Elisa on Windows and new resources for contributors
So our Windows developer strike force came up with a windows version of Elisa, Windows XP and Vista are supported. Check out the Elisa download page to find the alpha version of the installer. There are some issues, this is an alpha, you're warned :)
Alessandro and Olivier cooked 2 tutorials showing off how to develop new features for Elisa, by example. The API of the upcoming 0.5 branch of Elisa has also been published, it might evolve a bit but it's already a good starting point for motivated contributors out there :)
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Fri May 9 17:36:22 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
On-going projects status report
Last time I blogged about Elisa was end of February in an ultimate attempt to keep up with the weekly news reporting idea. I miserably failed since then... Some people recently asked me some status on Elisa, so I'll do my best to deliver some periodic insider news of Elisa and the other projects I'm involved on ;)
March was the month of the Elisa organization changes, the bug tracker is slowly moving towards Launchpad, the code was moved to Bazaar branches (about 20 so far) and the code reviews process was officialized (mailing list and BundleBuggy). All these changes are meant to ease contributions to the project and increase its visibility in the FOSS world, we'll see how it goes :)
The team significantly grew up, we have 2 new developers working on the windows ports of both Pigment and Elisa, one QA manager working on improving the global quality assessment of the code we write and a new graphic designer, smashing his head on the UI ergonomy and look. This is quite amazing, at some point we needed a sheet of paper with names and assigned roles on the wall to keep up with new people arrivals!
So the whole team is mainly working on the upcoming 0.5 branch of Elisa, for which a first release is scheduled in june. Many architecture changes on the table, a revisited UI framework, some new plugins to drive more content to the end-user and the usual fixes. More details to come later about that.
Some news about Pigment, Loïc worked on the OpenGL|ES plugin and support for touchscreens. This opens up Pigment to a wide range of embedded platforms! The plan is to release a 0.4 version soon. Work is heading towards the Pigment 0.5 branch. Guillaume is continuing his efforts on the PAF animation framework, the API is coming along nicely, let's keep an eye on this promising project.
Last but not least both Pigment and Elisa will be presented at next GUADEC, be sure to attend!
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Mon May 5 17:14:08 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Coherence strikes back
With a release per month, Coherence is evolving rapidly, the community is coming along, it's nice to see the IRC channel filling up with developers and users. Recently Frank added a backend for Tracker, it's a bit rough on the edges currently and publishes only the Music files over UPnP, but support for Videos and Pictures publishing will come soon! In the future, every media file you'll have on your desktop monitored by Tracker will be potentially available to the other devices of your living network via UPnP.
One nice use-case is to use Rhythmbox on one computer to play the media hosted on another desktop, transparently, with no headaches of setting up a network share. Work is currently being done towards a desktop applet called gcoherence meant to ease the configuration and setup of Coherence:
Another new feature of Coherence is a MediaServer backend for Ampache, a web-based audio jukebox system. I haven't tested that one yet, but Ampache looks like a nice toy to play with in the near future :)
Great stuff guys, keep up the good work :)
957 hits / 6 comments
Sat May 3 17:15:38 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Releases!
Yeah GNOME 2.22 is out! Yeah Elisa 0.3.5 is out ! Let's celebrate :) Well it still has no DVB, no standard DVD, no HD-DVD (it's dead anyway), no Blue-ray support BUT 0.3.5 brings drag&drop, a little nice splash screen, Codeina (or CodecBuddy, or whatever its name now), some UI improvements and the usual bugfixes. I really think we're on the right track, the software is slowly but surely getting mature, people actually write Elisa plugins, translate Elisa in their language and help us to hunt bugs, this is cool.
Pigment 0.3.5 was recently released too. Loïc and Guillaume are now starting to work on the future Pigment and they have already ambitious great plans, good stuff to come for sure, let's keep an eye on how it will evolve :) I'm especially looking forward the Paf! animation framework, let's stop reinventing the animation framework wheel now, we need a generic animation framework, be sure to read Guillaume's post, it's very interesting.
