Category: Usability and interaction design
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Getting Things GNOME 0.6 released
Yes, ladies, gentlemen, and seemingly-dead plants, it’s happening: after over 10 months of incremental work from the community, we are now releasing version 0.6 of our favorite personal productivity app, Getting Things GNOME. This release comes with some new features, lots of code improvements, many bugfixes and UX refinements (I am told that the “Better…
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Overhauling your Open Source project's "Developer Experience" and redefining the workflow
A collection of observations and insights about attracting contributors by improving the developer experience of your open source project, particularly if you don’t have the luxury of paid developers.
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Renommer un périphérique audio avec PulseAudio
J’ai découvert par hasard qu’on peut faire un clic droit sur le “profil” d’un périphérique dans pavucontrol pour renommer le périphérique. Or, cette fonctionnalité n’est pas disponible par défaut puisqu’il faut un module supplémentaire (sous Fedora, du moins). Pour faire un essai en temps réel: $ pactl load-module module-device-manager 34 “34”? Quelle drôle de réponse!…
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Taking down my online portfolio
Cleaning up my apartment today, hoping to get rid of a pile of draft papers that has been cluttering my space for six months, I’m taking the opportunity to write about what this particular pile of paper means (yes, my blogging backlog goes that far—I am draining the swamp one post at a time!) For…
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GSoC 2014 projects for Pitivi: transformation, chroma keying, image sequences
Thanks to GNOME, we will be able to get some reinforcements for Pitivi this summer. We’re very pleased to have Lubosz Sarnecki making a comeback! In 2011 he implemented the cairo-based clip transformation (zoom/resize/crop) feature in the viewer. Lubosz is quite experienced with OpenGL, Blender and GStreamer, as you can see on his blog and…
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How do you visually represent a project's timeline?
Here is a fun example to illustrate why software development in general is a complex endeavour: You think you’re going to fix a tiny problem: “hey, maybe we could make ‘s welcome dialog look a bit nicer“. Eventually, someone proposes a design or idea that looks interesting, and you realize that to truly realize it,…
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Pitivi status update for Q1 2014, fundraiser launch
Since my previous technical update in January, I haven’t had time to touch Pitivi’s code. Thankfully though, Alexandru Băluț has been filling the gap with a ton of refactoring work: around 150 commits! That took a fair amount of time to review and merge, believe me. Besides code cleanup, he also finished the port of the…
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Scratching some Media Library itches
Besides catching a cold and shovelling snow, this holiday season I spent some time scratching itches in Pitivi. For starters, thumbnails generation: if you’ve been using the new Pitivi, you certainly ran into this: As you can see, thumbnails were not necessarily being shown for all clips. That was not the result of a buggy…
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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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No more stuck rendering dialogs!
If you’ve tried rendering projects with Pitivi 0.15 or older, chances are you’ve encountered one of these dreadful situations where the rendering process would get stuck: …at the beginning, with the progressbar saying it’s currently “estimating” — which was a lie that I corrected a little while ago. …at the very end. Extra trolling points…