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Monday, 30th November 2009

Lots of tidying up in preparation for releasing Alpha 6.

• Fixed another bug found today by Anton Kerezov, where negative x and y offsets for layers weren't being correctly saved into project files
• Reworked the Project-> "Adjust dimensions" function to be much simpler and more effective (and not crash)
• Updated with the very latest language strings from Launchpad
• Improved the code in the image crop function
• Also made it so that the Layer -> "Image crop" option can only be clicked on if an image layer is selected

New development snapshot here:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/salasaga_200912011725.tar.bz2
 

Sunday, 29th November 2009 

After discussion with Anton Kerezov about importing screenshots, the code for it has been updated.  If a screenshot is not the same size as the project, instead of automatically resizing it the screenshot will now be put into a separate image layer at it's native size.  This lets the Elearning author adjust it themselves as they want after the import.

Also fixed two small bugs, one with the "Fit to width" zoom selector string not being recognised correctly internally in the IDE, and one where many of the top menu options weren't being enable after the screenshot import operation.

Several people (including Anton) have recently commited translated strings to the Launchpad interface, so these have been imported into the latest source code as well.

New development snapshot here:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/salasaga_200911300544.tar.bz2
 

Friday, 27th November 2009

Created an initial package for Fedora 12 64-bit, now available for download:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/Fedora_12/fedora_12-salasaga-200911270028-0.x86_64.rpm

It was compiled using the Ming 0.4.2 64-bit rpm here:

  https://sourceforge.net/projects/ming/files/Development%20Snapshots/ming%200.4.0-rc2/Fedora%2012/fedora_12-ming-devel-0.4.2-1.x86_64.rpm/download

If you want to compile the Salasaga package yourself, this is the source rpm:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/Fedora_12/fedora_12-salasaga-200911270028-0.src.rpm
 

Thursday, 26th November 2009

Added support to the film strip area for dragging slides around.  Makes organising slides much easier.

New development snapshot for testing:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/salasaga_200911270028.tar.bz2
 

Wednesday, 25th November 2009

Improved how text lines are vertically spaced in the working area.   This is still not perfect either, but it's improving.  Also updated the notification bubbles sent by the screencapture code, to now treat Notify-OSD specially.  Due to the bad design (?) and inflexible programmers for that software, the best we can do for it is to have both pre and post screenshot confirmation bubbles be 2 second "confirmation" types.  This at least gets the notification bubbles off the screen for when the screenshot is taken, so they're not captured in the screenshot itself.  It's reduced functionality for Ubuntu users, but at least it works now.
 

Tuesday, 24th November 2009

Reworked how text lines are calculated in swf output.  It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it was.  Also took a lot of time yesterday to fix minor bugs as well.
 

Wednesday, 18th November 2009 

New development release is available, that should be very usable with localisations.  Looking to finish things off (hopefully tomorrow) for the next release:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/salasaga_200911180027.tar.bz2

I think we're getting close to Beta.
 

Tuesday, 17th November 2009 

Debugging and fixing problems with unicode character handling, with the much appreciated assistance of Anton Kerezov.
 

Monday, 16th November 2009

Updated the dialogs of the highlight, image, and mouse layer types to use tabs and sliders in the same way as the text layer dialog now does, then released a new development snapshot:

  http://www.salasaga.org/downloads/alpha6_dev/salasaga_20091116.tar.bz2
 

Sunday, 15th November 2009

Found out on Friday (after a LOT of debugging) that the text layer properties were being wrongly saved by the GTK provided gtk_text_buffer_serialize() function.  When tags started to get even slightly complicated, it would mix up what attributes should be applied to what characters.  Saving that output to project files was what was stuffing things up.

After spending all of friday, yesterday, and much of today trying out various approaches to get around this, the solution has been to rewrite the text layer saving code to store everything in plain XML in the project file.  It makes the output very verbose, but the output should also be very portable, and it's easy to see/edit exactly what's being saved.

Also converted the spin buttons in the text layer dialog to sliders, adjusting some of the maximum values acceptable around this.  Seems significantly nicer to use, so the other layer types should get the same treatment soon too.
 

Thursday, 12th November 2009

Took a lot of time to rework the text layer dialog.  GTK has a problem (even in the Gimp) of dropping an onscreen text selection when the arrow of a spin button is pressed.  This was completely stuffing up the call back functions used to set text height, etc.

The font size and border width are now sliders, as they don't interfere with the text selection, plus they're additionally more user friendly it seems (after using them for a while).

There seems to be a bug present with how some text layer colour values are being saved, so that's probably on tomorrow's list of things to fix.
 

Wednesday, 11th November 2009

Didn't update this development log from April through August, even though a large amount of work was done to improve usability and functionality.

Going to make use of it again, so people can see what's being worked on and where things are up to for this part of the project.

For today and yesterday, I've been testing out the latest development code with Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala).

• Found and fixed a few trivial bugs, but also a serious one with how projects file are loaded.   The base64 decoding function was sometimes corrupting the last byte it decoded, leading to some project files having layers rejected at load time.
• Made some small usability changes while looking into this bug, as resized text layer dialogs weren't expanding out nicely.  They now expand out to maximise the text area.
• Fixed LP bug 246774, which was causing a lot of grief for some people and was due to our validation function not properly working with the comma character as a decimal point.

Older History is stored in the Development Log Archive.