Newscoop and Airtime hotfixes kick off a summer of open software
As you can see from our Tumblr, summer is well and truly here (in Berlin at least) and so starts a really busy period of activity for Sourcefabric. We've got some important hotfixes for our Airtime and Newscoop communities, plus grand plans to get you involved in some core development and design for the next exciting evolutions in open source media tools.
A summer of streaming?
The Airtime 2.1.2 hotfix was released yesterday after some great work by our community who spotted and helped us troubleshoot a critical issue that had been introduced with the previous release. That issue is now fixed and DJs all over are taking advantage of the new 'live' capabilities to do all sorts of amazing things. Check out the guys on the Linux Action Show for instance who show you how to use airtime for podcast creation and a home radio.
We've just slashed our Airtime Pro streaming prices too. Airtime Pro is our cloud-hosted radio solution for people who might not have the technical know-how to install the open source software themselves. Our streaming packages are now half price meaning you can reach more people, for less money!
Opening newsrooms with Newscoop
Newscoop 4.0.1 was also released yesterday, which is great news for newsrooms. Our open source community helped us squash plenty of bugs from the acclaimed Newscoop 4 release, so online publications that need content management need look no further. Newscoop can take care of videos, images, front page management, location and community engagement - all out-of-the-box.
Very soon we'll be publishing details of the planning around Newscoop's API, which will mean easy app development for both journalists and readers - something news organisations tell us over and over again will be vital to their plans. We've a couple of big partners on board, so watch this space.
The road to Frankfurt
The Frankfurt Bookfair is one of the largest publishing events in the calendar and Sourcefabric will be there. Project lead Adam Hyde has embarked upon a quest to gather, build and share open book production knowledge and he'll be blogging every step of his journey to Frankfurt.
As he goes along, he'll be meeting publishers, authors and designers who will be helping us to improve Booktype, meaning a better open source publishing tool for everyone! Check back here for details on this and Booktype Pro, a cloud hosted book production platform for authors, publishers and organisations.
Stay tuned for Superdesk
We'll also be revealing how you can help us build Superdesk very soon. We've been working on an amazing media management framework in our Cluj lab - once we have all the necessary documentation and wiki pages in place, we'll be opening the doors for your feedback, contributions and input.
It's also a vital stage for thinking about workflows and user interaction design. We'll be posting prototypes, screenshots and mock-ups here on the blog for you to feedback on. We believe that journalists, broadcasters and publishers should be involved at every stage of our product design and we can't wait to hear your ideas.
Have questions? Feel free to ask them in the comments below or on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr!