The Board 0.1.0
December 23, 2010
The Board 0.1.0
Today I’m officially joining the GNOME Old Farts Club. I thought it would be a good time to make the first release of The Board. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Board 0.1.0! I wanted to do this a few weeks ago but with so many moving parts in our platform it was actually a bit hard to reach a point where all dependencies were actually working fine together. So, what is this release about?
Feedback. First of all, this is not a release for users. The Board is buggy, unstable, and lacking features at the moment. But it’s in a dogfoodable state for developers and expert Linux users. Current feature list includes:
- Add, load, remove pages
- Photo, video, note and label elements
- Add, edit, remove, resize elements in a page
- Basic Firefox and Chrome extensions
- Basic Nautilus extension
I’m expecting to get some useful feedback from early testers and developers on those features and the general UX. You can get an idea of what’s in the release by having a look at the previous blog posts and respective videos listed in The Board’s wiki page.
Contributors. If you’re a developer interested in setting up a development environment to start hacking on The Board, have a look at the hacking page. I wrote a script—heavily based on what GNOME Shell provides—that automates most of the process of fetching and building dependencies from git. Please report any build problems on GNOME Bugzilla. I filed bug reports for quite a few known bugs and missing features that should be a good source for initial contributions.
Distros. Even though building The Board and its dependencies became much easier with the above-mentioned script, it’s might still be a bit painful to get The Board running on your system. So, here’s a call for distro packagers to create easy-to-install packages to be used by early testers. The idea is to be able to provide the simplest possible way to get The Board running on all major Linux distros.
So, what’s next? **I’ll continue to fix bugs and hopefully make a 0.2.0 release soon with a couple of new features: audio elements with voice recording capability and support for actions—align, distribute, remove, etc—on multiple elements in a page. I expect to be doing more frequent releases from now on.