Newest Entries are on the Recent Entries page.

Friday, 30th June 2006 (morning)

SourceForge have now re-enabled logins, so I've uploaded the Development Snapshot from the other day (and marked it's release date as the 28th):

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=428425 

Thursday, 29th June 2006

Started adding grayed out versions of icons for the layer toolbar. SourceForge are still not letting people log in, so I can't release another development snapshot until they do.

Wednesday, 28th June 2006

Completed the code and images for having disabled (grayed out) icons on the main toolbar while a project isn't loaded, and having them be enabled when a project is loaded.

Moves the program in the direction of being more usable (important). :)

Created another Windows Developer snapshot, but lo and behold SourceForge are having another unplanned outage (surprise surprise) so I can't actually log in to release it. :( Will have to add it to the release list tomorrow or something.

Tuesday, 27th June 2006 (evening)

Took several hours rewriting the main toolbar creation code, mainly getting it reorganised so buttons can be disabled (grayed out) and enabled (full color) as needed. i.e. so the Export as Flash/SVG buttons are disabled when no project is loaded. Also started creating greyed out versions of buttons.

Mostly done, not quite finished, on both counts.

Tuesday, 27th June 2006 (morning)

Improved the error message dialog when no screenshots are found to import. It now shows the naming convention expected, so users can check if their screenshot files are just being missed due to that.

Sunday, 25th June 2006

Embedded all of the roman characters from the Bitstream Vera (standard) font into the output svg stream, plus the most usual extended characters. Sorry to the Arabic and non-roman-character-set people out there for the moment, but I really wanted to get something Working Now rather than trying to create a perfect solution.

SVG output now looks decent. Well, for resolutions of 320x240 and above on Windows anyway. Noticed that Opera 9 doesn't render text quite the same width on Windows and Linux (there's a smidgeon of difference between them), so the text background looks slightly too wide at higher output resolutions (1024x768+) on Linux.

Whipped up a new development snapshot. This is worth trying out, as with persistence you'll be able to create usable svg output with this. :)

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=427494 

Thursday, 22nd June 2006

Embedded a few characters (glyphs) from an italic Bitstream Vera font into the output SVG, to test if they're actually being used. Good news is that they are! :) Will have to figure out a way of loading in the appropriate font file when creating svg output, and only embed the characters needed. Should save space that way, as embedding a complete font would add 90k (uncompressed) to any svg otherwise.

Wednesday, 21st June 2006

Started adding code to embed the Bitstream Vera fonts in the output svg. Lots of work still needs to be done, likely needing a full weekend or so.

Tuesday, 20th June 2006

Investigating how to embed a font into the exported SVG. Batik has an SVG Font Converter Utility, so I've used that to convert the BitstreamVera fonts from ttf to SVG and added them to CVS. Tomorrow I'll have to figure out how to embed them (the theory looks fairly simple) and use them (could be a bit harder). We're on the way... :)

Monday, 19th June 2006

• Cleaned up some of the code in the svg export function, so it frees unused memory a bit smarter.
• Working out the window maximisation state at exit time has previously been a bit hit-and-miss because of the various ways the application can be exited. This is now fixed and reliable for non-Windows platforms, and the preference saved ready for the next startup.

Sunday, 18th June 2006

Took many hours getting the new play button for svg output to look reasonable AND work well (i.e. trigger playback properly, scale in proportion to the output resolution, be centered, and disapper when no longer needed). Functions acceptably now. :) (i.e. it's useable)

This may be the first time Flame is producing content that's not 100% embarrasing to see. ;)

Created a new windows development snapshot for testing out:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=425695 

Thoughts/feedback on the new play button would be useful, as would submissions for a much better replacement from a talented graphic artist! :)

Saturday, 17th June 2006

Did a bit more work replacing the ugly play button in the svg output with a nicer one. Not quite finished yet.

Thursday, 15th June 2006

Started replacing the ugly play button on the playback bar with a much nicer one from Open Clip Art. Also been spending time over the last few days figuring out how to make a proper playback bar for SVG. i.e. with working buttons for stop, start, pause, rewind, etc. I think it'll have to be done with SMIL style animation and an event loop. (Could be kind of interesting. :()

Monday, 12th June 2006 (evening)

Started adding an onscreen playback control bar to the exported SVG animations. The Start button works (in Opera 9 beta2 which I develop against), but the restart and stop buttons seem to misfire. They're also really ugly buttons, that will have to be fixed later.  :) At least they're positioned reasonably well, and scale correctly with the output size.

The code is in CVS, but not in the development snapshot released this morning.

Monday, 12th June 2006 (morning)

With the assitance of the guys from the gtk-app-devel mailing list (especially Tor Lillqvist and Ivan Baldo), a console ("DOS Box") no longer appears when launching Flame on windows. Turns out I'd been using the -mwindows flag in the wrong place. It needs to be in the linking options, not the compiling options. :)

Pushed out a new Windows development snapshot with these latest changes:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=423975 

Also updated the project file in the "Simple Project A" example, to use a named slide:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=191294&release_id=418458 

Sunday, 11th June 2006

Spent many hours today trying to get the console window ("DOS Box") to not appear when Flame is launched on Windows. No luck so far, though I've tried every solution mentioned in a multi-hour search of Google (-mwindows, capturing log output for every domain, redirecting print output, etc).  :(

Kind of wondering if it's a defect in the version of Glib/GTK libraries I'm using or something.

If anyone has good suggestions for other things to try, I'm all ears. :)

Saturday, 10th June 2006

Rounded out a bunch of code for assigning names to slides. Looks pretty stable in testing thus far:

• Added working functions and menu options to edit/unset the name of a slide.
• Fixed the code for saving slide names to the project file.
• Added code to load slide names from the project file.
• Removed the File -> Save As main menu option, because the standard File -> Save option asks for the file name every time anyway (presently).

One consequence of the change is that project files now have a "name" attribute for slides rather than a "number" attribute. Existing projects will continue to load and work fine, but I should update the Sample Project file for good measure.

Thursday, 8th June 2006

Created a new function to generate tooltips for the slide thumbnails on the left, then updated things to use it. Gives a better tooltip experience. The changes are in CVS. :)

Wednesday, 7th June 2006

Did a bit of work on memory management, creating a function to free the memory allocated to a deleted slide. Then updated a few things to use this function (i.e. when creating a new project or loading an existing project).

Tuesday, 6th June 2006

Fixed the bug causing Flame to crash when a slide is deleted - an error in how it was unreferencing the no longer needed memory - and pushed out a new windows development snapshot:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=422697 

Sunday, 4th June 2006

Picked up a copy of SVG Essentials and have started leafing through that to improve my SVG knowledge.  :)

Updated the SVG output so:

• Elements used in text layers are grouped together logically (<g ...>).
• The most common element properties are defined at the start in a <defs> definition tag (internal stylesheet way of doing things).
• Text is now sized properly, fitting neatly in the bounds of the enclosing background rectangle. (Yay!)

Noticed a bug that causes Flame to crash when deleting a slide. Doh! Haven't got time left to fix this today however.

Released a new development snapshot (for windows) including all of these changes:

 http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=58083&package_id=53841&release_id=422190 

Thursday, 1st June 2006

Updated the screenshot importing code, so the project height and width is calculated from the size of the imported screenshots.