Contact Lookup Applet 0.3
Autocompletion in the entry! There are still some niggly bugs to fix, but this is looking fabtastic now. This release requires GTK+ 2.3.
Download it here.
More on the "Wishlist"
It appears I got lots of comments on my blog last night... I'll field them here. Note that the long post by Andy which ends "powertools are not part of GNOME Desktop" was actually by me, no idea why it says Andy.
"If you do a skin of GTK+ 2.x for EMACS" -- there is a GTK+ 2 port of emacs already -- "like there is one for OOo" -- all OOo does is copy the theme colours, my patches to the GNOME control center (in 2.4) mean that emacs should do that for you too.
Paul Gnuyen -- you don't want "viewports" over "workspaces". You want the implementation of virtual desktop to include spanning windows across desktops. That is fine, I thought there was a bug about this but I can't seem to find it at the moment :( The spanning issue I think might be possible if you fiddle with the X virtual desktop size too, but I've only got a single screen so I don't know the details of this.
Eugenia -- I was waiting for your reply. :) I understand that low-tech journalists and "normal" users will bitch, moan and generally complain about things which annoy them without going through the proper channels to get the problems solved. However, I expected you, someone who was recently a member of the nautilus mailing list, to be up to date on what is happening in GNOME development. It is a little late posting a wishlist for GNOME when 2.5 has just his the API freeze, and contains a large number of the entries on your list. I expect you to file bugs all the time, to be active on the usability lists, because "you care" (as you say). Or I'd expect such an article to be passed to some of the people close to GNOME development first so that they can point out the differences in direction/features which already exist/etc etc.
I want GNOME to be a commercial desktop. I want GNOME on the NHS desktops, in our government, one as many desktops as possible. I wrote Sound Juicer to be a CD ripper for normal people, as the existing rippers are not very user friendly. It is this focus on end-users which GNOME has, 800,000 users inside the NHS will not want a powerful text editor, or an integrated IDE, but a powerful email client, a easy to use web browser, a easy system to use. Yes, there should be comprehensive CD burning software using the GNOME library, and video editing software using GTK+/GStreamer, but at the moment there are larger fish to fry. We need the best email client (luckily Evolution 2 is looking excellent) and the cleanest browser (Epiphany is developing so fast and so well) before we can look at other, less important, programs.
In a related note, I see Federico has fiddled with the new file chooser, and renamed the Frobnicate button... For people who didn't know what "Frobnicate" meant, the Jargon File is a handy reference for "Lart" too.
Finally, contact-lookup-applet now sports auto-completion. I hope to get 0.3 out soon.