It’s been a little while now since I added the “preview” of GCast, the screen capture and sharing application for the GNOME desktop, to the download page. Given that a fair bit of time has passed since then, I just wanted mention briefly where the project is currently at.

I’ve decided to rewrite the way that editing is currently done, before moving ahead with the rest of the application — certainly before releasing it. The reason for this (from a technical standpoint) is that GCast in its early state uses underlying widgets to represent graphics items (such as rectangles, text, and so on); something which I have discovered is costly in terms of performance. As far as accepting interaction goes this was the easiest way to get started, but it has become a hindrance.

So although GCast’s editor works, it could be much better. I’ve come to the conclusion that it will be worth taking the time to do things right before releasing it, even as a beta, and I’ve developed a prototype of a new system of editing (undoubtedly the standard, but hey, I’m learning this as I go) which is able to cast off the handicap of widgets by being able to independently manage the editor rendering/interaction process. For you, this means a faster and more reliable product.

As it turns out, I think that having less time to work on it as life has gotten busy this summer has been beneficiary. By being forced to step back and look at the scope of the project in a larger perspective, priorities — namely, the balance between a rich feature set and a smaller subset of well written basics — often get re-arranged for the better.

I’m excited to resume development on GCast again soon. Until then, thanks for your patience.

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the 2.0 release of MonoDevelop, which happened a bit ago but it took a while to hit the Ubuntu 9.04 Beta repositories. I’d forgotten about it until today, when I was trying to use the alpha 1 release to do some work on GCast; however, it’s been so long since I attacked the code base that for the life of me I could not track down a bug that had recently reared its ugly head. I’d made too many changes since the last SVN commit, so diff’ing a bunch of files was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Thank goodness, after installing MonoDevelop 2.0 with its integrated debugger, it took all of a few minutes to find the problem. I don’t know how I’ve survived this far on this particular project without a debugger — I’ve had to resort to GDB and MDB at the command line a few times, but only reluctantly — wish I could reclaim the lost time. Kudos to the MonoDevelop developers for making a great product even easier to use!

Get MonoDevelop 2.0 at: http://monodevelop.com/