January 2013 – Herostratus’ legacy

Announcing GPhone v0.10

Hi folks!

As many of you may know, lately I have been working on Ekiga and Opal. And, as usually happens to me, I started to wonder how I would re-write that piece of software. My main ideas growth clearly: craft a GObject library, ala WebKitGTK+, wrapping Opal’s classes, paying attention to the gobject-introspection, also, redirecting the Opal’s multimedia rendering to a GStreamer player, and, finally, write the application with Vala.

The curiosity itched me hard, so I started to hack, from time to time, these ideas. In mid-November, last year, I had a functional prototype, which only could make phone calls in a disgraceful user interface. But I got my proof of concept. Nonetheless, as I usually do, I didn’t dropped the pet project, continuing the development of more features.

And today, I am pleased to present you, the release v0.1 of GPhone.

Well, I guess a screencast is mandatory nowadays:

Igalia WebKit week: welcome Žan and Rego!

This a new weekly WebKit Igalia’s report. And the last week has been a shaky one.

Let’s start with a warm welcome to Žan Dobersek as collaborator student, who is working hard in a lot of cool matters: gardening the bots, cleaning up the Coverity run output, modifying the WebCoreTestSupport to decrease the dependency WebKit2 API, digging in a stack size problem in JSC, and much more fun stuff.

Meanwhile Joanie, after a lot of restless hacking hours, could fix a crash in tables accessibility, and saving us from many other accessibility crashes. She is working to make the world safer for table users everywhere!

But we have more new faces around: Our dear colleague, Rego, is getting his feet wet, and he started finding and fixing new bugs and he is enabling more tests in the Gtk+ port.

Calvaris is following his efforts for enhancing the user experience with the media controls for HTML5. Here is a recent screenshot of these controls:

Claudio is pushing the accelerator pedal for the snapshot API in WebKit2. With this API the applications would retrieve a snapshot from a webview as in the Overview mode in Epiphany.

Philippe is working on the fullscreen video porting the GStreamerGWorld module to GStreamer 1.0, while he is still hacking on the AudioSourceProvider for WebAudio.

And the last but not the least, Dape is working real hard on the Qt spell-check support, and he also proposed solutions for Qt WebNotification support.

And that is all for now. See you!

Two video streams simultaneously in Ekiga

As we talked earlier, we added support for H.239 in Ekiga, and we were able to show the main role video and the slides role video, one stream at the time.

But now we did a step forward: we wanted to view both videos simultaneously. So, we hacked again Ekiga and we added that feature, when a second video stream arrives, another window is showed with the secondary role stream.

Here is the mandatory screencast:

Weekly Igalia’s report on WebKit

Hi webkitters,

This weekly report project was supposed to start after the last WebKit hackfest, but my holidays got in between and now I’m recovering of them 😉

Here we go:

In summary, in these last three weeks we have had 15 commits and done 23 reviews.

Martin and Carlos have been working on the authentication mechanisms. Now they can be hooked ,through the web view API, by the applications, which could take control of the dialogues and credentials handling.

Martin has also been dealing with text rendering with complex layouts (such as Arabic). This effort leaded, finally, to the removal of Pango in favor of Harfbuzz.

Now let’s talk about Carlos’ baby monster: the injected bundle patch. As you know, in WebKit2, the engine has been split in two isolated processes the UI and Web processes. The first is in charge of the user interface, and the former deals with HTML, CSS and JavaScript handling. Meanwhile this approach adds more robustness and responsiveness, also imposes more complexity because it is required an IPC mechanism to interact with the Web process. This is particularly hard for accessing to the DOM bindings.

Carlos, since the last year, has been working on his injected bundle patch, which offers a mean to support loading plugins in the web process using injected bundle. Hence, through DBus, an application could load a plugin to communicate, indirectly, with the Web process. This approach is supposed to be the milestone for the DOM bindings in WK2GTK, and also provides a mean to pre-fetch DNS registries. This patch has been happily pushed just recently, in the second week of January.

If this was not enough, Carlos also released the development version of WebKitGTK+ v1.11.4.

Now let us go to the multimedia realm, my favorite land.

Philippe finished the port of his patch for WebAudio support to GStreamer 1.0 as backend. And now he is porting the full-screen support in Gst 0.10 to Gst 1.0 in order to reuse ans share the same base code. Aligned with WebAudio, Philippe is developing a new audio source provider that gathers raw audio data from the MediaPlayer and pipe them into the AudioBus if it is required.

Xabier has been working to deliver a nice and neat HTML5 media controls, using stylable GTK+ controls. And myself, I’m still playing with the audio pitch preservation.

Another great landmark for us is a11y, and here Joanie has been working hard to bring back the accessibility tests on GTK to a sane state. And also keeps her efforts to enable an access to WebKit for Orca.

In other sort of things, Berto has been fighting against a bug on GtkLaunch, which was shown in Epiphany too when displaying only images. Meanwhile, Dape, lurked on spell checking support for Qt WebKit2. And Sergio enabled, by default, the WebP image handling.