So, The Board 0.1.0 was released a couple weeks ago with a good set of initial features. The 0.2.0 release will come with a couple of interesting new features. Here’s one of them: sound elements with voice recording capability.
At this point, it should be clear that The Board is all about easily making daily records in form of videos, photos, notes, and labels. The addition of sound elements is natural step. Click on the image above to see a video demonstrating the new feature.
So far, voice recording in GNOME has been an obscure feature because the sound recorder app is not easily accessible and it doesn’t provide a convenient way to organize and access your voice memos. The Board makes it extremely simple to record voice memos. No need to care about saving files or anything. You can easily label your tapes for later reference. Just add a sound element and start recording!
The design still needs a bit more polishing of course—show playback and recording time, improve tape animation, error messages, etc. Feedback is welcome as usual. If you want to try this and other features, just follow the instructions on the hacking page to get The Board built and running on your system.
The next feature I’ll be working on is actions on multiple elements. Operations like removing multiple elements at once, aligning and distributing elements on a page, stacking elements, etc. Some exciting stuff coming soon!
Awesome stuff, keep up the good work :)
The only thing holding The Board back from World domination is a deb package that works on Ubuntu. The build instructions sent me into dep hell and ultimately didn’t work for me after much head scratching. Unfortunately I lack the right combination of motivation and intelligence to make the package for the community.
That said, The Board looks bloody awesome and I appreciate your hard work!
@The Gropes, Yes, I totally agree that the build instructions are far from ideal for people who just want to try The Board out. They are actually meant to be used by people interested in contributing patches to the project. Not by early testers.
One technicality that gets a bit on the way of distro packagers at the moment is that The Board uses bleeding edge GNOME Platform, what makes it a bit difficult to get dependencies right on current stable distro releases.
In the case of Ubuntu, I think the easiest and best way to get The Board packages would be have them in Natty’s GNOME 3 PPA which already includes most of The Board’s dependencies.
[...] Sounds in The Board So far, voice recording in GNOME has been an obscure feature because the sound recorder app is not easily accessible and it doesn’t provide a convenient way to organize and access your voice memos. The Board makes it extremely simple to record voice memos. No need to care about saving files or anything. You can easily label your tapes for later reference. Just add a sound element and start recording! [...]
This looks very good! I hope this afternoon i will finally be able to finish the build process with your great help. I’m praying for some packaging pro to come around and help you out :)
Good Luck and thank you so much!
One cool thing about all this seems to be that the Gnome development platform actually allows for doing stuff like that. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I guess there are API’s for pretty much everything you are doing in The Board, not much need for custom widget hacking and so on.
@Alex, Yes, most of the code is just about using existing API in GLib, GIO, GStreamer, Clutter and Mx with Gjs (the Javascript bindind) without many custom bits. The only custom Clutter actor I have is TbBox which is used all over the code to do complex layouts.
It’s quite easy to do crazy and exciting stuff with GNOME Platform these days. See GNOME Shell and litl OS for example. It’s just that there aren’t many app developers taking advantage of it to implement innovative UIs.