novacut-community team mailing list archive

[Jason Gerard DeRose <jderose@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another month, another release. This release still isn't interesting to the
end user, but it's an exciting release for anyone interested in Novacut UI
development.
Enabling UI innovation

We decided to build Novacut around CouchDB
<http://couchdb.apache.org/>because it basically gives us real-time
collaboration for free. But as long
as we're using CouchDB, WebKit <http://www.webkit.org/> becomes a really
attractive option for building the UI as we have a local web server to talk
to.

There is another reason to use web technology... many people know it. I'd
say these days there are probably more world class UI designers building
with web tech than everything else combined (if anyone has actual facts to
prove *or* disprove this, would love to know).

But the benefit of building with web tech is lost if the development process
is too awkward or unfamiliar. Web developers expect to be able to change a
file and hit *Reload*, so a big goal this month was to make our UI
development *that* easy.

As you can see in this
video<http://vimeo.com/groups/novacutartistdiaries/videos/29748141>,
I think we've pulled it off: change a file, hit *Reload*. Plus, we really
hope other apps start using this sort of architecture, so we split the key
bits into a standalone library called
UserWebKit<https://launchpad.net/userwebkit>.

Getting dmedia production ready

Most of the month was spent doing massive work on the road to rubber
stamping dmedia<http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/novacut/novacut-pro-video-editor/posts/101613>as
"production ready", which means two things:

   1. We're extremely confident that dmedia will never cause data loss
   2. We're prepared to maintain indefinite backward compatibility with the
   initial dmedia database format

 Recommending dmedia for day-to-day use is both very exciting and rather
terrifying. Protecting your data is a big responsibility, and this has
obviously weighed on my subconscious. A few weeks ago I actually had a bad
dream that Philip Bloom <http://philipbloom.net/> was trying out dmedia and
it lost some of his files!

But the point is, we take protecting your data very seriously... and we wont
call dmedia "production ready" without good reason.
Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases
PPA<https://launchpad.net/%7Enovacut/+archive/stable?field.series_filter=oneiric>for
the soon to be released
Ubuntu <http://www.ubuntu.com/> 11.10 "Oneiric" . And you can download the
source code from each component's Launchpad project page. Whoa, six
components and counting:

   - novacut <https://launchpad.net/novacut>
   - userwebkit <https://launchpad.net/userwebkit>
   - microfiber <https://launchpad.net/microfiber>
   - dc3 <https://launchpad.net/dc3>
   - dmedia <https://launchpad.net/dmedia>
   - filestore <https://launchpad.net/filestore>

Special thanks

This release wouldn't be possible without the hard work and expertise of the
following people:

   - Thanks to Harno Ranaivo <https://twitter.com/#%21/HarnoRanaivo> for
   designing the Novacut icon, which got its first real use this month!
   - As always, thanks to Ian 'IZO'
Cylkowski<http://www.design-by-izo.com/>for the stunning Novacut
   brand identity
design<http://www.design-by-izo.com/2011/06/27/novacut-brand-identity-design/>upon
which the above icon was based
   - Big thanks to *marekj* (whoever you are) and James
Raymond<https://launchpad.net/%7Ejamesmr>for giving priceless feedback
on what a
   non-sucky UI development
process<https://bugs.launchpad.net/dmedia/+bug/837233>should look like
   - Thanks to David Green <https://launchpad.net/%7Edavid4dev> for laying
   the groundwork for how dmedia will query for info about the hard disks
   and file-systems <https://bugs.launchpad.net/dmedia/+bug/714941> upon
   which files are stored
   - Thanks to Manish Sinha <https://twitter.com/#%21/m4n1sh> for fixing an
   issue <https://bugs.launchpad.net/filestore/+bug/846954> or
two<https://bugs.launchpad.net/filestore/+bug/847044>in how we build
the documentation for
   filestore <http://docs.novacut.com/filestore/index.html> and
Microfiber<http://docs.novacut.com/microfiber/index.html>
   - Thanks to Akshat Jain <https://twitter.com/#%21/akshatj_96> for *sitting
   still long enough* to add a cool
feature<https://bugs.launchpad.net/microfiber/+bug/833646>to
Microfiber (hehe, or did he ADD that feature?)
   - Thanks to David Jordan <https://twitter.com/#%21/DMJordan2> for doing
   countless code reviews and researching how we'll make the render
backend draw
   directly onto
WebKit<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut/HelpNeeded#Special_.3Cvideo.3E_like_element_for_WebKitGtk>
   - Thanks to a friendly anonymous reviewer for pointing out a rather
   glaring problem <https://bugs.launchpad.net/filestore/+bug/854486> in the
   dmedia hashing protocol (which has since been fixed)

Contribute to 11.10 and beyond!

Want your name in next month's release notes like all the cool kids above?
If you look at the *Jump in* section on this
page<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Novacut>,
you'll see a link to the *Bitesize Bugs* for each component. These are bugs
that should (in theory) require little coding, but will get you familiar
with the Launchpad workflow, running the unit tests, and, importantly, get
your name in the release notes.

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 11.10 components
will be released on Thursday October 27 2011, and development is already
underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 11.10
milestones:

   - novacut 11.10 <https://launchpad.net/novacut/+milestone/11.10>
   - dmedia 11.10 <https://launchpad.net/dmedia/+milestone/11.10>
   - filestore 11.10 <https://launchpad.net/filestore/+milestone/11.10>
   - microfiber 11.10 <https://launchpad.net/microfiber/+milestone/11.10>

That's all, folks!

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose <http://twitter.com/#%21/jgderose>