I still don't have internet at home and little spare time during working hours so I'm blogging asynchronously. Reminds me of the good ol' days when I was writing my mails at home, then pushing them on a USB stick to send them from wherever I could find a connection... A lot of things happened since last time I wrote about Elisa and my work at Fluendo Embedded.

I have been working on re-designing and implementing the new elisa.fluendo.com, the old website being a customized wordpress, quite inadapted, neither easy to tweak nor to maintain. Not to speak about the contents and this terrible download button which I could not locate the first time I visited the website, back then as an interested potential contributor. The idea was to deliver a true community website with a professional design, and I think that to some extent we kind of managed that. The feedback is pretty good so far. David, our designer, has been working hard at sketching and Guido and I have been working equally hard at implementing it. After two weeks struggling with CSS theming, my conclusion is that CSS, in their current implemented version (2.1), suck. And their implementation in that piece of crapware that Microsoft dares to call a browser sucks incredibly more. To the contrary, coding the backend has been lightning fast and pure pleasure, using Django, of course.

In parallel, we have completed the transition from subversion to bazaar for source code versioning, the migration from Trac to Launchpad for bug tracking and from Trac to MoinMoin for the wiki. We are now using extensively Launchpad and the blueprints system to write specifications. And we have set up a public Bundle Buggy instance (which we were already using privately) to track merge requests and enforce a review process that ensures better code quality.

Meanwhile, the whole team is focused on our next release, Elisa 0.5. The new REST architecture has already proven to be as flexible as expected, yet there are lots of features we need to implement before we can release anything. We are currently designing the brand new user interface from scratch with strong usability constraints, implementing the widgets needed, writing new resource providers (Flickr, Amazon, Youtube, Shoutcast, ...), writing an efficient database backend and a new player, among other things.

Next news from the world of Elisa with the next release, stay tuned!