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Tuesday, 29th April 2008

Added an optional information button to the exported swf, so authors can put in freeform text and a clickable link.  Should be useful for authors to include a built in feedback mechanism, for example to a rating submission page or feedback form or similar.
 

Monday, 28th April 2008

The colour and border attributes for highlight and text layers are now adjustable.  As is the opacity of highlight layers.

Also started adding code to have an "information button" in swf output.
 

Sunday, 27th April 2008

Found 2 bugs with the way the screen capture key was being set in metacity.   The first was recently introduced by moving to storing the full path name to the screencapture command, thus a comparision was no longer working properly.  This meant a new key binding was being additionally set each time the program ran.  Now fixed.

The second was with the way the gconf key was being unset at program exit.  It was only unsetting one of the two gconf keys, leading to a build up of crap after many program runs.  That's fixed as well.

Also further fine tuned the control bar in exported swf.  The fast forward and rewind buttons are no longer displayed if there is only one slide.

Got fed up with rows in the timeline area being able to be moved around while resizing them, so adjusted that too.  "Feels better" in usage now.
 

Thursday, 24th April 2008

Still working on the initial guides for installing Salasaga on Ubuntu.  Have been finding small annoying things (including bugs) in the alpha 1 release through doing this, so have been fixing them as they're found.  They'll be included in Alpha 2, which will most likely be next week:

• Manual changes to slide duration weren't taking effect properly
• The background for the control bar in the swf output looked fuzzy.  Now it's drawn directly as a swf vector so looks very sharp

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Creating initial guides for installing Salasaga on Ubuntu.
 

Tuesday, 22nd April 2008

Created packages of Salasaga Alpha 1 for Ubuntu Linux, versions 7.04, 7.10, and 8.04.  Added them to Sourceforge and the Downloads page.
 

Monday, 21st April 2008

Enabled the bug tracker on SourceForge, and pushed out the first alpha release tarball.  Will look at Ubuntu packages tomorrow:

http://downloads.sourceforge.net/salasaga/salasaga-0.8.0.alpha1.tar.bz2
 

Sunday, 20th April 2008

Important milestone reached today.  The dependency on Ming has been revised, with Salasaga now able to use Ming version 0.3.0.  This is important, as version 0.3.0 is the accepted stable version that most *nix distributions already have.
 

Friday, 18th April 2008

Added the option for taking full screen screenshots, not just of a selected window.  Have also been trying things out with Salasaga, fixing bugs and tweaking things as I go.  This is in preparation for having a Good Quality development snapshot released soon, or perhaps "Alpha 1". (finally!)  Also updated the license to LGPLv3.
 

Thursday, 17th April 2008

Added code allowing  the movement of the start and end points of an object visually, in the working area.

Seems to work, but I've also managed to break the code that does visual dragging of an object at the same time.  Ugh.  Need to find out why and fix that tomorrow.
 

Wednesday, 16th April 2008

Rewrite of the time line widget is now complete. :)  Added the code to display images and mouse layers using Cairo.  Seems to work ok.  Also looked for obvious bugs from the recent coding, finding that multi-line text strings were not displaying properly.  Now fixed. :)
 

Tuesday, 15th April 2008

Briefly looked into what it would take to add alpha (transparency) to the Pango text strings used in text layers.

Ugh. Required WAY too much to learn about Pango, which I didn't really like anyway. :-/

Went with option B, replacing usage of Pango with Cairo (still in progress).  Also changed some internal data types and optimised things a bit on the way.  Redraw of the working area is significantly quicker now again.

With the conversion to Cairo, text strings are mostly ok now with some fine tuning needed.  Highlight layers are pretty good too.  Still need to investigate how to do images (cairo_image_surface_create()?) then with some testing this bit is done and we can move on to the next task.  (yay!)
 

Monday, 14th April 2008

The new time line widget has a movable cursor position, so you can change the point in time of the slide you're looking at.  Have also added initial working code that draws the main working area at the selected point in time, including transparency for the transitions in and out.  Having trouble finding out how to do alpha (transparency) with text strings (pango) at the moment, but suspect that's due to needing sleep at the moment. ;->
 

Sunday, 13th April 2008

Have been very focused on writing the new time line widget over the last few days.  It's nearly done.  Should already be usable right now, though I haven't tested "general functionality" for a while so may have inadvertantly broken something.
 

Thursday, 10th April 2008

Took some time to fix bugs (including crashing ones) in the latest development snapshot, and now back on improving the functionality of the timeline area.
 

Wednesday, 9th April 2008

Making good progress with the timeline rewrite.  It now does everything that the old time line did, but in addition it shows what's happening when visually, and in the next few days I should be able to complete it by adding lots more visual editing capabilities. :)
 

Tuesday, 8th April 2008

Learning how to create custom Gtk widgets, so we can have a proper timeline widget with layers and sliders and everything.  It's kind of complicated, but I think I understand the basics.  Have written a stub function (in Subversion), but have only hooked it in to things on my local development pc.
 

Sunday, 6th April 2008

Added a dialog to warn users about potentially losing unsaved changes, and also separated the Save and Save As functionality into two menu items, as per msayed2004's suggestions on the Salasaga forum.  Also added a Close Project option to the top menu, plus fixed some warning messages at run time.
 

Saturday, 5th April 2008

Added validation of new values typed in directly to the time line area.  Also started adding code to track when a project has been changed, so should be saved (as per msayed2004's suggestion on the Salasaga forum).
 

Thursday, 3rd April 2008

Started trying to update my Windows XP development virtual machine, in preparation for getting the Win32 Salasaga code working and caught up to the *nix code.  Not having much luck getting Ming to work thus far. :(
 

Tuesday, 1st April 2008

Finished adding fade in and fade out support for layers (no April fools!).  Seems to be ok.  Also noticed film strip thumbnails weren't being generated quite wide enough, and fixed that too.

Newest development snapshot is available.  Recommended update. :)