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.