This is the first post on Elisa news, I’ll try to make one per week and cross-post it on the mailing list too. So, what’s going on these days in Elisa world? Let’s see… :)
Florian, Christophe and I are currently working on a new user-interface (yeah yet another one!). We first improved our MVC framework to ease the development of Controllers, Views, Transitions between Views and dynamic switching of Views. The code is in better shape now! You can track progress of that new frontend on its dedicated milestone scheduled for January. So far we have the menu navigation support, one vertical list (with scrollbar) and a Grid view able to display large menus in an attractive style. By the way that new frontend is usable with the mouse, hence on touchscreens!
We’ll then focus on the Player Controller/View, the contextual actions menu (what you can do while browsing menus) and the Slideshow view which needs some love too.
Unfortunately developing a new UI like this takes time, we had to reimplement some Pigment Python widgets and create new ones, but hopefully most of them are reusable, we boxed the Elisa specific ones directly in Elisa. You can find the Pigment widgets in the pypgmtools.widgets package.
On the other hand Benjamin and Alessandro have been working on the media scanner and the database support. Thanks to them Elisa is now faster at analizing multimedia files via GStreamer and the code is more maintainable.
DVB related work is currently stalled, we finally got DVB-S at the office, Benjamin struggled with drivers for his card and did some GStreamer patches. Elisa-wise there’s a plan for Live-TV and EPG management but it’s not fully implemented yet.
Lionel and Loïc have respectively spent time on porting Elisa and Pigment on win32, there are still some issues to be sorted out, but they are both confident :) More to come about that on next episode.
Guillaume is fixing annoying issues in Pigment like image-cloning, rendering tests, text font height fixes and plenty of other things that used to bother us.
Loïc, between 2 win32-battles have commited a GTK+ widget, allowing developers to embed Pigment inside GTK+ applications, I’m sure he’ll talk about it soonish :)
So this is what we are currently working on, there’s so much more to come, stay in touch!