Yorba tag:www.yorba.org,2009-09-30:/blog//1 Movable Type 4.261 Shotwell 0.6.1 released tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/allison//9.44 2010-07-01T21:12:22Z 2010-07-01T21:46:01Z Allison Barlow http://www.yorba.org/blog/allison
It is highly recommended that all users upgrade.

Major improvements since 0.5 include:

 * Basic support for RAW images, including import support for all common formats like CR2 and DNG
 * Full support for working with PNG images
 * Users can now zoom into photos
 * A new preferences dialog
 * The ability to open photos in an external editor, such as the GIMP, from within Shotwell
 * Photo tags and titles are imported automatically from XMP and IPTC metadata
 * A photo trash can
 * Numerous bug fixes and improved language support

Download a source tarball from the Shotwell home page at:
http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/

Binaries for Ubuntu Lucid or Maverick are available at Yorba's PPA:
https://launchpad.net/~yorba/+archive/ppa ]]> Fillmore and Lombard released tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/rob//7.43 2010-06-28T15:16:06Z 2010-06-28T15:42:23Z Rob Powell http://www.yorba.org/blog/rob
Fillmore is an open-source multi-track audio editor for Gnome, based upon GStreamer and written in Vala.  You can record one mono track at a time.  You can create multiple tracks and sequence your audio to create songs, podcasts, stories.  You can export your project to an Ogg-Vorbis file. 

Lombard is an open-source video editor for Gnome, based upon GStreamer and written in Vala.  You can import and arrange your video clips using Lombard.  If you would like to add extra audio tracks for music or voice overs, open up your Lombard project in Fillmore.

We are currently working on version 0.2 of both products and would love to hear what features you would like next.

You can read more about fillmore and lombard here.
]]> Publishing is Ready for Prime Time! tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/lucas//8.41 2010-06-23T02:16:43Z 2010-06-23T02:18:33Z Lucas Beeler http://www.yorba.org/blog/lucas

With the release of Shotwell 0.6 coming up, we've started the process of updating documentation. In addition to Shotwell's familiar user documentation, which Allison has been diligently cranking away on to great effect, there's also the Architecture Overview, a technical document that describes Shotwell's underlying design. Of more interest to programmers than users, the Architecture Overview is the go-to document for understanding how all of Shotwell's pieces fit together. Because I wrote a lot of the publishing subsystem, it fell to me to document it for the Architecture Overview. And as I was writing up my description of the publishing subsystem's design earlier today, I realized something: publishing is ready for prime time.


What I mean by this is that if you're a software developer and there's a web service you'd like to publish photos to that's not supported in Shotwell right now (SmugMug and Zooomr come to mind), then building support for it into Shotwell shouldn't be too hard. There is one major caveat: the service you're interested in supporting must provide a REST interface. But if that key requirement is met, you should be able to adapt the Shotwell publishing system to your needs in no time.


Adding new publishing services will get easier once we have a dynamically-loadable plug-in system in Shotwell (see ticket #182), but even today it's straightforward. If you're interested, start by scrolling through the "Photo Publishing" section of the Architecture Overview. Once you get a feeling for the classes the make up a typical web connector and how they interact, you're not far from subclassing them for use with your own web service.


If you do end up building your own web connector in Shotwell, by all means send us a patch. Pending a code review, we'd love to include it in the next version of Shotwell!

]]> Dinner with Yorba tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.25 2010-04-22T21:12:46Z 2010-04-22T21:07:32Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco's Fillmore District, Yorba hosted a dinner with a gaggle of GNOME folks.  We met at Sheba Piano Lounge for drinks and some mighty tasty Ethiopian food.  A jazz trio played just a few feet away and a neighboring birthday party treated us to slices of their cake.  I thought it was a wonderful evening -- thanks to everyone for attending!

