2011
I’m happy to announce that a new version of Lightspark flash player has been released. The release features improved stability and graphics:
- Gradient support has been vastly improved
- Graphical glitches are greatly reduced
- Added support for the upcoming gnash 0.8.9 release
- Added support for profiling ActionScript code
- Added support for muting all sound by pressing ‘m’
- Added support for copying error messages to the clipboard by pressing ”c’
The tarball is, as usual, available on LaunchPad. Binary packages for Ubuntu maverick and natty are available from the Sparkers Team PPA.
Packages for Debian and Fedora will be available soon.
Lightspark 0.4.6 released
Posted by Alessandro Pignotti in Lightspark on March 15, 2011
I’m happy to announce that a new version of Lightspark flash player has been released. The release features improved stability and graphics:
- Gradient support has been vastly improved
- Graphical glitches are greatly reduced
- Added support for the upcoming gnash 0.8.9 release
- Added support for profiling ActionScript code
- Added support for muting all sound by pressing ‘m’
- Added support for copying error messages to the clipboard by pressing ”c’
The tarball is, as usual, available on LaunchPad. Binary packages for Ubuntu maverick and natty are available from the Sparkers Team PPA.
Packages for Debian and Fedora will be available soon.