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Wed Mar 12 23:22:48 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Hi Planet GNOME!
Just a quick post to say hi to the GNOME community. Thanks Jeff for adding me!
So I'm Philippe (philn on IRC), working for Fluendo on the Elisa MediaCenter, writing Python fluently during work hours for fun and profit and off work, only for fun :)
I regularly write news about Elisa, did some posts about Pigment and GStreamer too and a good bunch of posts related to various hacks and ramblings about Python.
So expect new posts about Pigment and Elisa towards better integration in the GNOME desktop. I'll also try to blog about my little growing experience in the GStreamer world :)
1228 hits / 3 comments
Wed Feb 27 22:49:37 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Elisa weekly (not that weekly) news #6
Hey been a while since last shot of Elisa news... Be not disapointed, much is happening! Let's see...
The whole team is firing up to cook an Elisa release candidate for tomorrow and final release should happen end of next week. What's new? The plugin management framework entered test stage, the server is coming along nicely and the client library became more robust thanks to Guido's continuous efforts. Integration in Elisa UI has been started. Elisa will check every hour for updates from the server and manage its plugin upgrades automagically with minimum user interaction. Benjamin has been working on drag&drop support (which was added in Pigment by Loïc). So we can now easily add new media locations in Elisa by "putting" them in the Elisa window, sweet :) Same goes for plugins, if you download some Egg files providing Elisa plugins and drag them to the Elisa window, they will be installed too!
Benjamin also worked on a benchmarking process. First time Elisa is launched a Pigment benchmark is started to see how fast the user machine is, if it handles the various OpenGL things Pigment supports. This is useful to warn the user if Elisa won't be able to run smoothly on his machine.
Florian brought a shiny new Slideshow plugin to Elisa, code is much cleaner and bugless this time, which is good news. He also fixed a good bunch of bugs in the frontend code.
Alessandro worked on Codeina (or CodecBuddy, or whatever its name) support for Elisa. It means that if Elisa isn't able to play a file because a codec is missing then a little program fires up and handles additional codecs installation, mostly without user interaction. In the future versions of Elisa we'll have deeper integration with Codeina and the codec installation UI will be managed by Elisa itself. Now Alessandro is busy preparing his FOSDEM talk, I cross fingers for you dude :)
Loïc is also preparing his talk for FOSDEM. He has been working on an impressive little application to show Pigment bling and play with mapping matrices and a webcam. I shall tell no more, be at FOSDEM this weekend!
Guillaume has been thinking about Pigment 0.5 and more specifically the rewrite of our current Python animation framework in C. He's investigating on the current solutions available to compare them... See his work on the wiki.
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Thu Feb 21 12:57:33 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
N810: first impressions
Two weeks ago I bought my N810 with the discount code kindly offered by Nokia for the Maemo development program. The device is really nice, the OS2008 provides a totally new user experience (compared to the version I used on my N770). So here are few remarks I have after few weeks of usage:
- the padlock slider is too easy to activate.
- the keyboard is coool but I sometimes have difficulties with the keys of the first row in the keyboard. To me they are slightly too near from the screen.
- I dislike the kinda "micro" USB plug, it looks like some Nokia specific plug, a mini-usb plug would have been more handy so that I could use the same USB wire as for my camera.
So far I used the IM a bit with Frank for a video chat and with Mom for an audio-only GoogleTalk chat. Sound is good but video quality was bad, I need to make more tests I guess :)
Played a bit with MediaStreamer and Coherence, everything works fine, excepted seeking that's lacking because Coherence HTTP server doesn't yet support HTTP range requests.
