The good news is that we've done a really great job with overhauling the ui.

The bad news is that it's taking a long time, we didn't really get a good strings freeze, and thus translations of the strings in the interface are in bad shape.

German has 2 untranslated strings. Galician has 64. The rest are over 150. There are around 900 strings in Miro total.

I talked with Nick about this because we're planning to ship Miro 4.0 in a week and that's probably not enough time to make the translations better especially since the only way I have of contacting people who are interested in doing the work is the equivalent of shouting at the top of my lungs into the darkness.

So the plan is this:

1. I'm going to send this email and blog it and ask you to do whatever you can to help us fix this: help translate, blog about the situation, ...

2. We're going to ship Miro 4.0 with mediocre translations.

3. Any languages that have more than 450 untranslated strings will be removed from the release with the thinking that if there are that many untranslated strings, the interface is essentially unusable.

4. We're going to do a 4.0.1 release before June 6th. I hope that people use Miro 4.0, realize the translations are in bad shape, and do something about it.

5. I'll keep an eye on the translation status and continue to do releases with updated translations when appropriate for the next few months.

We currently use Launchpad for translations:

https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk

If you do help translate, please send me an email. I want to include you in the credits!

Miro 4.0 has a credits list that lists all the people that have helped us with all the things that went into the Miro 4.0 release cycle.

Part of the list is automatically generated from Bugzilla and git data (authors, bug reporters, bug commenters, ...).

However, there's a lot of work that people do that isn't easily divulged from Bugzilla and git.

If you're wondering whether you're on the list already, install Miro 4.0 rc1 and look at the About Miro dialog--the list is there.

If you helped with Miro 4.0 and you're not on the list, send me an email before Friday so that I can add you to the list.

If your name is in the list, but you want it written differently, send me an email before Friday.

Thank you in advance for your work however trivial you may think it was on Miro 4.0. It is a project of many hands.

On May 11th, we released Miro 4.0 rc1. It has some known issues, but we've fixed a ton of stuff since the beta. I encourage you to upgrade to rc1 and let us know if you run into any issues.

Specifically, we need your help to test:

• using Miro to sync media between Miro and your Android device

• using Miro to stream through DAAP to other DAAP clients on your network

• Miro on Windows

Builds are located on the nightlies page in the Sticky Files section.

Note that this is not a final release release! There are still some problems and tweaks we're working on.

Also, we really need help with translations. If you know multiple languages, please help us translate. On Launchpad, there's a Miro section for translations.

Also, if you help with testing and translation, please let me know so I can gleefully add you to the credits where you rightfully belong!

Miro 4.0 status

• roadmap

• we're working on a rc for today

• we're tentatively planning a rc for next week

• we're hoping to release on May 23rd

Will:

• worked on P1 bugs, synced translations, did peer reviews

• coordinated release candidate work

• had the flu

• fixed the keys on his Macbook except the spacebar

Jonas:

• worked on app indicator support and other P1 bugs

Goeffrey:

• worked on performance issues and crashes related to sharing

• planning to look at OSX Lion support

Paul:

• worked on device issues/crashes and ui issues

• waiting on information that we'll get in the next release candidate

Ben:

• fixed a bunch of issues

Kaz:

• worked on a ton of P1 blockers

Janet:

• did a ton of testing

• worked on automated testing which is working pretty well

Order of business:

• rc1 today

• rc2 may 18th?

• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.

• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/ .

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 99 bugs/feature-requests created

• 4 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 9 bugs marked INVALID

• 6 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 81 bugs marked FIXED

Unrelated side note

I finally added the rst plugin for PyBlosxom to my blog so now I can post in restructured text rather than HTML. Yay!

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• we put out a beta on Saturday and things are looking awesome

• there's still a lot of work to do, we need help with testing and translations.

Janet:

• We did a beta release over the weekend. Huge number of Windows downloads (2000ish). OSX downloads (100ish). Source downloads (10ish).

• Some minor issues discovered so far--things are looking ok.

• Pulling in interns to do more testing on Miro.

