Praxis LIVE build:130508

A new build of Praxis LIVE is now available from the usual place, with Windows (.exe) installer, zip distribution, and of course Linux (.deb) installer. This release has taken a little longer than normal to put together. A project I was involved with over the first few months of 2013 helped fund some nice new features, but it took a little time to get them in a releasable state (read the release notes for a full list of what’s new).

Meeting Point (2013) – Digital Prisoners – Bonn Square, Oxford.

Packaging as a .deb

If you’ve been following this blog or the Praxis code site for the last couple of months, you might be forgiven for thinking that not a lot had been happening. Actually that’s far from the case. I’ve been busy with a number of projects, one of which has seen some major additions to the Praxis code, and I’m now in the process of tidying that up for a new release. Some of the audio code has also been extracted and pushed to a separate repository (https://github.com/jaudiolibs/) of which more soon … but I digress. One thing that changed with the last Praxis LIVE release is that by default the Linux download is a .deb (Debian binary package) file, and I’ve been meaning to write up a how-to (for my benefit as much as yours!) since. So, here goes.

Dabbling with the dark arts again

Well, the subject of dark themes seems to have come up again in the NetBeans world recently, with Geertjan blogging about Stan Aubrecht’s dark theme for Nimbus.  This looks great, though as you might have gathered from the look and feel of Praxis LIVE, I quite like dark look and feels!

Unfortunately, the problem with Nimbus is it’s still not officially supported in NetBeans due to some EDT issues (though seems much more stable than the last time I tried it).  Also, to quote from Geertjan’s blog, “In Stan’s words, this is a “poor man’s” solution. There are some area that would need more tweaking, e.g., the top bar in the Options window. But it would mean changing code in NetBeans. This new module just adjust a few UIManager constants.“  Well, as I blogged about in the Dark arts of NetBeans hackery, it is possible with some devious hackery to alter things like the top bar of the Options window, and this is done in Praxis LIVE, so I thought I’d have a go at providing a plugin for this look and feel that could be used within the NetBeans IDE (or other platform application).

NetBeans IDE running with Praxis LIVE look & feel

New year, new Praxis LIVE

A (slightly belated) Happy New Year to you all, and news of a new Praxis LIVE release.  Just squeaking in during the final fanfare of 2012 was Praxis LIVE build:121231, bringing some major work on the video pipeline, some nice UI improvements, dynamic component support, and the start of a TinkerForge binding (see video below).

Downloads – http://code.google.com/p/praxis/downloads/list
Release notes – http://code.google.com/p/praxis/wiki/ReleaseNotes

Praxis LIVE – development update Oct 2012

Well, if you’ve been following this blog you might be forgiven for thinking that Praxis LIVE development has stalled over the last few months!  This is actually far from the truth, but it’s also been a busy few months in other ways so updating here has taken a bit of a back seat.

Video Rough Cuts #1

I’ve just started doing a series of videos of Praxis LIVE in action. These rough cuts are unedited except for addition of titles, and are straight screencasts without voiceover. At some point in the near future I’ll look at doing a promo and some tutorials, and more in this series too.

The Influence of the Actor Model (Praxis architecture 101)

No, not a post about my salacious exploits with a C-list Hollywood celebrity (that’s for a different blog ), but a technical overview of a key aspect of the Praxis architecture. Absolutely essential to Praxis’ media neutral architecture, as well as the ability to edit everything live, is an asynchronous, shared-nothing, message-passing system. This is loosely inspired by the Actor Model and other solutions for concurrent / distributed programming (without following any particular concept to the letter).

NPE Hunting (Win7, Java7, custom LAF)

I recently had to track down the cause of a NullPointerException when opening a JFileChooser dialog in Praxis on Windows with Java 7.  Turns out there’s a nasty little bug that affects NetBeans platform apps and the NetBeans IDE when using a custom look-and-feel or switching look-and-feel at runtime (it affects the ez-on-da-ice plugin too).

Praxis LIVE build:120620

A new release of Praxis LIVE is up at http://code.google.com/p/praxis/  bringing a range of new components and some important improvements.

JNA 3.4.x on the NetBeans Platform (revisited)

This is a short update to my earlier post on adding JNA 3.4.0 to the NetBeans Platform, based on various comments on that post.