I also did some media transcoding so that I can watch videos on the device. Videos need to be encoded in MP4 at some specific resolutions. Fortunately there's an handy script at maemo.org to do the whole job for me :)
Last weekend I gave a try to geottagging using the documentation on Maemo wiki. I ended up with a nice KML file that can be displayed on Google Earth and Google Maps (see below too). I'll directly integrate these features in my gallery soon, geotagging is an interesting thing, especially for my next holidays... :)
Agrandir le plan
In the coming weeks I'll start developing user-interfaces using the Python EFL libraries. I'll most likely play a bit with the Coherence MediaRenderer called Compere, so far implemented using PyGame and try to rework it with the EFL libs... More to come later :)
edit: Frank the Coherence guru reminds me that Coherence de facto supports HTTP range requests but MediaStreamer HTTP client doesn't implement the seek requests correctly... :)
1217 hits / 3 comments
Tue Feb 12 22:17:45 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Coherence and Rhythmbox love
Some heads up and bling on Coherence front. Rhythmbox now acts as MediaServer, MediaClient and MediaRenderer thanks to Frank's great efforts. This is awesome :) See the demo video, it really blows you away:
And the Rhythmbox plugin is developed in Python
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Wed Jan 30 23:15:00 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Elisa weekly news #5
Welcome to this new edition of Elisa weekly news. I'm not very regular on the timetable, but yet haven't reached the 3-weeks limit! :)
So what happened since last week? First off we've got Huge feedback from the release, good press coverage so far, especially an article on ars technica. The website is having trouble to keep up with the hits, we'll soon move it to a new server. Enthousiasts (or desperate, it depends) users keep flowing on the IRC channel at any time, this is exciting! Many thanks to Saviq, dev, hugolp and some others who form the first non-core-elisa support team. Many things happen on IRC, someone is building an Elisa live CD, another one did a plugin to list MythTV recordings and watch live-TV from the Myth backend. It's really nice for us to see people having fun with Elisa like we do every day at work :)
On the development side, Benjamin and Florian are designing a new API to replace the current media_provider API and improve the MVC framework to go even further in the modularization process. This new move is inspired from the REST architecture of the Web, among other things. I'm working with Guido on the Plugin Repository framework, we've got a (console) client/server prototype so far, it's coming along nicely and will very soon be integrated in the Elisa UI. Alessandro is doing some GStreamer development, hunting some bugs either in gst-python or directly in the GStreamer plugins. In the end we are getting some nice improvements inside Elisa :) He will also move the Elisa media_scanner in a separate plugin, out of the core.
Loïc released Pigment 0.3.4 and Pigment-python 0.3.2 last week. He also added ARGB support to the Pigment OpenGL plugin, meaning that we are now able to make even more bling inside Elisa, like apply color masks to drawables. He also added some API to hide/show the Viewport. Next he'll work on freedesktop startup specification support and minimize/maximize the viewport in the tray bar, everything towards better Pigment integration in the desktop! Guillaume is hunting an annoying race condition inside X.org's XCB library which makes Pigment based applications crash on some distributions like Fedora8.
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Tue Jan 29 11:54:04 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Reinteracting with Pigment
ReInteract is a nice tool, I thought it could be a good idea to make a Pigment extension for it.
Repgm allows the reinteract user to integrate a Pigment canvas inside Reinteract, as shown in the screenshot below:
I'd have a made a screencast but my laptop would have died trying to keep up :) It's quite easy to test tho:
download ReInteract
download Repgm, put the 2 files inside reinteract working copy
run reinteract uninstalled:
./bin/uninst.py
play with repgm :)
The repgmtools is only intended for test/demo purpose, one can directly play with repgm.canvas() which returns a ReCanvas instance. ReCanvas inherits from pgm.Canvas and the ReInteract CustomResult class so as to nicely integrate in the reinteract UI. Once that canvas is created, any Pigment operation is possible:
- adding images, text, ...
- animate things and so on
- play media with GStreamer
So this makes a nice tool for the Pigment wanabee eager to interactively learn how to use Pigment in Python!
update: Fixed svn link
1079 hits / 1 comments
Sun Jan 20 20:45:13 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand