Tasks 0.2
Tasks 0.2 is ready to roll. Tasks is a simple To Do manager, using GTK+ and libecal (part of Evolution Data Server). No great new features over 0.1, but several bug fixes. Now that I've been putting off categories by fixing up code, I'll have to them.
- Sort tasks based on the locale
- Persist window size
- Allow GTK+ themes to change the task colours
- Move the cursor to new tasks
- Remove the None priority from the interface
- Add a frame around the date popup (thanks Luca)
- Don't close the date popup when the month is changed (thanks Kris)
- Pop down the combo when the button is pressed (thanks Kris)
- Add a faded label to the entry explaining what it is for
- Fix memory leaks
For 0.3 I invite a dedicated member of gnome-i18n to be the first person to send a patch to i18n the source and provide a translation. Fame and glory can be yours!
Help Interweb!
I've upgraded my Ubuntu laptop to Feisty, and now when I press Control-Left or Control-Right instead of moving to the next/previous word (as it did in Edgy and as far as I recall Sarge too) I just get ;5D and ;5C. Does anyone know how to fix that?
NP: Storn, Heather Nova
Why I Love DVCS
Over the last four days I've had patchy Internet connectivity but I've been hacking on Tasks a bit in the evening and on flights. The result:
$ svn diff | diffstat README | 33 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++ src/Makefile.am | 1 src/koto-group-filter-model.c | 4 +++ src/koto-task-editor-dialog.c | 40 +++++++++++++++++--------------- src/koto-task-editor-dialog.h | 5 +--- src/koto-task-editor.c | 47 +++++++++++++++++++++++--------------- src/koto-task-store.c | 37 ++++++++++++++++++++++++------ src/koto-task-store.h | 3 ++ src/koto-task-view.c | 45 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----- src/koto-task.c | 51 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ src/koto-task.h | 26 +++++++++++++++++++++ src/test.c | 48 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++----- 12 files changed, 281 insertions(+), 59 deletions(-)
Now I wish I had the foresight to clone the Tasks repository into a Bazaar branch so that I could commit as I went, and then merge it all back when I got home. But no, I have several bug fixes and new features in this mega-diff, and I'm too anal to commit it in a single go. Expect a Tasks 0.2 soon!
Lack of Tasks/Evolution Synergy
I'd noticed back when Dates was started the libecal was failing to notify Dates when events in Evolution changed, and vice versa. This was magically fixed when Dates moved over to ESource, so I didn't continue investigating it.
However, Tasks doesn't use ESource yet and people had noticed that if you add items to Tasks, they don't appear in Evolution or the panel. This is a major problem, so I build EDS and debugged the problem. Turns out that the system tasks store is at ~/.evolution/tasks/local/system/ but when using ESource it is at ~/.evolution/tasks/local/system (note the lack of a slash) and as backends are looked up using literal string comparisons, these don't get the same backend so you don't get change notifications, and even worse modifying the task list with one application will overwrite the other's changes.
Luckily the fix was trivial, and I hope that it gets reviewed soon. Update: committed!
Tasks 0.1
I've just tagged and rolled a Tasks 0.1 tarball. Tasks is a simple To Do manager, using GTK+ and libecal (part of Evolution Data Server). It isn't very featureful at the moment, but it's progressing nicely: I'm using it already.
I'll be adding this to the OpenedHand Projects site shortly, but for now here is a tarball.
Hero Worship
Ryan Lortie Is My Hero. I expect to see a presentation at GUADEC explaining the new panel code and how it's being integrated into G2.20, Ryan. :)
ICC Profiles In X Specification 0.2
About 18 months after the 0.1 release of this specification comes 0.2. This is a very simple update and now specifies how to handle Xinerama-style setups where a single root window has multiple physical screens (thanks to Kai-Uwe Behrmann).
ICC Profiles In X, version 0.2, can be downloaded here.
NP: Takk, Sigur Rós
Icon Request...
I'm just finishing off a 0.1 release of Tasks, a minimal To Do application for GNOME (yes, it's another EDS frontend). However, I don't have a rocking icon and can't seem to find one in the GNOME or Tango icon theme. Does anyone know of a cool icon I could use, or does anyone out there fancy flexing their drawing muscles and knocking up a quick icon?
Multitouch and GNOME
The multitouch system legend Jeff Han released another demo recently, which I saw on MacRumours. As usual it's a combination the usual gestures to move around a map and dragging objects around with basic physics, but then I was surprised to see a RHEL desktop appear. Watch the demo and look out for the morphing demo near the end.
Chances are this is using MPX, which is being integrated into XInput 2 as we speak.
NP: Dreaming Wide Awake, Lizz Wright
GUADEC 2007 Call For Papers
The GNOME Users and Developers European Conference (GUADEC) invite you to participate in the 8th annual conference on the 15-21st July 2007 in Birmingham, England.
The deadline for proposals is Monday 12th March. Successful candidates will be selected and notified by the GUADEC organising committee. Unsuccessful candidates will still have an opportunity for their session to be scheduled during the Approach Weekend or After Hours.
For more information, and to submit a proposal, please go to http://www.guadec.org/callforpapers.
Postr 0.5
Postr 0.5 is out. This has a few fixes:
- Catch errors throw by EXIF or IPTC parsing
- New flickrpc (cleaner code, works with Python 2.5)
You can follow the development in the Bazaar branch, or get the Postr 0.5 tarball.
Xrandr, postscript
If anyone out there has been using my Edgy packages for the new Xrandr love, then you'll notice that I've just deleted them...
Daniel Stone, X hacker extraordinaire, has built updated packages. As he can actually use git I trust them more than I trust my own. They may blow up your machine and so on, but they are available here:
deb http://www.fooishbar.org/packages/ randr-1.2/edgy/$(ARCH)/
He also kindly built AMD64 debs, something that I cannot do.
GUADEC 2007 Pre-Call for Papers
I plan on announcing the GUADEC 2007 Call for Papers in the next day or so, so I want everyone to put their thinking caps on and consider giving a talk this summer. There are several topics I'd like to see a good set of talks on:
- 10x10. How are we doing on the 10x10 plan: this includes feedback from people who have done large deployments, to people working on making GNOME work in the enterprise, and people putting GNOME in embedded devices.
- Integration. GNOME needs tighter integration within itself, be this showing presence in relevant applications, integrating chat/voip into the desktop, and tighter integration between applications. Do you have a cool application that makes GNOME easier to use, or something that integrates applications, documents, and people into a cohesive whole?
- Future. Lots of new code is being written, do you have anything interesting? A replacement for gnome-vfs, progress on Project Ridley, a new implementation of something fundamental like the panel?
Devil's Pie in Linux Format
Jeff Waugh talks about Devil's Pie in his interview with Linux Format (issue 87).
However, there's this really cool thing called Devil's Pie, which is an extra little thing you run. It just plugs in and you can completely script the way Metacity works, using Lisp. Much in the same way you could with Sawfish, except for being a plugin and being directly focused on scripting the window manager. You can do amazing stuff. The work on that has actually been sponsored by Pixar.
Thanks Jeff! Any more of this and people will start thinking I'm paying you...
NP: Flight 602, Aim
Asynchronous Flickr Library, version 0.2
Flickrpc 0.2 is released. This has several improvements:
- Re-license to LGPL
- Don't use an intermediate deferred, instead chain them (thanks Andrew Bennetts)
- Clean up errback handlers (thanks Andrew Bennetts)
- Try to import xml.etree for Python 2.5
Basically no new features but it now works on Python 2.5 without an external ElementTree, the code is cleaner, and it's LGPL instead of GPL. Grab a tarball here or the bzr tree here.
NP: The Good, The Bad, And The Queen
Xrandr 1.2
Since I got my 20" widescreen monitor in the summer, I discovered how bad X's support for resizing displays is. I wanted to have the ability to plug my laptop into the 20" display in the office and expand the desktop to 1680x1050, or remove the 20" display and shrink the desktop back down to the native resolution of 1024x768. It turns out that a number of factors were stopping this, and the only way to do it would have been to restart X. Because of this I ended up using the display at 1024x768 when I did use it, but mostly I stayed on the sofa.
Then I heard about xrandr 1.2, the all-singing all-dancing revision of the X Resize and Rotate extension. Basically, it would solve my problem, and as luck would have it my laptop has an Intel chipset and the people hacking on it work at Intel. Yesterday after lots of poking I finally made it all work for this. This involved a lot of poking and a little black magic.
The first step is getting an X server new enough. First, you'll need to update some X protocol headers. We'll start with the easy ones that have had releases (grab the latest release you can find):
- xproto
- glproto
- inputproto
Then you'll need to update various other bits of X:
- libXi
- libdrm
Once this is done and X still works, it's time to brave the perilous world of git. If you've never used git before, it's quite simple for this. Go to the git browser and find the module you want to check out. Click on it, and you'll see two URLs: you want the anongit one. Do git clone [url], and then if I've specified a branch other than master, cd into the directory and do git checkout [branch]. For example:
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel cd xf86-video-intel git checkout modesetting
You'll need to grab:
- xorg/proto/x11proto
- xorg/proto/randrproto
- xorg/lib/libXrandr
- xorg/app/xrandr
- xorg/xserver (randr-1.2-for-server-1.2)
- xorg/driver/xf86-video-intel (modesetting)
Build it all in that order. The order is important as if you build the Intel driver against randr 1.0 instead of 1.2, it won't do what you want. By now you should have an X that looks no different. But...
$ xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 240, current 1024 x 768, maximum 1680 x 1050 VGA disconnected 0mm x 0mm LVDS connected 1024x768+0+0 246mm x 185mm 1024x768 50.0 + 60.0* 40.0 800x600 60.3 640x480 60.0 59.9 TV disconnected 0mm x 0mm
Now that is clever. Here you can see that I don't have anything connected via VGA, my LVDS (no idea what this stands for, but it means the laptop's panel) has a preferred mode of 1024x768 (thats what the * means), and I have nothing connected to the TV output (because Lenovo didn't wire it up). Now if I plug something into the VGA and run xrandr -s 0 (select default screen size), the external display should power on. Xrandr doesn't try to be too clever, it will leave that to desktop daemons, but by default it will try and make something appear on all of the connected displays. In this case, my 20" TFT gets a clone of my laptop panel, at 1024x768.
That is no good though, I want to turn off the laptop panel (as I'll be shutting the laptop) and switch the external display to 1680x1050. This is where the black magic starts... Currently the Intel driver cannot resize the physical framebuffer in memory after X has started, so it defaults to a framebuffer of 1200x1024 (IIRC). That isn't big enough to hold 1680x1050. Also the Intel driver doesn't detect any modes from the TFT. This may be Dell being stupid, or the EDID parser in the driver being too restrictive, I don't know. Luckily we can still use modelines in xorg.conf so I added this:
Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Dell TFT"
# This is a standard modeline for 1680x1050 at 60Hz
Modeline "1680x1050" 149.00 1680 1760 1944 2280 1050 1050 1052 1089
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "Screen"
Device "Intel"
Monitor "Monitor"
# This says that when using a monitor on the output called VGA, use the
# settings in the monitor "Dell TFT"
Option "monitor-VGA" "Dell TFT"
DefaultDepth 24
SubSection "Display"
Depth 24
# This tells the screen to allocate a frame buffer up to
# 1680x1050.
Virtual 1680 1050
EndSubSection
EndSection
With this, everything just works. If I xrandr with various displays plugged in I can see what they support and can switch modes. To make everything nice and easy I wrote a small script that I bound to an unused function key:
if xrandr -q | grep -q "VGA connected"; then xrandr --output LVDS --off --output VGA --mode 1680x1050 else xrandr --output VGA --off --output LVDS --mode 1024x768 fi
(thanks to Eric for pointing out that I don't need to use the hex values). Simple! As you can see the new xrandr is very powerful. If you want to do Xinerama-style dual screen you can do that too: xrandr 1.2 encompasses that behaviour.
The final thing to point out is how glad I am that GNOME seems to handle the screen resizing like this so nicely already. When the desktop shrinks Metacity moves windows so they are visible, and when the desktop expands the panel applets on the right stay on the right instead of sitting in the middle. The script I run when I change screens does more than I pasted here: it changes the wallpaper to match the aspect ratio, and also changes the fonts.
I hope this has made sense, I know there are a few people out there who were waiting for me to test this before they gave it a go. If anything is too vague, leave a comment and I'll expand it. I should also mention that I've got Ubuntu Edgy packages for everything here in my repository.
NP: Animal Magic, Bonobo
Edgy Eft packages for Contacts and Dates
After gentle pestering asking from Bryan Forbes, I build packages for Contacts
and Dates for Ubunty Edgy Eft. They are available in the usual place, debian.o-hand.com.
It also looks like Chris still has a 770 scratcbox to hand, so we might even have 770 packages soon too!
NP: 9, Damien Rice
Dates 0.3
Following up the Contacts release earlier, I just rolled Dates 0.3. This mainly has a simple fix that means on the first start it enables a calendar, so you can do something useful with it.
Again, N800 packages are already online, and I'm rolling packages for Debian now. 770 packages will be available when I've found a 770-compatible scratchbox!
Contacts 0.3
I've just released Contacts 0.3. This release doesn't have a lot of visible features, but the use of Glade was removed and we have more translations.
More importantly, it's also available for the Nokia N800! Grab your Application Catalogue installation lines from maemo.o-hand.com and install Dates and Contacts on your N800 today! Contacts doesn't yet have a Maemo port so it isn't totally integrated, but as both Contacts and the N800 addressbook use evolution-data-server, your contacts are shared.
NP: Skalpel, Skalpel
