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Archive for October 16th, 2006


Posted on October 16, 2006 - by jono

Say NO to winky smilies

As someone who spends a large chunk of his life on IRC, mainly due to working with the various communities on IRC, my quality-of-IRC (QoIRC?) is pretty important. Although typically blissful in my day to day bumblings, one increasing trend seems to be sweeping IRC communities like a dose of diarrhoea at a festival…

…winky smilies – ;)

They annoy me. IRC has enough ambiguity without someone deliberately enforcing it. Some people use winky smilies all the time. Now, translate this into the real world (that’s the point of smileys). Imagine winking that much. Imagine walking to the bus stop and saying “cold out today!” ;) . Imagine going to a shop and responding to a question with “no I don’t want cash back” ;) . People would think you were nuts. It is just isn’t normal, and we need to put a stop to it. The world of online emotions is perfectly supported by :) :( :P and :D .


Posted on October 16, 2006 - by jono

Jokosher Hackfest

Well, today the growing Jokosher team met in #jokosher on irc.freenode.net and hacked on some of the remaining features planned for 0.2. There was lots of great work done today, and here are some of the highlights:

  • Laszlo worked on the audio fade GUI and it is now pretty damn usable. Still not hooked up to the audio yet (more on this later) but you can add, edit, delete and move volume points. Today it really started feeling solid – this is going to be a really nice and simple way of performing volume curves.
  • More work on the Extension API. We have a pretty nice API forming where third-party developers can hack on additional chunks of functionality that fit right into Jokosher. John has been hacking on Egg file support so now Extensions are self-contained units. This is going to be a killer feature for 0.2 and I can’t wait to see what kind of stuff people will hack on.
  • Luke has been hacking on an Extension Manager that will provide a simple and easy to use interface for installing and removing extensions. In the future this will download extensions and perform upgrades from jokosher.org too.
  • Aq has been hacking on his Freesound Extension which is probably the best example of the Extension API. When Jokosher was firm forming as a design, this was one of the number one things I wanted to see, and a feature that really demonstrates what Jokosher is about – integration. With it, you can search Freesound from Jokosher, view the results, preview them and then drag the audio into Jokosher to use. This is a really awesome way of getting audio into Jokosher easily and cuts out the process of browsing Freesound in a web browser, downloading and then importing. Here you just search and drag. This is shaping up really, really nicely and Aq is working to get it ready for 0.2 so it shows what the Extension API can do.
  • Chris made some commits to make accessing instruments easier, and to change an instrument when it has been added.
  • Elleo fixed up some ALSA device related stuff.

…and I mainly worked on fixing up bugs in the effects code, looking into other bugs and writing test scripts for GStreamer problems. I have also written prototype code that can be dropped in when some things are fixed, most notably when a few gnonlin bugs are resolved, I can merge in the code to hook the audio fades GUI up to GStreamer. At that point Jokosher should be usable for making real music and podcasts as you will be able to record, edit, mix, adjust volume and mix down. Exciting times! :)

We have around two weeks to fix this lot up before we hit our feature freeze. It is critical that we get some GStreamer bugs fixed, essentially:

If some kind GStreamer hackers want to resolve these, you will help make all our efforts today usable even sooner. :)

For you screenshot junkies:

The current recording view where you are editing volume levels. Not that the big buttons will be replaced with nice small icons.

The mix view, complete with VU faders, panning controls, master faders and more.