Another eds-sync Release
We've just released eds-sync 2.20070531, with some hot new features.
- Allow building against a stock evolution-data-server 1.10
- Handle duplicate contacts correctly
- Batch contact commits if possible (requires eds-dbus)
- Don't work on the same contact multiple times
- Remove code that exists in Glib
- Expire the inspect cache when handles are removed
- Set the alias when adding a contact to the roster
I've uploaded a tarball to Maemo Garage which should be visible soon, but for now there is a tagged release in Subversion.
Tasks 0.7
It's a Bank Holiday weekend, so what better to do that to implement a great new feature in Tasks, and then attack the bug list? It's now Sunday evening, and Tasks 0.7 is available from the Pimlico web site as usual.
- When adding a new task, parse ! or + as high priority, - as low priority, and @foo as the group foo
- Make the details window wider (#314)
- Fix mnemonic activation on the description field
- Close the New Group dialog on enter (#347)
- Add a menu shortcut for Mark Complete (#346)
- Don't conflict the Description and Delete mnemonics (#345)
- Enable interactive searches in the task view (#315)
- Allow multiple editor windows to be open (#317)
- Add a keybinding for Delete
Best Tasks release ever!
Wanted: Non-European Tasks Users
I've added a hot new feature to Tasks, so that you can specify a priority and group when creating a task instead of having to create and then edit it. It works like this:
- Some Task
- Create a task with the summary Some Task
- + Some Task
- ! Some Task
- Create a high priority task with the summary Some Task
- - Some Task
- Create a low priority task with the summary Some Task
- ! @Work Some Task
- Create a high priority task in the Work category with the summary Some Task
Now, I've tried to be i18n-aware, and use GLib's UTF-8 functions to manipulate the string, but I'd like someone to check this. Can a non-English speaker test this out with some interesting locales, specifically with UTF-8 characters which contain ASCII whitespace in their byte representation such as 0x20. Thanks!
Update: thanks to Simon for pointing out that my paranoia is unfounded, UTF-8 was designed to stop this sort of problem. However, people checking this code works would still be useful!
NP: Music Is Rotted One Note, Squarepusher
Open Sourcing of eds-sync
It took a while, but Nokia finally relicensed eds-sync under the GPL. Hooray!
eds-sync is one of the many components that you don't see on the Nokia N800, but is essential to the integrated chat/voip interface. It's role is basically to do full two-way synchronisation between any number of remote rosters (generally Jabber/XMPP rosters on the N800) and the Evolution Data Server addressbook. It also downloads avatars, so that they are available on disk for display in applications.
NP: Live at the Jazz Café, Fink
Contact Lookup Applet 0.16
This is a very overdue and probably the last release of contact-lookup-applet. Tarballs are available in the usual place. A few bug fixes in this release:
- Display more than one street address in a combo (#375433, Travis Reitter).
- Support secondary phone numbers (#359816, Timo Aaltonen).
- Remove ellipsis from the About menu item (#340450, Brian Pepple).
I'm also looking for a co-maintainer, or even better someone to take over maintainership. I don't use this anymore, but many distributions still ship it (and Ubuntu even has it in the stock install). The codebase is pretty small and simple, so is anyone interested?
NP: Peel Session, cLOUDDEAD
Pimlico Mailing List
A quick heads-up for anyone interested in the Pimlico suite of Contacts, Dates and Tasks. There is now a mailing list available for discussion, simply mail pimlico+subscribe@o-hand.com to subscribe.
NP: The Silent Ballet Volume 2
Tasks 0.5
Tasks 0.5 is now released. This release has features a port to OpenMoko and several bug fixes.
- Add an OpenMoko frontend (Rob Bradford)
- New icons from Andreas Nilsson to match the Pimlico style
- Use a SexyIconEntry for the URL entries if available (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #241)
- Fix layout of widgets in the task editor (Diego Escalante Urrelo, #236)
- Chain up focus events in the new task label fixing warnings and IM
- Add some padding around the editor dialog (#323)
- Improve messages for translation
- Translate the menu bar
- Fix license to refer to Tasks not Sound Juicer
- Remove Application from the desktop file
More information, screeenshots, and tarballs can be downloaded from the Pimlico site. There are no packages yet, but I hope to have those online shortly.
I'm Doomed
Srini mailed the list so it's official now: I've just joined the Evolution team as Addressbook Maintainer. I've a terrible feeling this will be the end of me, but I'm sure the journey will be fun! Thanks to Srini for asking me to join the team, it's a great pleasure to be invited to maintain such a high-profile component as Evolution. I've not really touched the code of Evolution itself, focusing more on Evolution Data Server, but that is good because Srini has been focusing more on Evolution so together we should make a good team.
