Can't stop the signal.

This is going to be a long post, I’m going to go over a bunch of stuff, so feel free to go and fetch some coffee before reading it

We’ll be talking about Google Summer of Code, Project Memphis, a kick-ass community project using Canola and also the pending release.

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Seventy Six trombones led the big parade
With a hundred and ten cornets close at hand …

Others have blogged about it already, but I still felt like I had to post something. Canola2 is now Free Software. We’ve been working on it since last year, and it has been quite an experience. As developer and team leader at ProFUSION, I can say that we’ve learned quite alot with this project and that we hope now with the release of the source code it will grow into a nice community.

I once heard that everytime a piece of proprietary software is released a puppy is born and angels sing Hallelujah in the sky. Don’t know if that is actually true, but either way, the source code is here and instructions for building it are here.

Google’s Summer of Code for 2009 has also started, and is now accepting student applications. Maemo got in as a mentoring organization, and I’ll be mentoring possible projects there (as will glima and antognolli from ProFUSION). There are a few ideas of plugins for Canola in Maemo’s suggested projects page. If you are eligible and want to develop for Canola, talk to us on irc.freenode.net at #canola.

After working on Canola for the past couple of months, finally we get to see it released. Hopefully people will like this new version, which is both faster and more stable (or less stable, I’m never quite sure which one we picked). We’re now back following the latest revision of the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries, which allowed us to make the UI experience alot smoother (check it out by going to the Photos section). Also there are a bunch of new features and lots of bugs fixed, so try it out yourself and tell us what you think. Hopefully now development of Canola will get back to more regular releases, and we’ll start seeing more external plugins being developed (such as the flickr plugin being done by Thomas Schimdt, available here).

For this release we went above and beyond the call of duty, doing tests that no one had ever done before (at least to our knowledge). That’s why we can say, with much confidence, that Canola works perfectly while drinking in Buenos Aires:

Canola in Buenos Aires

Testing in other capitals will ensue. Cheers !!!

Here at ProFUSION we’re using BlipFM quite a lot to both listen to music and share recommendations with others. Since until now no one has made a plugin for Canola (*hint*), I’ve written a really simple script in Python to parse a page and generate a podcast XML. It’s still quite hackish, but I’m going to improve it later to support more pages and stuff like that. Any comments/contributions are welcome (for all intents and purposes, the code is under the WTFPL).

Source code available here. Example podcast generated from my user here.