[Gnash-dev] Code Freeze Feb 1 - Release Announcement (First Draft)

[diptorup]

> Volunteers to help review or write the release announcement always
> appreciated...

I would like to help write the release announcement. I took the liberty
to write a first draft, incorporating points from the NEWS file, wiki,
mailing list and developer blogs. Would appreciate feedback, so that I
can make changes as needed.


Open Media Now! and the Gnash community are happy to announce the
release of Gnash v0.8.9. Gnash the GNU Flash player is a free/libre SWF
movie player, with all the source code released under GPLv3. Gnash is
available as both a standalone player and also as a browser plugin for
Firefox (and all other Gecko based browsers), Chromium and Konqueror.
Currently Gnash has been ported to most GNU/Linus distros, embedded
GNU/Linux, *BSD, non x86 architectures - ARM, MIPS, PowerPC, and even 64
bit processors. And yes, Gnash plays Youtube!!

The last few months have been pretty eventful, and Gnash has made
several important advances.  

* Re-entrant core libraries. Now Gnash is no longer dependent on a
singleton Virtual Machine and Garbage Collector. Thus each new SWF can
have it's own VM and GC. This opens up several exciting possibilities,
like windowless browser plugin, Python/ PHP modules for controlling SWF
executions, etc. 

* Improved SWF8 support with BitmapData.draw, BitmapData.loadBitmap,and
other bitmap functions.

* Improved ActionScript performance processing, especially for
interactive applications.

* RTMP remoting support. 

* Support for PNG and GIF files in all DefineBitsJpeg tags; support for
DefineBitsJpeg4 tags, and fix display of some GIFs with multiple
records.

* dump-gnash: improved speed, sync and flexibility. 

* JPEG screenshot output. 

* Support for linear RGB interpolation mode in gradient fills. 

* Various other fixes to improve performance and greater stability. 

For more detailed information about these and other improvements please
go through the NEWS file on the source repository. 

Apart from these, the Gnash project saw strong community participation
in getting a buildbot system up and running. Several volunteers joined
in to setup different buildbot salves for multiple OS, which has allowed
for quicker testing and bug fixing.  

Another community driven effort, to start a pledge drive to raise funds
for AVM2 support for Gansh, also proved successful. The amount raised
would enable the project to do initial exploratory work on AVM2
integration for Gnash.

Moreover four University of Colorado at Boulder seniors chose to intern
with Open Media Now! to be able to work on the Gnash project for their
senior year project.

The Road Ahead -

With such strong community participation and continued dedication from
the development team the Gnash project is poised to make even stronger
strides in the near future.  

- Heavy work is on to refactor the Gnash rendering libraries to better
support hardware acceleration to properly work on mobile devices. Once
complete Gnash would have support for both OpenVG and OpenGLES2. 

- Better input device handling by adding Microphone and Camera support. 

- Better Win32 and OSX support, by getting the Gnash plugin work for
Firefox on Win32 and OSX. 

For more info and other areas of focus, please refer the List of Tasks
page on our wiki (http://wiki.gnashdev.org/List_of_Tasks).

 

To get the Gnash sources got to http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/gnash/0.8.8,
or from Gnash Git using the release_0_8_9 branch. Experimental binary
packages built by the Gnash team are also available at
http://www.getgnash.org/packages, along with source snapshots. Binary
packages for Debian or RPM based systems will be available from your
GNU/Linux distribution, and from whatever BSD variant you are using.

Questions about Gnash or offers of help can go to the developer's email
list at address@hidden  

If you support the work being done by the Gnash project and like to see
further enhancements, please consider making a donation. Free software
doesn't exist without your support, for donation information, go to
http://www.openmedianow.org/?q=node/32.