Will:

• Worked on P1 bugs that were primarily TypeError issues and easily fixed with some defensive programming.

• Happy to have a beta channel---that'll solve a bunch of release testing issues.

• Going to switch gears and work on Miro User Manual stuff. Trying to write a comprehensive but concise manual. It needs to be concise because otherwise we'll spend tons of time writing and maintaining it. Planning to do a few manual-writing sprints like we did last cycle.

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community project list page.

• Working on P1 bugs for Miro and Miro Community.

Rob:

• Tighten up the systems, make them more automated, make them more efficient.

Geoffrey:

• Worked on P1 bugs and trying to squeeze more performance from transcoding.

Kaz:

• Worked on P1 bugs

Jonas:

• Worked on Windows playback issues and some other beta bugs.

Asheesh:

• Interested in fixing Miro stuff to make it easier to bring in new contributors and also running some sprints

Ben:

• Worked on P1 bugs.

Order of business:

• More ui changes coming.

• RC on Friday. Focus on outstanding ui changes.

• Manual doesn't need to be totally up to date on release, so Will will updated a bunch of stuff, and probably put in stubs for bits.

• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.

• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 104 bugs/feature-requests created

• 5 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 1 bugs marked INVALID

• 8 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 54 bugs marked FIXED

• 2 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

We've been working hard on Miro 4 for a while now. It's a very ambitious development cycle: we're implementing a lot of new features, we're fixing a lot of problems, we're improving performance, and we're fixing codebase and infrastructure issues. We've done a ton of work.

On Saturday, I put out a set of Miro 4.0 beta1 builds. We've switched into the release cycle for Miro 4.0. We're hoping to do a final release by the end of the month.

At this point, I don't think anyone's written much about Miro 4 or shown any screenshots of what it looks like right now. So here's some for your ogling:

You can also see changes in the sidebar on the left side, and filters on the top. You can also see in the sidebar the new Stores section which makes it easier to buy content from Amazon and other stores and pull it into Miro automatically.

List view has an item details pane on the bottom so you can see the details of the item. If the selected item was a music item with cover art, the cover art would show up in the item details pane.

This is where you configure DAAP-based sharing allowing you to stream media from Miro to other DAAP-supporting systems on your network. You can also sync with Android devices as well as any mass storage device (thumbdrive, external hard drive, ...).

There's a lot more, but I'm going to keep this short.

Builds are located on the nightlies page in the Sticky Files section.

Note that this is a beta release! There are still some problems and tweaks we're working on.

We could use any help we can get translating strings and testing builds.

Also, if you help with testing and translation, please let me know so I can gleefully add you to the credits where you rightfully belong!

w00t for beta releases and w00t for almost there!

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• things are stabilizing--if you've been waiting to test nightlies, now's a good time to jump in

Paul:

• worked on P1 bugs related to devices and ui changes

• worked on feed scraping for the Miro Guide and performance fixes

• worked on small bugs on Miro Community

Kaz:

• worked through P1 bugs related to list view

Jonas:

• worked on P1 bugs and other problems he's found while testing

Will:

• synced translations

• fixed 17120

• updated to libtorrent 0.15.6 on OSX and Windows

Ben:

• fixed a bunch of P1 issues

• spent a lot of time on metadata extraction issues

• fixing the video search widget issues

Order of business:

• We need to do more testing with external hard drives on all three platforms.

• Talked about download notification: We talked about the specific problem we're trying to solve and options for that.

• Things are feeling much more stable. We're going to wait until Janet has some time to catch up and figure out when the codefreeze should happen.

• Talked about making sure Miro works in 800x600 which touches on UI resizing issues.

• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.

• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 58 bugs/feature-requests created

• 2 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 5 bugs marked INVALID

• 14 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 70 bugs marked FIXED

• 8 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

We (PCF) have a MediaWiki instance that we use for a variety of PCF projects. Since we set it up, we've been plagued with spam. The spam is always exactly the same kind of thing: an account is created, an image is uploaded, a new page is created with the image and a link to some crap url.

