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updated all the links, but since I'm probably forgetting something, please let me know if you find anything that's out of date.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

The first Lily public beta is available for download- you can grab it here or via the now enabled download link in the header. This first beta is essentially feature complete for the 0.1 release. There's a new set of demo applications, a few new externals and the usual load of bug fixes, including some significant fixes for Linux. The complete changelog is available here. Download it, check out the new examples and demo applications, join the user group and get started making something of your own.

With the public beta finally out, I'll be focusing on bug fixes, improving the documentation and preparing the source for the move to a public repository. And of course, getting ready for Firefox 3.

There's a new Lily beta available.

I'm happy to say this will be the last of the "private" betas- the first public beta should be ready for download on the site in November.

New stuff in this release: There's now a Examples folder in the download with sample code organized by topic- if you're new to Lily, this is a good place to start exploring. There's a new external named "svg" that provides an SVG based graphics API that's compatible with Processing. Documentation is still pretty sparse, but check out the SVG patch in the Graphics folder in the examples to get a feel for what it can do. There's a handful of other new externals that do useful/fun stuff- range mapping, unique random numbers, a socket listener, drag and drop, a xul tree widget, and an external that outputs a browser's http requests/responses.

Not new but improved: The "Save as app" and "Save as addon" functionality has been cleaned up and expanded- they're working now on Windows and I've added a dialog to allow users to enter metadata about the app/addon they're creating. In general, all things Windows are much improved from previous betas. Many sundry bug fixes.

Still busted/To be done: Linux compatibility- I've done about 5 minutes of testing on Ubuntu Dapper and Lily appears to work only if Firefox is installed in the user's home or if Firefox is run as root. Other tbds for the first public beta- More documentation. Bug fixes. New demos. Fix the site.

The complete changelog is here

If you've signed up to test Lily previously, you should be receiving an email tonight with the new download url. We're still looking for testers, so if you're interested please get in touch.

I've updated the current beta with my Windows fixes. There's still some cosmetic infelicities, unfortunate text wrapping and whatnot, but the core functionality is there and the demo patches are all working, save the text/marquee demo which has a hard-coded path to /usr/share/dict/words (if there's a Windows equivalent, changing the path to point to it should fix it). There's also a couple of new externals, including "drop" which enables reading a file's path and contents by dragging and dropping it into the window.

The download url is unchanged from Beta 3. I'll only email the folks who've signed up in the last couple weeks and save the mass spamming for the Beta 4 which will include the Unix fixes and tutorials. As always, if you're interested in testing, lemme know.

There's a new Lily beta available tonight.

This beta addresses a number of usability issues- there's new easier to navigate menus, a help screen, a contextual menu, an expanded status bar area with more info and better feedback, rewritten and expanded help text and newly redesigned and annotated help patches. This beta also has a couple of interesting new menu items: "Save as app" and "Save as addon" that allow you to save a patch as a standalone Xulrunner application* or as a Firefox extension. There's also 50+ bug fixes. And there's an icon now. Yay. The complete changelog is here

If you've signed up to test Lily previously, you should be receiving an email tonight with the new download url. We're still looking for testers, so if you're interested please get in touch.