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First alpha of the Ivolution Project is out !

julien Lengrand-Lambert

• 2 min read
It's been two weeks I haven't blogged about Ivolution. . . and there's a good reason for that: The first alpha of the project is out . . .  and I definitely need some alpha testers !
The software is fully free and open-source, and available for both Linux and Windows environments. I even have some samples for you to test, so why not give it a try ?! I completely focused those two last weeks on shipping the first version of the product. So here is a short list of what I have done :

  • Write an illustrated user's documentation

Commenting the code is one thing, but it doesn't really help the end user. I have thus created a user's manual,  full of images to be sure that people are not lost when they start using Ivolution. I tried to describe features in the simplest possible way, and even created some example videos. Additionally, it helped me find some new bugs (mostly typos) that I corrected.

  • Ship a project website.

A project definitely needs a website so that people can find it. I have tried to create the website as light as possible, and remove any unnecessary information. The website contains the online version of the documentation, together with the executables, the FAQ and so on. Here is the set of tools I have chosen for the website :
  • Github pages, to simply host the project. As a bonus It is also versioned, and any new push is automagically shipped :)
  • Sourceforge (do I really need to present it? ). It allows me to host all the archives and executables, for free.
  • Pelican. The little brother or Octopress, but in Python. I wanted something really simple for the website (understand static); and Pelican allowed me to keep using Python.
It has a lot of really useful plugins (analytics, themes). . . I'll definitely use it again for my next projects.

  • Get users on rails !

I want users to start using the software as fast as possible. In this way, there is a 1 minute tutorial for Windows users; and a three steps only installation for Ubunteros ! I also compiled a set of samples so that you can generate your first movie in seconds. The creation of the website has been quite long, but also really light compared to what I expected. Pelican really helped me being productive while having a set of nice themes to use. Being a complete newbie in web development, I am thankful for that ! I found on the other hand Sourceforge surprisingly complex compared to what I expected. The platform definitely has tons of capabilities, but I had to fight my way through the menus to do what I wanted to.
That's all folks! Now that the website is out, I need to find some testers for the product. My next week objective for the project is to post messages on the internet about the Ivolution project. It is still really young and need more work; but I'm sure It can help some people ! And don't forget, if you want to be part of it; feel free to join me on the project !

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