Tag Archives: release

Fillmore and Lombard released

We are pleased to announce the first release of yorba’s multi-media creation tools, Lombard and Fillmore.

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.

Shotwell 0.5.0 released

Yorba has released Shotwell 0.5.0, a major update to our digital photo manager.  This release includes a host of new features, including:

* 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

Shotwell 0.3.0 released!

Hello, world: this is the inaugural post of the Yorba blog!  I actually have quite a few topics queued up to blog about so you can expect more posts in the weeks to come ( and I know that my fellow Yorba engineers are looking forward to writing soon too.)

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!