novacut: Announcing the Novacut 11.12 components

This was a shorter development cycle because this month we began a new release process, which includes a week-long quality step leading up to the release. The goal is to deliver higher quality stable releases and to deliver them more smoothly.

Note that this week-long quality step wont cut into development time as we'll be starting on the next month's release at the start of the quality week. This is more just a change in how we time things, so that there's time for both manual and automated testing to validate the release.

Shiny, shiny

All the same, this was an action packed month and we probably delivered more exciting, user-visible change than any previous month. The crown jewel is that we landed the first of the beautiful UI design work that James Raymond has been doing:

This month was all about Dmedia, and we made great progress there, including getting video playback working inside our HTML5 UI, all thanks to GStreamer.

But next month is going to be all about Novacut, and we seem on track to land the first take of our cutting workflow. If you're interested in what's in store, considere attending our next weekly IRC meeting, which will resume on Sunday, January 8.

Special thanks

Thanks to Robbt for upgrading to Ubuntu Precise for the sake of testing Novacut and Dmedia, and for documenting his notes on testing Dmedia
Thanks to David J. Fulde for being awesome and for providing priceless insight into my, "so how do you feel about Ubuntu?" question (his short answer: very good)
Thanks to Kelly Strawinski for helping to incept the idea that Ubuntu is in the hizzy
Thanks to some mystery person and their kind mystery producer for sharing a glimpse of what Dmedia might look like when used on a real production set

Get the bits

Packages are available in the Novacut Stable Releases PPA for Ubuntu Oneiric and Precise. And you can download the source code from each component's Launchpad project page. Whoa, seven components and counting:

Contribute to 12.01 and beyond!

We always release on the last Thursday of the month. The 12.01 components will be released on Thursday January 26, 2012, and development is already underway. To see what's in store for the next releases, checkout the 12.01 milestones: