Planet SoC

Extra! Extra!

We’ve just released the most awesome f-spot so far: 0.5.0! It features a countless amount of enhancements, polish and bugfixes. Here’s some appetizer, but you’d better taste it by yourself:

- New Sidebar context switching
- Extendable Editors
- New Metadata display
- Color profile support
- Duplicate detection at import time
- Reduced and faster db access, faster queries on big collections
- Light speed tagging
- FullScreen mode enhancements
- New extensions distributed by default
- Updated documentation
- Updated translations
- Hundreds of bugfixes
- New contributors

We’d like to thanks everyone involved in that release cycle, bug reporters, triagers, testers, developers, translators. So thx, and keep up the hard work.

Just in: The new sidebar editors in F-Spot have landed. Apart from the color tool and some cosmetic changes, it’s mostly finished.

Also: F-Spot now features a histogram in the sidebar.

Sidebar + Histogram

That is all.

PS: F-Spot already had the histogram. It was just very well hidden.

When it comes to performance, F-Spot hasn’t always been the best of it’s class. Part of my Summer of Code time has been spent on improving that. While reworking the editors (which will land soon), I ran into trouble spots, which I’ve started fixing. My mentor improved in these.

To show the difference, I’ve made a small unscientific benchmark. Below are the times needed to add 2 tags to a set of 1000 photos. During this amount of time, the user interface freezes.

Adding 2 tags to 1000 photos

Observe how the whole UI freezes for over 20 seconds in the currently released version. In SVN, you hardly notice it happening! This is a 44.5 times speedup!

Google Summer of Code
Lots of activity around F-Spot lately. As there’s a number of people very curious about what I’m doing, I’ve made a small screencast providing a sneak preview.

In the screencast I first highlight the old editing tools below, which are quite hidden. I then show you how the new tools will be implemented.

Click for screencast (Ogg Theora)

The UI is still very basic, as my GTK+-fu isn’t all that strong.

F-Spot performance enhancements
At the same time, both Stephane Delcroix (my mentor, who should really blog more!) and me are working on big patches to improve F-Spot performance. Expect a much smoother experience soon!

Great news from F-Spot land!

F-Spot 0.4.4 released
First of all, the new F-Spot 0.4.4 is just released (credits go out to Stephane Delcroix, who should really start blogging more).

From the release notes:

About a month after 0.4.3.1, we’ve released F-Spot 0.4.4. It features
some new blinky features, a better gnome and gnome2.22 integration,
updated translations and tons of bugfixes.

And, as this release is a pre-Soc one, more fun stuffs are coming.

More info here, downloads also on the website. This immediately marks the point where I can start pushing my GSoC code into trunk. So without further ado:

It is now official, I have been selected to participate in the Google Summer of Code. I will be working on F-Spot, a photo management application. My mentor will be Stephane Delcroix, who is already trying to trick me into bringing him breakfast.

The last few years I was occasionally involved both in F-Spot and Banshee. Now that Banshee is totally rocktastic, it’s time to make F-Spot shine.

F-Spot

I will be working on the Sidebar, most specifically integrating editing tools. You can read my proposal over here. This is based on Jimmac’s awesome mockups.

Some updates from the past week:

Summer of Code
I have submitted my Google Summer of Code proposal for a Banshee project to the Mono Project. I might submit another one to GNOME (just in case), but only if I can work it out in greater detail. I don’t want to waste reviewers time by sending in half a proposal.

Zend Framework & Doctrine
After trying out the Zend Framework (a PHP Application Development Framework) and Doctrine (a Object Relational Mapper for PHP) for quite some time, I wrote up an article on Integrating Zend Framework and Doctrine. If you want to play with some of the nicest PHP technologies currently around, check it out!