News: Development

Fabian Gebert

2009/04/02 09:08

Development

Working on the next release

We're still working hard on the next release and getting Mediabird into Moodle.

A beta version of 0.5.2 has just been released and we will now focus on further documentation and debug.

We've improved security and stability in this release.

Feedback and bug reports are appreciated.

Fabian Gebert

2009/02/28 18:09

Development

ORM and other platforms, Widget version

I bet many of you programmers out there have heard about ORM, object-relational mapping. That is about converting object-oriented data structure into SQL-accessible relational database structures. For now there's been several approaches to do this, including Hibertnate, Doctrine, Propol and many others.

For Mediabird to be as compatible as possible, we have now evaluated Doctrine and other PHP ORM solutions.

Unfortunately, there is no cross-language toolset (where only the syntax would be different) and additionally, when integrating with third-party platforms such as CommSy or Moodle, we'll have to think twice about how to get through to the database (using ORM). We'll of course appreciate any support by experienced ORM developers.

For now, it seems to be the best option just to use Doctrine for the ordinary Mediabird widget version and develop a layer for the Moodle DB wrapper and CommSy. Well, thatis a wrapper for a wrapper, but anyway.

And for those of you interested in using Mediabird from any site, there's an easy-to-embed widget version in development. That will allow you just to insert a snippet of HTML on your website and to allow the users of your website to take notes using the Mediabird website. There will be back-linking from the notes to your site, such that your users will never loose the link to your pages... Stay tuned.

Fabian Gebert

2009/01/21 20:52

Development

Preview of the upcoming release, note taking and usability

To give all users and interested people a preview of the upcoming Mediabird release 0.5, I've quickly recorded a screencast which presents some of the nice functionality we've implemented so far:

The presented highlights include:

• Being able to handle all operations from the notepad rather than separate views
• Having a proper handling of sheet insertion
• Being able to keep an overview by just hovering the navigation buttons
• Accessing the different levels of content with three tabs on the left

The next step will now be to finish the implementation and make this release stable.

We will try to accomplish this during the next two or three weeks.

Fabian Gebert

2009/01/19 18:34

Development

Using Aptana with XDebug on Ubuntu

Following the steps below will allows you to debug a local Apache installation from Aptana without the need of using the built-in webserver of Aptana

• install php5-xdebug

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

• add local apache to server list in Aptana (using /etc/init.d/apache2 as executable)
• add an external browser in the preferences dialog (firefox %URL% for instance)
• edit your php.ini and insert
  

zend_extension_ts=/usr/lib/php5/20060613/xdebug.so
debug.remote_enable=1
xdebug.remote_host=127.0.0.1
xdebug.remote_port=9000
xdebug.remote_handler="dbgp"

• create a debug configuration in Aptana and launch it
  • specify Remote Application
  • specify XDebug
• If it does not work, select "Break on first line" in the debug config. This will break the execution of the currently being executed script (scripts launched at the same time won't be caught by the debugger though)
  

Frank Wolf

2009/01/15 15:06

Development

How to slice images in Inkscape

The objective:

You have finished a pretty website design in Inkscape and now want to export all parts in separate bitmaps. To do this in one step you only have to do the following:

• If pictures that should be exported individually are grouped, ungroup them
• Pictures will be exported under the name of their XML-id. To set them to meaningful names use the menu Object -> Object-Properties (or SHIFT+CTRL+O)
• now select all ungrouped pictures and export File->Export bitmap... (or SHIFT+CTRL+E)
  Important: tick the Batch export check-box and set resolution to 90 dpi to have the images in the same resolution as on your screen.

Hint: Note that in Inkscape, the point of origin lies in the lower left corner whilst in HTML/CSS it is defined as the upper left corner.