Version bumped to 1.3.5, full time python 3 support, python 2 is no more. Should work on Ubuntu 12.10 and 13.04. Unstable PPA was already updated here’s how you install:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/unstable-series
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install kazam

Among other changes are new toolbar icons, Unity Launcher Quicklist support and an additional instant mode.

In this release many things have changed, a quick run down:

• GUI was redesigned, rehauled and refreshed. Ease of use and simplicity were still our guidance
• Support for GStreamer 1.0, older versions are no longer supported. Kazam 1.3.2 will for now only work on Ubuntu 12.10
• Keyboard shortcuts are back. Still in experimental stage, but usable.
• Different capture modes: Full screen, all screens, area and window. With window mode you can select a window on your desktop to capture its contents. For now, this works only for screencasting.
• Wait, only for screen casting? What? Kazam can now capture still images too. You can capture full screen, single screen or a pre-selected area.
• Autosaving of videos and pictures. By turning on autosave every video and screenshot will be saved automatically without user intervention.
• Awesome theme-able shutter sound for taking screenshots, for now Canon 7D and Nikon D80 sounds are available. ;)

If you’re using Ubuntu 12.10 you can install it with:

add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/unstable-series
apt-get update
apt-get install kazam

If you want, you can install from source, but if you’re not on Ubuntu you’re mileage will vary. Please do report the bugs you find and I’ll fix them as soon as possible.

This release is nicknamed the Stargazer release.

Many thanks to me4oslav, mpt, popey, kenvandine and the rest of the bunch who helped with this release.

Happily share this post with whomever you desire. Spread the word.

On Ubuntu 12.10, which is a primary deployment platform for Kazam, GStreamer 1.0 will be installed by Ubuntu Software Center. The only issue with GStreamer is that adder plugin is broken and recording of two audio channels is not working. I am hoping for a quick resolution of this bug from the upstream.

I am happy to report that Keybinder-3 got into Ubuntu 12.10 and keyboard shortcuts will work without any additional external packages from various PPAs. All the credit here goes to @kenvandine who kindly did all the work for this to happen.

If the gods of time management have mercy on me, then Kazam Screencaster will also get a complete UI overhaul. Ideas that came up at UDS-Q design session and all the work that @mpt and @me4oslav. You can check all the mock-ups and wire-frames with some comments by m4cho. Note that not all the changes will get into 12.10. Unless I suddenly decide to quit my job. ;) Kazam Screencaster is becoming much more that it was. After some persuasion, by two previously mentioned guys, I yielded and decided to expand on what the scope of Kazam is.

I will be turning it into one-stop-recording-facility-with-ease-of-use-and-simplicity-as-a-primary-design-goal. Beside screen casting, Kazam will also offer screen capturing and sound capturing. Both are just a few more steps down the capturing road. Capturing of screens, windows and regions of screen will be available to users. As for the sound goes, Kazam will not be Audacity, but it will offer basic sound capturing functionality.

When the time is right I will start working on Kazam Screencaster Service. Fully functional capturing service with easy to use API that will allow further integration with Ubuntu and Unity.

 Update: Here’s the latest video of Kazam and new region selection window.

It all began with a jet lag …

Sunrise in Oakland, CA

I’ve spent most of my early mornings with Brandon Holtsclaw talking about clouds, scalability, requests per second and OMG!Ubuntu!. After the breakfast and during the day I tried to attend as many interesting sessions on desktop, community, Ubuntu TV and so on. There were two sessions that I had to participate. Design Theater where I presented Kazam to the Canonical design team and the successfully managed to rip it apart and made me question myself about all the usability studies. The session was absolutely awesome and I even got a notebook full of nice drawings, sketches, and ideas about Kazam’s UI.

The other session was about Gwibber and gwibber-service. In short, gwibber-service will be mostly rewritten, we will keep support for only the most used services. The rest of the services (especially the ones we can’t even test and use) are being separated into separate packages that are not installed by default. And we will add support for Twitter’s streaming API. We are also dropping the database back-end and all the messages will be stored in a persistent Dee model.

I never planned to write much about the outcome of the UDS. There was plenty of coverage elsewhere. This time I will stick to the personal experience of the whole event and I better start at the beginning.

Saturday

I arrived to San Francisco soon after lunch and I bumped into a few Ubuntu people while riding on a BART to Oakland. After unpacking and hopping to IRC, I soon invited myself to a dinner with a bunch of people. Hamburgers and Pepsi (probably made with tap water, I learned my lesson and after that I was ordering it in cans). From all the people I remembered three Italians, mhall, pleia and czajkowsky. Lovely bunch.

