Lily

Devjavu, the company that was providing us with free project hosting, is closing so I've migrated everything to Google Code- the new url for the dev wiki, issue tracker and source code is http://code.google.com/p/lilyapp/

The SVN checkout command is now: "svn checkout http://lilyapp.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ lily"

I think I've updated all the links, but since I'm probably forgetting something, please let me know if you find anything that's out of date.

I'm bumping the current release to public beta 3 today and picking up some bug fixes that have been gathering dust in the trunk. Let me know if you encounter any issues. I was hoping to have been out of beta by now, but life and work are not cooperating. Hopefully I can make better progress in the new year...

Tangible computing comes to Lily: yesterday on the user list, Thomas Winningham announced a new set of Lily externals for doing multitouch applications using the TUIO protocol. TUIO is the protocol used by reacTable and other table top interfaces. If you're not familiar with reacTable, take a minute to check out this video. I've been thinking about doing a multitouch demo for the Lily 0.1 release, so Thomas's announcement was a terrific surprise and now I can't wait to try them out. Great work!

Thomas post on his library on the NUI list is here.

It's been a while coming, but Lily public beta 2 is now available for download. Getting all of Lily's bits and pieces working on Firefox 3 was a bigger task than I imagined and took months to complete. Users contributed many bug reports and suggestions for improvements; not counting FF3 related work, this release contains over 150 bug fixes and enhancements since the first public beta in January. There are some great improvements in performance and usability.

Now that all the FF3 compatibility bugs have been squashed, we should be back on track to release Lily 0.1 in the fall.

Mozilla released Firefox 3 RC 1 yesterday- I've posted a compatible version of Lily and updated the links on the site.

You'll need to update to use Lily with the new Firefox release candidate.

I've added a new external object called "processing" to Lily today to take advantage of John Resig's wonderful new library Processing.js. Processing.js is a Canvas based implementation of the processing language in Javascript. Unlike my own port of the processing API, John's library includes a parser for near total compatibility with the language. Awesome.

I haven't had much time to play with it yet (John only released it last night), but it's been interesting to compare it with my own SVG based implementation. SVG, being DOM-based, seems to have a ceiling for the number of objects that can be included in an animation- once that ceiling is exceeded performance begins to suffer noticeably. John's Canvas-based version seems to handle much more complex animations without pinning the meter. There are also a couple of features in John's library that take advantage of the new Canvas functionality in Firefox 3. I'm really looking forward to spending more time playing it. Great work John!

You can download the latest Lily beta here - it includes the "processing" external.

Good news- it was announced earlier this month that Lily received a $500 grant from the Shiftspace Commission program to develop a project that integrates Lily with the metaweb application ShiftSpace. I'm a huge fan of Shiftspace so getting a grant to do this work is a very good thing.

As part of this project, I'll be making the necessary changes to enable Lily to run in the content window of the browser (as opposed to the chrome XUL window that Firefox addons run in). This is a first step on the long road to adding a "Save as webpage" option to Lily.

I'm happy to announce that the Lily source has finally landed in the public repository.

You can now check out the latest code anonymously with the command: svn co http://svn.devjavu.com/lily/
(if you're unfamiliar with subversion version control, here's a resource)

The development project homepage is here- http://lily.devjavu.com/. There's a Trac installation with integrated issue tracking, browsable source, timelines, etc. For now, I'll leave the current bugs open on bugzilla, but future bugs should be filed on Trac.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I've officially buried Lily public beta 1. Security changes in Firefox 2.0.0.13 killed it and since Firefox 3 is now just around the corner, its not worth the effort to resuscitate it.

The good news is that Lily public beta 2 is now ready for prime time. It's been tested thoroughly on Windows, Mac & Linux with Firefox 3 beta 5 and is feeling fast and solid. I will continue updating it as the Firefox 3 release cycle progresses and "officially" release it once Firefox 3 launches, probably sometime next month.

You can download Lily public beta 2 here and pick up the latest Firefox 3 beta here.

Changes in security restrictions in Firefox 2.0.0.13 have broken Lily beta 1. I hope to have a patched version up this weekend. In the meantime, folks desiring Lily activity should try the new Lily beta 2 (currently in development) with the latest Firefox 3 beta.

Firefox 3 Betas
Lily Public Beta 2pre1