Exciting Developments

Dan and I periodically get together to have a look at progress with the project, and last night was the first chance I had to see the work Dan has been doing over the past few months towards the first in the 1.1 testing release series.

All I can say is wow! There’s support for translations (thanks to everyone who’s contributed translations so far over in Launchpad), display groups, overhauled permissions system, overhauled user login/sessions, and now he’s in the middle of redesigning the GUI for scheduling (and in fairness I probably missed some bits too).

Progress is also good on my baby, the cross-platform client for Xibo based on libavg and written in Python. I’m in deep with the webservice code at the moment, which is the final step in making it basically functional. We’ll then need to crack on with getting webpage support in to libavg. There’s some really nice features coming – region layering, transparency (including alpha transparency on images and video), webcam/firewire camera support, region and layout transitions and maybe even some basic animation.

Andy Pattenden has been busy too building some CC licensed backgrounds and other assorted artwork for the project (watch out for analogue clocks in 1.2!), and Jim Packer is busy tidying up the excellent theme he made for the website.

There’s a VMWare Appliance for Xibo in the pipeline thanks to Terry Bradford.

There’s also a fair number of bugs that have surfaced in 1.0.2 so we’re busy working towards a 1.0.3 release for both server and client in the near future.

And to cap the post off, I see we’ve hit 300 Xibo installs ever (that we know of). Thanks to you all for your feedback. We read every single email, bug report, blueprint and forum post – but there’s a mountain to climb and we’re prioritising boring “under the hood” work at the moment that will mean the shiney stuff later on will be easier to implement and maintain.

Best wishes

Alex