Over the last month, Asheesh and I fiddled with MediaWiki configuration trying to strike a good balance between maximizing hassle-free contributions and minimizing spam. This most recent round was Asheesh's idea and it seems to be successful. Thus I'm documenting it here.

We installed the ConfirmEdit extension for MediaWiki. That gives us an additional addurl permission that MediaWiki doesn't have. I set this addurl permission to require a captcha and then I wrote my EmailConfirmedNonCaptcha captcha plugin for the ConfirmEdit extension.

The gist of the EmailConfirmedNonCaptcha plugin is that it always rejects the change with a nice message if the user isn't in the emailconfirmed group. That's it.

Now we have new user accounts created, but the accounts can't do anything because they're not made by humans and they're not confirming their email addresses. Thus this particular spam vector is dead in its tracks without hassling potential contributors.

I posted a "project page" with the code for the extension at http://pculture.org/wguaraldi/emailconfirmednoncaptcha/. But that disappeared when I left PCF. I moved the project over to https://github.com/willkg/ecnc on GitHub.

Updates:

4/25/2011: Asheesh suggested I add some before and after screenshots.

4/25/2011 later: Correcting a totally silly thing I did by not mentioning that I worked with Asheesh on this. It was totally his idea. I just wrote it.

1/17/2012: I moved the project to GitHub and updated the urls in this blog entry to reflect that.

Miro 4.0 status (roadmap)

• things are stabilizing--if you've been waiting to test nightlies, now's a good time to jump in

Paul:

• worked on Miro P1 fixes

• working on Miro Guide and adding additional podcasts to the guide

• will be spending some time on Miro Community going forward

Jonas:

• worked on P1 ui-related issues

• wrote a Magent URI design doc

Geoffrey:

• worked on P1 ui-related and sharing-related issues

Kaz:

• caught up with P1 bugs

• going to spend time making metadata extraction unit tests

Ben:

• worked on P1 bugs

• going to work with Kaz on metadata extraction issues

Will:

• updated the PCF bug triage tool -- greasemonkey is so easy!

• tested Miro on Vista and Windows 7 and it's looking decent

• synced translations and worked on preventing spam in the wiki

Order of business:

• Several of us spent some time hunting for good quality podcast directories and other than the iTunes directory and Miro Guide, there isn't anything out there.

• Talked about when we're going to call this release done, when we're going to do a code freeze, and how we prioritize things over the next week.

• Talked about using the severity field to denote critical/blocker and everything else.

• Miro is developed by a community of people including you! If you can't contribute your time and work to development, testing, and translations, please consider contributing funding by donating. Your money goes directly to ongoing development of Miro and related projects like Miro Community and Universal Subtitles. See http://pculture.org/about/ for more details on these projects.

• Did you know there's a Miro User Manual? If you haven't looked at it yet, it's worth taking a look at. You can find it at http://manual.getmiro.com/.

Bugzilla stats for Miro for the last week:

• 70 bugs/feature-requests created

• 3 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 2 bugs marked INVALID

• 10 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 80 bugs marked FIXED

• 5 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

The Ogg Theora versions of the PyCon 2011 videos are posted on the PyCon blip.tv channel now and I'm slowly pulling them in to Python Miro Community.

I'd do them all in one big batch, except that it takes a minute or two to approve each video and also the Miro Community feeds are limited to 30 items, so if anyone is using a podcast client and watching the PyCon 2011 feed they'd miss any that fell out of the 30 maximum. That's bug 15177 and I'm hoping to fix it soon.

PyCon 2011 had some really great sessions. If you haven't already seen the ones you were interested in, I encourage you to keep an eye on the PyCon 2011 category as videos get posted.

These videos are being posted with Universal Subtitles support. If you presented at PyCon 2011, please take the time to caption your video. Captioning makes it easier to provide translated subtitles, makes it accessible to people who don't speak English and those who are hard of hearing, and also will make your video less opaque for search technologies when we add support for that.

Again, I really apologize for it taking this long to post them. I hope to have faster turn-around on future conferences.

Questions, comments, concerns--just let me know.