My primary goal is to merge and polish the DBus port of EDS. The current
plan is to attempt to land the port in time for GNOME 2.20, although
disabled by default. Hopefully enough developers will be
foolish brave enough to enable it and report any bugs
they find, so that we might even be able to enable it by default in GNOME
2.20. This is a tight plan but it might just be achievable.
NP: Music City Soul, Beverley Knight
GTK+ Tip of the Day, Sound Juicer news
First, a tip of the day. Thanks to Matthew Garrett for pointing out that GLib 2.14 will have API for creating timers with second granularity (instead of millisecond): g_timeout_add_seconds(). This means that multiple timers scheduled to go off at roughly the same time will be fired at once, resulting in power savings.
I'm pleased to see this land in GLib, and can't wait for GLib 2.14 now as it is looking really good: GRegex and GSequence in particular are interesting new additions.
In Sound Juicer news, Luca Cavalli has ported the gedit/Epiphany plugin code to SJ. It's definitely work in progress at the moment, but it is coming together nicely. Follow #311688 if you want to keep up with the changes. The first two plugins I'd like to see from both feature and proof of concept angles are more complete CD playback controls (repeat and random), and downloading of album cover art.
NP: Delay, Dub Tractor
Postr Bugs
Not that Postr has any bugs (cough), but if you happen to find any then they can be filed in the all new Postr product on GNOME's Bugzilla.
NP: Minima Moralia, Chihei Hatakeyama
Sound Juicer "From a Council Flat Paying Higher Rate Tax" 2.19.1
Sound Juicer "From a Council Flat Paying Higher Rate Tax" 2.19.1 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. Brown paper bag release to fix not one but two bugs causing SJ to not start.
- Fix type names, which caused an assertion on startup
- Fix profile checking, which caused SJ to fail to parse any profiles
- Fix error handling when using errno (#438122)
Sound Juicer "Nikki's Growing A Patch Out In The Backyard" 2.19.0
Sound Juicer "Nikki's Growing A Patch Out In The Backyard" 2.19.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers. This is the first release in the 2.19.x development series, after I failed to do anything useful in 2.17.x...
- Attempt to repair brain-dead FreeDB encoding (Ka-Hing Cheung)
- Fix memory leaks in musicbrainz object (Cristian Persch)
- Follow the preferred sound device (Bastien Nocera)
- Use xdg-user-dirs (BN)
- Use gst_element_make_from_uri instead of hardcoding cdparanoia (James Livingstone)
- Display a better message after extracting (Adam Petaccia)
- Fix detection of FreeDB albums (David Mandelberg)
- Accessibility fixes (Rich Burridge, Patrick Wade)
- Don't crash if libnautilus-burn doens't know of a device (Pascal Terjan)
- Initialise threading earlier
- Convert strerror() output to UTF-8 for display (PT)
- Remove "Application" category from desktop file
- Fix srcdir!=builddir builds (Loic Minier)
- Internal refactor of extractor and metadata objects
Die Libgnome Die
I just committed to Evince a patch which makes the use of libgnome optional, meaning that Evince is now buildable on a pure GMAE system (obligatory screenshot). As GMAE has GConf and gnome-vfs, and gnome-keyring is trivial enough to leave in, the patch turned out to be quite simple:
- Don't use libgnome to start the help browser, but call Yelp directly
- Don't use libgnome to get an icon for a MIME type, instead copy ten lines of code from GTK+
- Disable use of GnomeProgram and session management
So the only regressions are that the keyboard accelerators are not saved, there is no session management (until session management lands in GTK+), and if gnome-vfs wants a password you don't get a password dialog. In my opinion only the last regression is actually a problem, and I want to fix that at some point.
Thanks to the Evince maintainers for their rapid review!
NP: Position Correction, TZU
For Sale: Discworld Novels
In order to make some space and a little cash, I'm selling my collection of Discworld novels. I have the first 24 in paperback, but sadly not Lords and Ladies. They are all in very good quality and I'm offering the lot for about £60. Reasonable offers accepted, and this is for collection or personal delivery if I'm feeling nice (say, you live in Cambridge). I can provide photographic evidence of the books if required, I just need to get them out from behind another pile of books.
Anyone interested? If so, mail me.
NP: Soulmates, Nobody