Sunday

The only day that I was really free and had nothing to do. After the breakfast I was meeting Dobey and Popey. After some chatting a few of us decided to go to San Francisco. We took a ferry from Oakland to Pier 39 in San Francisco.

Ferry ride from Oakland

Then we did a lot of walking and riding in a car. First time that I heard of ZipCars and I was flabbergasted. The idea is fantastic!

Popey summed it up nicely: “This is why America was built.” And yes, there was a bird poop on the windshield. When I got back, my roommate, David Callé, already arrived, he is actually a very nice guy and he is responsible for most of what’s going on with the Lenses in Ubuntu.

 Monday

Time for Monday keynotes.

After the opening keynotes, sessions started and I was fairly busy for the rest of the day. After the sessions it was time for the Meet & Greet party. A chance to get to know all the people I previously talked to on the IRC.

Tuesday

Highlights of the day? Google Circus party. Free drinks, free food and free entertainment. The very open kind of entertainment. I admit, it was the creepiest circus I have ever experienced and it was awesome in its bizarre kind of way. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves.

Google Circus, creepy?

Google Circus, how about now?

Google Circus, final round.

Wednesday

Everybody had a lot of expectations for plenaries. Electronic Arts was supposed to make a big announcement. Here, you be the judge of that.

Daily sessions ended and it was time to do some sight-seeing in San Francisco. Many thanks to pleia, she was a great guide. I had loads of fun which ended with some delicious food and a couple of drunk Australian ladies riding a cable car. Everything started at the BART station with an obligatory, “look ma’ the train’s all blurry” picture.

BART Station

Then it continued with Canonical people being nerdy tourists.

Canonical people looking at things.

Canonical people looking at things.

And it ended with a previously mentioned cable car ride.

Cable Car in San Francisco.

Thursday

Most successful for me. Did get to talk with desktop guys about global hot keys and key bindings. My problems were over. Which was even more awesome because I was also told that the problem with Pulse Audio and Python was being addressed and fixed. And indeed it was, later that day, new fixes were released and PulseAudio ctypes calls were working in Python 3. I have my road clear for porting Kazam to Gstreamer 1.0 and Python 3.

Beside that, I also had a nice chat with Jason DeRose from Novacut about the upcoming video editor.

Friday

Gwibber session. Lots of changes, lots of work to be done. A lot by me. I’ll link the etherpad document when I manage to find it.

Beach party with the Spazmatics. Boy band made of four nerdy looking guys. If they were really nerds, I have no idea, but when I tried to Google them, I found at least three bands with the same name and the same theme. There will be no pictures from the party and all the incriminating videos of Canonical people doing karaoke will be destroyed and never, ever, ever, like ever, replayed.

Saturday

It was time to pack my bags and head back home. Highlights of the day?

“Kazam is a blast.” — Mark Shuttleworth

I have no idea if Mark really knew what Kazam is but I don’t even care. I pledge myself to the Ubuntu cause. ;) To rephrase everything, I was pleasantly surprised how accessible and friendly everyone was. It didn’t matter if they were community people or Canonical people, sitting down for lunch wasn’t a big deal. Look for a table with an empty seat and join the conversation. No matter where you went, someone there was talking about open source, Ubuntu, Linux and all kinds of other nerdy stuff.

Leaving San Francisco for the third time in my short life, I had a feeling that I still didn’t get enough of the city. Every time I am amazed by it and I leave with a bitter-sweet goodbye, hoping I will be back again someday, perhaps for a longer time. While I was boarding the plane, I thought that the fun is over and normal life started kicking back in …

… at least until the guy sitting next to me decided that he wants to go out and that it would be a good time to open the emergency exit. Midair, over the Atlantic. After they managed to restrain him to the restrooms, he was handcuffed and dragged away. They upgraded his seat for free and as a bonus he was sedated for the rest of the flight. Then the fun was really over. For him and for me.

Thank you all.

Rundown of changes:

• Detection of Linux Mint (LP:#971643).
• Minor documentation fixes (LP:#944371).
• An option to disable countdown window (LP:#934586).
• Start/Stop options for indicator menu (LP:#934841).
• More resizing handles on region selection window (LP:#946403).

