I released Swfdec 0.5.2 today. This was an answer to the Ubuntu team that asked to have a new release to go with the Gutsy freeze. Diffstats showed 3k adds in libswfdec/ and 12k adds in total – for 3 weeks, that is pretty awesome. It even makes me the 6th most active C Free software coder!
This release also marks an important point, because it makes the Flash file work that David always wanted to have working. So we fullfilled the goal that made the project founder give up. ;) And while doing all this and walking down history lane, I realized I never thanked the people that make Swfdec go at the pace it currently does. So here is a (most likely incomplete) list of Thank you’s:
- David for starting Swfdec and writing such a sane file parser and jpeg library. I love not having sigsetjmp() in my code.
- Eric for being a great reference on all things X and BSD and doing the admin tasks on Freedesktop.
- Pekka, who suddenly showed up and started testing and fixing all this stuff I’ve always been too lazy to do. Sorry Warsow guys. :p
- Klaus and Sandro for hacking on Ming, that makes writing tests bearable and easy.
- Carl for enduring my questions and helping me slowly get rid of my ignorance of all things graphics. Oh, and he also manages Cairo.
- Andreas, PClouds (his actual name is Nguyễn Thái Ngọc Duy, but I can’t pronounce it, so I always think of him as PClouds) and all the other people that submitted patches.
- Michael, Mario, Alexander and all the other packagers that ensure the code I write works and works well.
- Johan and the rest of the Gtk team for Gtk, and in particular GtkBuilder. Building GUIs made easy again.
- Ryan for dvalue. And for knowing all this stuff about C.
- Richard for that one email back in the days. I wonder if he even remembers it.
- And last but not least Ulrike and the rest of my family, who live with me ignoring them for hours or (probably worse) showing them stupid Flash files that work.
So, how many people work on Swfdec?
5 comments ↓
your html is borked.
No, my HTML was ok. WordPress trying to make XHTML out of it is borked. Should be fixed now.
Congratulations! This release is working better than ever. It’s actually the first time I tried the 0.5 series and I’m amazed at the progress.
I do have a couple of questions about the mozilla plugin though:
1) Is it possible to “play” flash content by default? I suppose I would be more annoyed by swfdec’s shortcoming if I did that, but at the same time it would encourage me to do more bug reports.
2) Is anyone looking into implementing WMODE support? I believe the bug in Firefox preventing this was fixed in trunk (firefox 3 alphas should have it). This is one of the most annoying bugs of the proprietary plugin, it would be great publicity if you guys fixed it first. :)
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137189)
Happy hacking.
Something seems to be wrong with the plugin, I couldn’t get it to load in any browser (tried mozilla, firefox, seamonkey and xulrunner). No error messages or anything, just doesn’t show up in about:plugins, and youtube doesn’t see it.
Actually, thank _you_! I got rid of that stupid closed-source flash plugin that always crashed Epiphany after showing one flash movie from Youtube.
Sure, not every flash file works yet but many of them are a distraction anyway (think Dice Wars or Desktop Tower Defense), so I’m not too sad about that ;-)
It’s people like you who make free software so much fun to use. Thanks a lot.