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Usability and Stability Improvements!  

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Over the past few days, I have shown off many of the exciting new features that are coming in OpenShot 1.3.0.

However, there are 2 really important goals that I have not spoken about recently, usability and stability. Much of the past 2 months has gone towards improving OpenShot in these areas.

Usability

• As you might have noticed on the above screenshot, we are adapting more and more HIG compliant screens, such as the standard "unsaved changes" dialog.
• Stock Icons - OpenShot now defaults to the current theme's stock icons, which will be more familiar to the user than our custom button images.
• Simplified Export Dialog - The export dialog is smaller, faster, has more export presets, and auto selects many of the drop-downs for the user. In other words, it's easier and faster to export videos now.
• Increased the speed interval of the play-head, resulting in smoother motion, more accurate time-codes, and a general feeling of awesome. =)
• Animated the play-head and play-head line when the timeline is clicked. The play-head zips to the location on the ruler that was clicked. It's a subtle effect, but really adds a polished feeling to the UI.
• Rounded Thumbnails - Softer corners on all thumbnails and icons.
• Transitions now tile to fill all horizontal space, making it faster to find the desired transition.
• And many other misc. improvements to dialogs and error messages across OpenShot.

Stability

• Just as much time has been spent focusing on the stability of OpenShot as the usability improvements. Such as...
• Improvements to MLT stability, including bug fixes for the affine filter, sdl preview consumer, and lots of other improvements by the MLT development team.
• OpenShot is now aware of the version of MLT installed, and adjusts certain features based on the version, to prevent crashes.
• A new Auto Saving patch is about to be committed, which will add another layer of safety for unexpected seg faults. This is one of the last remaining tasks in version 1.3.0.
• More time has been spent on testing, testing, and even some more testing. Did I mention testing?

In summary, version 1.3.0 of OpenShot will not only bring a huge selection of eye candy and awesome new features, but it will also be the most stable and usable version of OpenShot yet! Stay tuned for more news coming soon.

12 comments

1. nicolas  
   January 25, 2011 12:32 AM

   Oh man, with all these announcements I need to find me some time next week to install the lates version from the PPA and try it out.
   
   Great job you guys.

2. Brett  
   January 25, 2011 9:18 AM

   Can't wait to try it out! I'm eager to see if my "many tracks, slow playback" bug has been fixed.

3. Randy  
   January 25, 2011 9:51 AM

   Wow! I'm incredibly excited about the new version coming out.

4. Carlos Solís  
   January 25, 2011 3:43 PM

   Cool! Does this finally mean frame-exact clipping?

5. Edwin  
   January 25, 2011 3:49 PM

   Can't wait to try the new version!
   I am wondering if the bug 'Fade in / out glitches' is resolved, because that is an annoying problem.

6. Anonymous  
   January 26, 2011 3:33 AM

   Jonathan, are you (the project) participating in Summer of Code 2011?
   Would probably be a good idea...

7. Leonardo  
   January 26, 2011 7:57 AM

   O-M-G! So many exciteing features and improvements... Just can't wait... Have we any date??

8. dinolib  
   January 28, 2011 6:09 AM

   Thank you very much, I really valuable piece of code ;-)
   
   A question: the screenshot you posted is already committed? I've tried the 1.3 code but there are differences...

9. Micah Nordland  
   January 31, 2011 7:28 PM

   I am sooooo glad you are switching to default icons, if you could only make the resize handles available without having to switch modes

10. Garoth  
    January 31, 2011 11:07 PM

    Hey,
    
    Unrelatedly, I was amazed that your video editor worked for me. Just now, I tried pitivi, kino, kdenlive, cinelerra, avedemux, and a few other programs. Yours was the only one that managed to make my very simple 1 minute video. It's truly tragic that no one else seems to give a shit about stability -- but I'm very impressed that yours does. Thank you very much, and keep up the good work.

11. antistress  
    February 14, 2011 9:09 AM

    New work on usability is simply great : for the first i really want to try OpenShot (i didn't like former screenshots)
    Excellent + many thanks

12. Ahmed Kamal  
    February 14, 2011 11:39 AM

    Thank you man! I use openshot a lot, it's a great piece of software

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