A new development version (0.3.4) of Media Explorer has been released and includes quite a few changes. There are a number of new features, including:
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.
A few weeks ago the Media Explorer team released the first “stable” preview branch of Media Explorer (0.2.x) and this week we’ve started a new unstable series (0.3.x). The new features since 0.1.x include:
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.
We’ve just released a new update to Media Explorer, which includes some new features:
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 selectionDVD 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.
Last Friday we released version 0.1.4 of Media Explorer. This version includes some exciting new features, such as support for connecting to gnome-dvb-daemon to watch live TV and plugins for justin.tv and blip.tv. There’s also been a considerable amount of effort to increase performance and neaten up the transitions between screens.
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.