Cocktails at Sheba
The gang's all here
Rob and Dave
Dinnertime

]]> Shotwell video review tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.24 2010-03-22T18:27:08Z 2010-03-22T18:31:15Z Our first video review, from LinuxFileSystem.com:... Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim LinuxFileSystem.com:


]]> Shotwell 0.5.0 released tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.23 2010-03-16T18:04:27Z 2010-03-16T18:11:43Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim
* Photos can be tagged and organized by tag, creating a new tool for managing your photo collection
* Printing
* Photos can be published to Google's Picasa Web Albums service
* Photo exposure date and time can be set and shifted
* Photos can be set as your desktop background directly from Shotwell
* Photo import runs in the background, making imports smoother and more fluid
* Publishing photos to web services is more responsive
* New or updated language support for French, Italian, German, Simplified Chinese, Bulgarian, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Polish, and Portuguese.
* Other stability and performance improvements

We highly recommend that all Shotwell users upgrade.

Yorba would like to thank all of our bug testers and translators, without whom this release would not have been possible. We'd like to specially thank Martin Olsson, for his rigorous testing of Shotwell 0.5, and Kaj-Ivar van der Wijst, for his stylish redesign of the Yorba website.

We'd also like to think our friends at Red Hat for making Shotwell the default photo manager in Fedora 13 alpha!

You can download a source tarball from the Shotwell home page at: http://www.yorba.org/shotwell/

or grab a binary for Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid via Yorba's Launchpad PPA at: https://launchpad.net/~yorba/+archive/ppa

 ]]> Bowling as a metaphor for closing tickets tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.14 2010-02-23T03:21:42Z 2010-02-23T03:18:01Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim undo/redo system.  (Kudos to Rob Powell for turning me on to the Command pattern.)  Thanks to abstractions in our primary data structures, it was easy to build a set of base Command classes that deal with these generic objects in generic ways.  That's why our undoable crop command is only 13 lines of Vala code -- and that includes the class boilerplate.

When Adam first spec'd Shotwell (wa-aaa-y back in February/March of last year), he generated a slew of tickets for features he knew we wanted eventually, but in no particular order of priority.  We knew we wanted undo but didn't know when we'd add it (or even what would be undoable).

When I first attacked the problem in November, I pointed out that coding undo does not give you redo for free.  So, Adam created a separate redo ticket in case it had to go in later.

As it turned out, I implemented Redo alongside Undo.  I was elbow-deep in the code and I could see how to get redo implemented on all the various commands, and sometimes in generic ways.  (This is why crop's so small.)

That was pretty satisfying, closing ticket #65 and #1001 in the same commit.  Now, some of those tickets in between aren't for Shotwell, but certainly a lot of them are.  It felt like nailing the 7-10 split in bowling.  I'm a horrible bowler, and I only remember making that shot once.  Closing two tickets separated by 936 others is likewise satisfying.
]]> Vala article at GNOME Journal tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.19 2010-02-06T09:26:01Z 2010-02-06T09:32:52Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim The GNOME Journal about writing Linux multimedia applications with Vala is now posted.

Also, Adam and I are at FOSDEM 2010 this weekend.  We'll be floating around, probably spending most of our time in the GNOME room.  If you see us, come on up and say hi.
]]> Yorba is hiring tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/adam//3.18 2010-01-12T23:36:46Z 2010-01-13T20:44:59Z Adam Dingle http://www.yorba.org/blog/adam Fillmore) and video editor (Lombard) for GNOME.  If this sounds like your cup of tea, read more here:

http://yorba.org/jobs/

]]> If only it had been deprecated in 2001 tag:www.yorba.org,2010:/blog/jim//2.17 2010-01-06T02:29:29Z 2010-01-06T18:41:20Z You know that any post about deactivating HAL will, at some point, link to a bucket of bolts singing "Daisy Bell", so I'll do it now and get it over with.The past couple of days I've been removing from Shotwell... Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim a bucket of bolts singing "Daisy Bell", so I'll do it now and get it over with.

The past couple of days I've been removing from Shotwell the deprecated (and despised!) HAL.  Shotwell's reliance on HAL is minimal.  Most hardware interaction is through gPhoto.  What Shotwell needs is notification of devices being attached or detached (to run a gPhoto auto-detect) and a way of mapping USB ports to gPhoto camera objects (due to some legacy libusb port-naming stuff -- see this and this).  udev is the preferred replacement (although there's still some information out there saying to use DeviceKit; don't).  Unfortunately, there's no Vala bindings for gudev (a GObject-wrapper), so I had to build my own.

