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.