Blogg

Its been just over a week since we successfully funded, and I have been busy incorporating the many new features into my development schedule. As you can imagine, some of the more complex tasks require careful planning, meetings, and even simple prototypes, to help verify my schedule will be achievable.  So, I fully anticipate completing the project by the original target date of Dec, 2013, but I am still working on the exact plan to get me there.

Development Update

One of the biggest decisions we have made so far is to switch the user interface toolkit that OpenShot uses from GTK+ to Qt. We have carefully considered our options, and our team believes it is the only reasonable path forward. A few big contributing factors to choosing Qt was the performance of embedding HTML and JavaScript (for our timeline and curve editing widgets), native-looking widget rendering (on Mac, Windows, and Linux), improved tools for designing interfaces, and the easy ability to use OpenGL to display our video preview widget.

Another contributing factor is the simplification of OpenShot source code that will result from using Qt. Thousands and thousands of lines of GTK+ code will be removed from our source code, and replaced with either JavaScript timeline code, or a much simpler Qt API. So, while this will be a big effort, it will reduce the complexity of OpenShot's source code, and give us much more powerful and easier to use tools for building and debugging.

For those who are interested to learn more about Qt and why an application such as OpenShot could benefit from using it, take a look at this video. It's a fun video, and touches on the basics of what Qt can be used for.

Schedule

I am meeting with members of OpenShot's development team this week and making final adjustments to my development schedule. I plan on sharing it as soon as the final few issues are resolved.

Funds

I am still waiting for Amazon Payments and Kickstarter to release the funds to me. I'm not sure how long it typically takes for this to happen, but I just wanted to let everyone know I am still waiting for the funds. I will be making equipment and supply purchases once the funds clear, so I will keep everyone updated on this front.

I have many more updates to share as well, but I'll be spreading them out over a week or two. Things such as hardware acceleration plans, distributed editing (i.e. video server) prototype & update, and more improvements to our timeline interface. Stay tuned!