It turns out the Vala documentation for making bindings for GObject-based libraries has improved considerably, and I had a workable VAPI in just a couple of hours.  (It's here for those interested in its state.)

gudev has a signal for when devices are added, removed, changed, etc.  That's good.  However, it doesn't provide a way to get subsystem-specific device information (i.e. whether a USB device is a PTP camera).  The solution was to walk the USB bus (via libusb) and match bus/device IDs with gPhoto's auto-discovered port strings.  And that's all there was to it.

HAL offered everything we needed (signalling and USB-specific device type information), so I can't say I'm on the good-riddance bandwagon.  I'm not cheerleading for it either, though  Like a casual acquaintance with whom you don't have much in common, it's easy to say sayonara to HAL.
]]> Shotwell 0.4.0 released tag:www.yorba.org,2009:/blog/jim//2.16 2009-12-24T01:18:57Z 2010-01-06T18:42:18Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim Shotwell 0.4.0, Yorba's photo organizer for the GNOME desktop.  We've been cranking along the past two months (has it only been two months?) to get this version out before the end of December, and the hard work paid off.

Probably our most-requested feature to date has been publishing photos to Facebook and Flickr.  Shotwell 0.4.0 now offers both.  I'm pleased with the result, especially being able to log in to these services in Shotwell itself rather than through an external browser.  We have big plans on making Shotwell play well on the Web and with other Web services, so stay tuned.

Other big additions include more language packs, thanks to the work of translators from around the globe.  Shotwell 0.4.0 features complete or all-but-complete translations for Italian, German, Polish, Estonian, and Swedish.

Finally, Shotwell 0.4.0 has been ported to Windows and a binary installer is now available.  This is an alpha release with some limits, including a lack of camera support and no Facebook/Flickr publishing.  However, we were surprised with the (relative) ease of porting Shotwell to Windows.  GTK and Vala's portability were a huge boon in this process.

We're always looking for feedback, so let us know what you think.  Hope you enjoy!
]]> Shotwell featured on Transifex tag:www.yorba.org,2009:/blog/jim//2.15 2009-12-18T23:53:52Z 2010-01-06T18:42:54Z Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim Shotwell is the featured project on Transifex's home page.  They describe it as "awesome".

Thanks Transifex!  Great news to hear.
]]> Vala and C warnings tag:www.yorba.org,2009:/blog/jim//2.13 2009-12-18T03:13:34Z 2010-01-06T18:43:16Z We're frantic here at Yorba working to get Shotwell 0.4 out the door before the holidays, but I wanted to take a breather and point out a positive trend I've noticed with the Vala compiler.As you may or may not... Jim Nelson http://www.yorba.org/blog/jim Shotwell 0.4 out the door before the holidays, but I wanted to take a breather and point out a positive trend I've noticed with the Vala compiler.

As you may or may not know, Yorba is a 100% Vala shop -- well, maybe not 100%, but the sliver of code that's not Vala (and I'm including Make as a kind of scripting engine) is present only out of necessity.

We were sold on Vala from just about the beginning of Yorba's existence.  One major concern was the number of C warnings gcc spat out when compiling valac's generated source.  I'm from the medieval school of thought where Wernings Shalt Be Treatyd As Errours, but unfortunately there's little recourse with a system like Vala.  Each warning had its own root cause.  There was no central fix that could be made to the compiler, nor was it a simple matter of rewriting the offending line.  Many warnings were due to const-correctness.

