Category: Planet Python
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Tricks or Tracebacks? Pitivi 0.94 is here
Dear werepenguins, we’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Pitivi 0.94! This is the fourth release for the new version of our video editor based on GES, the GStreamer Editing Services library. Take a look at my previous blog post to understand in what context 0.94 has been brewing. This is mainly a maintenance…
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Presenting and hacking Pitivi at Pycon 2014
Pycon, or what I’d call the “main Pycon” (vs one of the sub-Pycons), has traditionally always been held in the United States of America. This year, it will be held in Montréal. The most astute among you might have noticed that Montréal (Québec) is not actually in the USA (because trying to capture Québec City…
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Fix it thrice
Some of you may be familiar with the good old “fix it twice” adage: fix the problem and then ensure it never happens again. Last year, when I made Pitivi’s automatic backup feature work, I requested someone to write extensive automated tests for it (with Dogtail), so that I could feel confident about this feature…
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A program's obsolescence
In 2005, I had a crazy idea upon which I started the Specto project. Initially, I thought I’d call my revolutionary piece of software WhileYouWereOut (continuing the world’s tradition of ill-chosen project names), because it really was about solving a core “want” in my life: to leave my computer alone and catch up with events…
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Persistent tab states, render UX polish and other things
With some help from luisbg, I finally reworked and merged a 2-years-old patch of mine. It turned out to be less trivial than expected, because we had to change the settings backend to allow loading/reading configuration files at runtime for our dynamically-generated tab components. So, what the heck does this mean to you? Automatically saving…
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Autohiding fullscreen toolbar, error dialogs and file format filtering
Here’s one of the reasons why I’m not exactly in a hurry to learn C. When you ask me to read through C code, this is what happens: No jokes. Even after simplifying and compacting the code, it’s still such a pain for me to navigate through C that I actually felt the need to output…
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Don't make me scroll
Let me tell you about a small usability improvement in Pitivi that might provide some inspiration to others. See, I hate scrolling. Unless it’s absolutely necessary and the dialog is bigger than my screen’s height or you expect to tile windows vertically, as an application developer you should avoid scrolling when possible. 2024 edit: a…
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Specto 0.4 released
I’ve been holding off a Specto release for way too long. See my previous post on the matter for some insights into why Specto 0.4 was released after Duke Nukem Forever. This development hell streak ends today. If there are still people out there using this piece of software, go grab the new tarball. Distro…
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Improving project loading performance
When you load a project in PiTiVi, importing the clips into the “media library” (also known internally as the “source list”) is pretty fast, but inserting them in the timeline is painfully slow. So I whipped out my torture test project and spent some time profiling what’s going on using Python’s cProfile module (I talked…
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Introducing: Recipe Manager
Three years ago, Daniel Taylor (of Arista fame) made a small application designed to store and manage your favourite recipes. It was simple, lightweight, elegant. He called it Recipe Manager (got a better, unique name, anyone?) and released a “technology preview” along with the file format spec onto this website. I was pretty excited and…