Will’s Miro dev blog

I like passively watching memes but not participating because I’m not into getting-to-know you blog posts. But… Chris has a “youtube four meme” that’s amusing.

I only have two that come up. I don’t visit Youtube often.

• Treadmill Kittens
• Powerthirst

1. Open your fancy Firefox 3 browser.
2. Click on the awesomebar and type in ‘youtube’.
3. Post the first four videos that come up.

I haven’t written much in the last couple of weeks because I was on vacation. On the first day of vacation, I went to the beach and got knocked over by a wave, somersaulted for a while, jammed my shoulder somehow, skinned my knee, and finally came up for air. I said, “Screw this!” and went back to my beach chair where I sat around, bled, whined about how my shoulder hurt and ended up with a serious sunburn. I spent the next few days indoors–vacation is dangerous.

In the last couple of weeks, I threw together a preferences panel and a channel settings dialog which, while mostly functional, are “putrid looking”. Luc is going to spend some time fixing that. Ben spent time re-implementing itemlists and allowing for channel searches, saving channel searches, and some other things. We’ve been tweaking the widgets to make them more functional and pretty.

We still have a lot of other ui stuff that still needs fixing and tweaking. The dialogs that you sometimes see at startup when things are awry need reimplementing. The sort bars need to be reimplemented. There are some other tawdry odds and ends that also need to be redone. Generally, things are coming together and most of the big features are in, but there’s a bunch of work that still needs to happen.

This morning, we talked about where we want to draw the line and encourage people to start testing the nightlies again. We haven’t thus far because the laundry list of things that weren’t working was pretty long. Janet thinks it’s probably a good idea until most of her litmus tests pass. Otherwise you’ll all be wasting your time finding things we already know about.

However, I think if you’re interested in testing out Miro 2.0, we’ve hit a point where it’s stable enough to use. I think we’re at what other projects would deem an Alpha 2 state.

Definitely take the time to back up your database BEFORE you try testing a nightly.

We’ve got a laundry list of issues targeted for 2.0. If you encounter problems with a nightly, let us know. We hang out on #miro-hackers on freenode and on the develop mailing list, too.

If you’re interested in helping out, we sure could use the help: testing, translating, triaging existing bugs, writing patches, drawing a fancy 20 page comic describing how great Miro 2.0 is going to be, ….

I did some bug triage today and then went through and fixed some old bug data (apologies to everyone for the bug spam). A couple of interesting things came out of that.

First off, it’s interesting to note that 2.0 so far has 163 bugs marked as FIXED. That’s more than any version of Miro since 0.9.5. Hard to know what happened before that because we have inadequate bug data. Go team!

Second, there are a total of 877 open bugs right now. 323 of those are targeted as Wishlist items. We’ve been around the 850 mark since September with a big bump between December and February in the 1000 range. I think that means generally speaking that we’re keeping up with bugs which is good.

Third, it’s pretty clear that the widget overhaul will clear out a lot of older bugs. Partially because we’re ditching the HTML interface and the issues that caused, but also because we’re re-implementing a lot of stuff and in doing that, fixing issues in the process.

Miro 2.0 is going to rock your socks!