I have long known that ap­pli­ca­tion de­vel­op­ment is an ar­du­ous process. I have al­so long sus­pect­ed one of the rea­sons it's ar­du­ous is the de­vel­op­er. I should be more speci­fic, I am one of the rea­son­s.

That's be­cause I don't know what I am do­ing, and I don't mean that in the "I am a lame pro­gram­mer" sense (even if that's al­so true some­what), but in the sense that I lit­er­al­ly don't know what the app should look like, or what its fea­ture set should be.

So, I have de­cid­ed to em­bark on a se­ries of ex­per­i­ments I will call 24-hour app­s.

Here are the rules:

• I shall cre­ate a neat ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, sta­ble, use­­ful, us­able and de­­cen­t-look­ing.

• I shall do it in no more than 24 hours. Af­ter that time, it should be at least good enough for a pre­view re­lease, if not a be­­ta.

• Those 24 hours can be split in two or three ses­­sions

• Time spent do­ing icon­s, doc­s, etc, counts.

• All de­vel­op­­ment shall be pub­­lic (I am us­ing github)

• I must have a use for the re­­sult­ing ap­­pli­­ca­­tion, and it should be at least an ad­e­quate so­lu­­tion for that prob­lem.

So, what's the first pro­jec­t? I call it Die Schere (The Scis­sors in ger­man) and it's a video ed­i­tor.

It's not a kden­live re­place­men­t, it's just the video ed­i­tor I wish I had when I need­ed to glue a piece of one video with a piece of an­oth­er.

In the old, pre-dig­i­tal world, that was done us­ing a cut­ter and scotch tape. I want Die Schere to be as use­ful and com­pre­hen­si­ble as that was, but use­ful for clum­sy peo­ple like my­self.

Here is a video af­ter to­day's ses­sion, which last­ed 8 hours:

The ba­sic func­tions are there, even if lots of work is still need­ed.

• You can load clips to work with them

• You can cut clips (like us­ing a cut­ter!)

• You can choose the cut points in­­ter­ac­­tive­­ly or by ed­it­ing a time

• You can ar­range them (like us­ing scotch tape!)

• You can gen­er­ate the out­­put video

As a back­end it's us­ing men­coder, but there's no rea­son it should­n't work with ffm­peg or melt if some­one writes 20 lines of code.

I just up­load­ed rst2pdf 0.12.2 to http://rst2pdf.­google­code.­com Rst2pdf is a tool to gen­er­ate PDF files di­rect­ly from re­struc­tured text sources via re­port­lab.

This re­lease fix­es a ma­jor bug (in­com­pat­i­bil­i­ty with re­port­lab 2.1) as well as sev­er­al mi­nor ones and adds a mi­nor fea­ture (bet­ter styling of list item­s).

For more de­tail­s, you can see the changel­og

I just up­load­ed rst2pdf 0.12.1 to http://rst2pdf.­google­code.­com

Rst2pdf is a tool to gen­er­ate PDF files di­rect­ly from re­struc­tured text sources via re­port­lab.

This re­lease has no new fea­tures, just a few bugs fixed.

For more in­for­ma­tion, see the changel­og

In an­oth­er rst2pdf-re­lat­ed note: some­one at the Uni­ver­si­tat Po­litec­ni­ca de Catalun­ya likes rst2pdf :-)

It's my plea­sure to an­nounce the re­lease of rst2pdf ver­sion 0.12, avail­able at http://­code.­google.­com/p/rst2pdf/­down­load­s/list

Rst2pdf is a tool to gen­er­ate PDF files di­rect­ly from re­struc­tured text sources via re­port­lab.

Rst2pdf aims to sup­port the full re­struc­tured text fea­ture set, and is very close to that goal, while al­so in­clud­ing some of the more ex­per­i­men­tal fea­tures, like a source code di­rec­tive with syn­tax high­light­ing and math no­ta­tion sup­port with La­TeX-­like syn­tax.

It sup­ports em­bed­ding ar­bi­trary fonts, both True Type and PS Type 1, both raster and vec­tor im­ages (in­clud­ing SVG and PDF), page tran­si­tion ef­fect­s, mul­ti­ple, flex­i­ble page lay­out­s, cas­cad­ing styles, and much, much more.

This ver­sion in­cludes many bug­fix­es and MANY new fea­tures com­pared to the pre­vi­ous 0.11 ver­sion, in­clud­ing but not lim­it­ed to bet­ter styling, in­te­gra­tion with sphinx, a very raw, pre­lim­i­nar graph­i­cal fron­tend called bookrest, kern­ing sup­port (via wor­dax­e), and a much more pow­er­ful ta­ble im­ple­men­ta­tion.

In fac­t, this re­lease has so much new code it needs tester­s! I would con­sid­er it be­ta qual­i­ty, and may (prob­a­bly will) have some rough spot­s.

You can find more in­for­ma­tion about rst2pdf in its home page ( http://rst2pdf.­google­code.­com), and ask any­thing you want in the rst2pdf-dis­cuss mail­ing list (http://­group­s.­google.­com/­group/rst2pdf-dis­cuss)

A list of im­prove­ments and changes in this ver­sion is just too long, but is avail­able at the changel­og

I hope you en­joy this pro­gram!

In oth­er news, Google just found me two nice things re­lat­ed to rst2pdf:

1. A tu­­to­ri­al to use sphinx and rst2pdf for ja­­pa­­nese texts: http://d.hate­­na.ne.jp/MiCHiLU/20091009/1255065687

2. It looks like a rst2pdf 0.11 bi­­na­ry for win­­dows is shipped by pythonxy here: http://­­code.­­google.­­com/p/pythonxy/­­down­load­­s/de­­tail?­­name=rst2pdf-0.11_py26.exe I will link to that!

I love when peo­ple do things like these :-)

As usu­al, a video show­ing it:

The cur­rent sta­tus is that the in­fra­struc­ture re­quired for the stylesheet ed­i­tor is in place:

• I fig­ured out how to turn the StyleSheet ob­­ject back in­­­to a JSON stylesheet.

• The changes are done and merged back in­­­to the same file.

• There is UI for 3 of the 6 re­quired pieces. The mis­s­ing ones are text styles, em­bed­d­ed fonts, and con­­fig op­­tions (like, break sub­­sec­­tions to odd pages)

• The UI for the whole app is pret­­ty rough, I am in full make-it-­­func­­tion­al mode right now. It will be rethought lat­er on.