• A new “twitter-send” plugin from Dario Freddi of Collabora
• Support for grouping of TV shows and music albums.
• An on-screen “back” button so that it should now be possible to use Media Explorer on a touch screen.
• Live previews for video items
• A visual refresh of the web remote application

There are also a number of changes behind the scenes, including a refactoring of the Model Manager API.

This is a development version and there are some known issues, but if you’d like to try it out, source code and more information is available at media-explorer.org.

• Telepathy plugin from Collabora, which enables video chat within Media Explorer
• Integration with Nautilus via the “Open With” menu
• The usual round of bug fixes, performance improvements and enhancements

The 0.3 branch (master) has started with a lot of refactoring work. The dbus-glib dependency has been removed and all dbus functionality is now implemented with GDBus. There is also work going on to improve the plugin framework and greatly simplify the internal API. We also now have our own domain: media-explorer.org, which we are using as the basis of a revamped DBus API.

A screenshot of the new video chat experience, taken by Collabora developer Jeremy Whiting

Mx Toolkit

The stable 0.2 branch of Media Explorer also coincided with a new stable branch of the Mx toolkit, which is now at version 1.4 and includes many improvements, including support for clipped redraws which should be a boost to performance. There are also lots of new features in the kinectic scrolling widget from another Collabora developer, Tomeu Vizoso. Other new features include support for direct unicode character entry (using the ctrl-shift-u shortcut); better keyboard handling in comboboxes and popup menus; the implementation of the GAction interface on MxAction; and many other performance and memory optimisations.

Internship in London

In related news, the Intel team in London is looking for a student to join the developer team for a 13 month internship, starting in 2012. We’re really keen to have someone who is enthusiastic about open source technologies. If you’re currently studying at university and are looking for a placement, the full details are on Intel’s jobs page.

• Support for playing optical media, such as DVDs
• Audio track selection
• Subtitle selection
• French translation
• Background plugins
• Album grouping for music

There were also the usual round of performance improvements and bug fixes.

Subtitle and audio track selection

DVD support

More information is available on the website. There are also new versions of clutter-gst and the Mx toolkit to accompany this release, with bug fixes and new features added to both.

We also released versions 1.2.1 and 1.3.0 of the Mx Toolkit, a Clutter based widget set. Both versions contain performance enhancements and bug fixes. Version 1.3.0 is a development version including new API.

Some of the Media Explorer developers are giving a talk at the desktop summit tomorrow, where they will be talking about Clutter, including demonstrating Media Explorer.

Chris introduced the project in April and since then we’ve added a few more features, including very simple music library support so that you can play music files and add them to the queue to create a playlist:

We also added some nice transitions to and from the video and slideshow that can be seen in our latest screencast, as well as animations when scaling pictures in the slide show. We’ve also been streamlining the performance, so animations are smoother and startup is quicker.

Checkout the new website for more information and instructions on building it. We’ve also created a Twitter news feed to keep people up to date with the latest developments.

The UI is still a work in progress, I’m hoping to land it before the feature freeze at the end of the week.

I’ll also be at Guadec this week, but only for the 28th and 29th. See you there!

It still needs a lot of testing and I’d also like to add support for using NTP services, although finding a method of applying this for different distributions will probably be tricky.

• This is the first release in the unstable development series.
• As this is a development release, it should not be used in production environments.
• Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Mx.

Some of the new features include some visual changes:

Shadows in MxEntry and MxScrollView:

New MxModalFrame for a window modal container, which darkens and blurs the window:

News

Changes since 1.0.0:

• Updated documentation
• Fix compilation with recent versions of GTK+
• Require GTK+ 2.20
• MxWidget: Move padding into the correct struct
• Reduce the libtool version age to indicate ABI change
• Fix GtkLightSwitch size and remove labels
• Focusable: don’t accept focus on hidden actors
• Allow spacing to be set from CSS in MxTable and MxBoxLayout
• MxOffScreen: Add “redirect-enabled” property
• MxOffScreen: Add accumulation buffer capability
• MxOffScreen: Provide an accessor to the fbo
• BoxLayout: add “scroll-to-focused” property
• Add MxSettings and support for reading xsettings
• Use CoglSubtexture rather than internal subtexture implementation
• ScrollView: add shadows to the inside of a scrollview when scrolling
• Viewport: respect fill, alignment and padding properties
• Window: respect ClutterStage:user-resizable property
• Improvements to MxIconTheme
• Support pixel (px) and point (pt) font size values in CSS
• MxModalFrame: new widget to implement modal dialogs

Updated Translations:

• Turkish (Ahmet Özgür Erdemli)
• Asturian (astur)

Many thanks to:

• Chris Lord
• Neil Roberts
• Thomas Wood
• iain

Sources

Sources are available from clutter-project.org:

http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.1/

or from git:

http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/

git clone git://git.clutter-project.org/mx.git

Documentation

Documentation for the unstable branch of Mx is currently available at:

http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/unstable/

Bugzilla

Issues and feature requests should be filed in bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx

To help clean up some of the current settings panels, I have been implementing the mockup that Jon worked on. The current state is available in the latest Gnome unstable release, which is available in Rawhide for people running Fedora. Unfortunately Ubuntu have decided not to ship development packages of this Gnome release for people to test, so here are some screenshots of what is available so far:

Some features will need integration with the new Gnome Shell, and these are “grayed out” for now. Clearly there is some work to be done to make sure it conforms to the new Human Interface Guidelines and generally looks visually appealing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a large team of people working on Control Center right now, so it would be great if anyone can help out testing, fixing and improving! If you think you may be able to help out, the best way to get in touch is to pop in to the #control-center channel of irc.gnome.org. If you feel like diving straight in, the UI file for Universal Access is here. Send any changes back to the mail list or pop by IRC!

Bee over waterlily by aussiegall

Also with this release, I’m pleased to announce Mx is now hosted on clutter-project.org!

• Sources: http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.0/
• Git: http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/
• Documentation: http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/stable/
• Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx