Development Log April 2008
Newest entries can be found on the Development Log page.
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. :)
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