Recently I've noticed fewer warnings than ever.  Shotwell is approaching the 25,000-line ceiling (according to wc, blank lines stripped) and I was curious what kind of trend there's been on warnings.  It's positive all right:

18-Mar-2009 Vala 0.5.7: 746 lines, 4 warnings, 0.54% lines generating warnings
12-Apr-2009 Vala 0.6.1: 2,789 lines, 8 warnings, 0.29%
20-Apr-2009 Vala 0.6.1: 3,160 lines, 11 warnings, 0.35%
26-May-2009 Vala 0.7.3: 6,347 lines, 57 warnings, 0.90%
28-Jun-2009 Vala 0.7.3: 8,663 lines, 79 warnings, 0.91%
18-Sep-2009 Vala 0.7.5: 15,270 lines, 131 warnings, 0.86%
17-Dec-2009, Vala 0.7.8: 24,591 lines, 56 warnings, 0.23%

I suppose I could go crazy with the graphs, but you get the point: Shotwell's code size is growing and the rate of warnings are dropping.  The big leap was between 0.7.5 and 0.7.8, which justifies my hunch that this was a recent development.

(I ran 18-Mar for giggles.  I don't think a program under 1,000 lines is worth measuing in this context, but it's fun to remember when Shotwell was just a tot.)

Zero warnings are, of course, the final goal here, but I'd say that Vala's largest improvement of late has been its growing silence.  When you think about it, that's what you're really wishing for when you type "make".

]]> Shotwell 0.3.0 released! tag:www.yorba.org,2009:/blog/adam//3.12 2009-11-05T00:38:14Z 2009-11-05T01:20:22Z Adam Dingle http://www.yorba.org/blog/adam
I'll start out by writing about our latest release: after several months of hard work we released Shotwell 0.3.0 yesterday!  Without a doubt this is the most interesting release of Shotwell so far. We've spent lots of time improving Shotwell's scalability and performance so that it's now very reasonable to use Shotwell with a collection of thousands of photos.  We've also added a one-click autoenhance feature which I've found significantly improves most photos we've thrown at it. I really like that Shotwell's autoenhance is non-destructive: it simply sets several adjustment sliders using built-in heuristics, but you can tweak the sliders afterward to your heart's content.  There are zillions of other new features as well; check the Shotwell documentation for details.

In my mind this release marks the moment when Shotwell is reasonably usable for working with actual photo collections, and I'm starting to use Shotwell exclusively for my own photo library.

We made a couple of realizations only after releasing 0.3.0.  First, we found that Shotwell will build without any changes on Ubuntu but not on Fedora (and possibly not on other major Linux distributions as well).  This was our mistake: it's our goal to be distribution-neutral.  We also realized that with the recently released GNOME 2.28 Shotwell displays no toolbar button labels by default. To fix these problems we're planning to release a new version 0.3.1 in the next couple of weeks.  (By the way, there have actually been a number of user interface changes in GNOME 2.28; I might blog more soon about those.)

Meanwhile, the team is chugging along and working on features for Shotwell 0.4, which we're planning to release this December.  In 0.4 you'll be able to upload photos to Flickr and Facebook, to move photos between events, to display extended information about photos and much more.  See our ticket list to learn more - the tickets marked high are currently slated for the 0.4 release, though of course that's subject to change as the release approaches.

Oh, and Shotwell 0.4 will also build on Windows and the release will include a Windows installer.  Yes, you heard it here: we'd actually like to make all the Yorba applications work cross-platform and this is a first step toward that.  Rest assured, however, that all our applications will remain absolutely first-class citizens on Linux platforms; that's Yorba's primary goal.  But we've actually found through recent experiments that GTK is surprisingly portable, and like other GTK-based applications such as Gimp and gedit we'd like to run on Linux first and foremost but on Windows and Mac OS as well.  (I'll plan to blog more soon about the strengths and weaknesses of cross-platform GTK in our experience).

We'd love feedback on the 0.3.0 release, and we're always looking for help: if you'd like to get involved and contribute code, documentation or bug fixes to Shotwell or our other projects then don't hesitate to get in touch!

]]> The Yorba Blog is Coming Soon tag:www.yorba.org,2009:/blog/adam//3.8 2009-10-01T05:33:48Z 2009-10-01T05:34:09Z So stay tuned!... Adam Dingle http://www.yorba.org/blog/adam So stay tuned!