Welcome to this second edition of the Elisa weekly news :) So what have the Elisa team been up to this week?
Florian and I continued on the new frontend. It is in better shape, more usable, a bit less buggy but still has some memory management issues. The vertical list view has been polished, navigation issues have been fixed. The grid view was also improved, the only part remaining is the zoomed selector support. Right it’s not zoomed and we use a red image, which is not very bling friendly. I also started to integrate mini widgets in the top bar, basically they will be menu shortcuts to search for content, switch between view layouts, notifications and access to the player. Right now only the latter has been done. Once the bigger issues are solved for that new frontend, we’ll make it the default one. The Poblenou frontend will be deprecated.
Benjamin brought back audio visualization support in Elisa, meaning that a nice animation is now displayed on the screen when the user plays audio-only content. He also refactored the menu activities management into a single (but easily extensible) XML based menu activity. It is now used by the Raval frontend we’re working on, and it’s working quite well.
Alessandro did some GStreamer related fixes inside Elisa, mainly on win32 platform. He also started to give us a hand on the new frontend, focusing mainly on mouse support for the widgets.
Loïc implemented an API in Pigment to expose texturing matrix operations, allowing various kinds of transformations in the drawables, like rotation, stretching, shrinking and much more. He finished win32 related polishing work too.
Guillaume hunted some more Pigment bugs, like support for loading images with size inferior to 1023 bytes, fd leaks and various other oddities found during the development of the new widgets.
Lionel continued to fill the Trac website with many new tickets, milestones and components to develop in the future. He didn’t have much time to help us but he’s a good beta-tester :) He also created a mailing list for developers interested on the SVN activity. Mailing lists for Pigment will also be created very soon.
Some news about Coherence, it’s important to talk about it, Elisa uses it quite a bit for all the UPnP related features and Frank, the project maintainer, is always very keen and responsive on our questions and feedback. So Coherence recently got a Rhythmbox backend, meaning that Rhythmbox can now act as a UPnP Content-Directory client and serve the media collection over UPnP. However you might need quite recent of versions of Rhythmbox and Coherence to get it working. A Last.FM backend is on its way too, but not checked in yet. This is really good news, Coherence interacts with more and more applications and online services!