Few other additional features:

• Added parameter –nosound to disable Pulse Audio and sound detection.
• Added parameter –test to generate a test video signal instead of capturing screen.
• Basic Pulse Audio check added if there are no PA libs, sound will be disabled.
• GtkBuilder UI (again), replaced GtkCheckBox with GtkSwitch.
• Removed Global Menu and replaced About option with a button (Contribution by Georgi).
• Blinking indicator icon.
• Added ‘Cancel coundown’ option to the indicator menu.
• Speed optimizations for VP8 and H264.
• Changed H264 container from Matroska to MP4.
• Added streaming options to H264.
• … perhaps there are more.

You can get Kazam at the usual location on Launchpad.

Python-keybinder still didn’t receive an upgrade, so I was forced to seek another way. After some googling I figured that Xlib provides everything I need. Awesome!

Not really. I made a working python example and when I transfered the code to Kazam everything blew up. It is not really smart to mix Xlib and Gtk. I started digging again. So, keybinder used Gdk for capturing all those keys.

I can do that! Right? Well, I can’t really. Gdk_window_add_filter() wasn’t included in Gnome introspection for some reason. Why? So far nobody knows.

Until I figure this out and get someone to do some work on introspection, Kazam will be left without global shortcuts. I hope this time will be measured in days, not weeks. :)

Call for testing and an open season for bug hunt. We will be hunting bugs in Kazam Screencaster and Gwibber Microblogging client. To help with the testing you will need the latest version of Ubuntu 12.04 – Precise Pangolin with Gwibber 3.4 (3.3.90) and Kazam 1.0.4 (1.0.4.1 NCC-1701E) installed. Gwibber testing will be exclusive to Precise Pangolin, Kazam testing will also cover Oneiric Ocelot. You will have to manually install Kazam by running the following command:

$ sudo apt-get install kazam

Instructions for Gwibber manual tests are available here. Instructions for Kazam will hopefully be published by tomorrow.

Everyone who would like to participate in this testing event is welcome to join #gwibber and #kazam on irc.freenode.net where event will be coordinated. For questions, contact BigWhale.

Bugs are reported in Launchpad, https://bugs.launchpad.net/kazam and https://bugs.launchpad.net/gwibber.

Many thanks to Kiberpipa, they provided us with a place  to stay and their infrastructure. Slovenian LoCo Team will be live streaming the whole event and we will have a Google Hangout setup so anyone can join.

Good hunting and keep in mind that we are also accepting new feature requests. :)

Kazam Screencaster reached certain maturity and I am happy to announce a stable 1.20 release. Codenamed as NCC-1701D it hit PPA repositories just yesterday.

For Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot and Ubuntu 12.04 Precise Pangolin you can use a stable PPA repository:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kazam-team/stable-series
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install kazam

Ubuntu packages were also tested on Linux Mint and you shouldn’t have any problems running Kazam on Linux Mint 12. I also tested Kazam on Fedora 16, everything should work as expected, but you will have to solve all the dependencies by yourself, because I cannot provide a working RPM package.

All of the issues reported so far were fixed. A short list of smaller new things that were added:

• region size is now displayed in the region window,
• screen resolution change is detected and video source selector is now updated accordingly,
• debug option –debug was added it should be used when reporting bugs, expect a lot of debug output,
• countdown window and about dialog box made prettier,
• App indicator menu and Gtk Status Icon were slightly changed,
• various changes in packaging, some RPM info added to setup.py

For the end, the latest screen shot from Precise Pangolin and a rumor that Kazam was uploaded to Ubuntu Universe repository and is waiting for review.

Kazam Screencaster 1.2.0

Please report all the bugs, wishes, suggestions, and feature requests on Launchpad.

Custom region recording.

Kazam 0.91-ubuntu5 and ubuntu6 for Oneiric Ocelot and Precise Pangolin packages are available. Source code is acab be found in the standard place on Launchpad. This is the last planned release before 0.92 which will be a week before Precise Pangoling Feature Freeze. Right now there are no immediate plans for adding new features before 1.0 release. Kazam release will coincide with Precise Pangolin release. So, a quick rundown of new feature in this release:

• Gtk3 port is finally complete.
• Appindicator will now fall back to Gtk.StatusIcon.
• It is now possible to record custom screen region.
• Recording frame rate is now a customizable option from 1 to 60 frames per second.
• If not needed or wanted, mouse cursor can be turned of in the recording.

You can get the packages from the unstable ppa. And please, do report those bugs you find. :)

Bugs addressed and fixes commited to: #896806, #661767, #656864, #662374, #635921, #732166, #739171, #908768, #660673, #660687.

If you had Kazam previously installed from unstable series PPA it will be upgraded automatically. If you are trying new installation, then you’ll find more detailed instructions here.

UPDATE: Kazam 0.91 was released, read more about it.