Since then it seems like I’ve been sick most of the time. Instead of doing something useful, I’ve taken to fidding on a re-write of my Agave colorscheme designer, and I’ve made a decent amount of progress. It still lacks a lot of features of the original, but it benefits from my vastly better grasp of gtkmm and related technologies. I still don’t know if I’ll ever actually get around to releasing it. It’s currently serving as a way for me to relax and take breaks from my other projects. It’s become sort of a playground for me to try out new technologies, and I think I’ve succeeded in making it nearly impossible for normal users to build as it requires quite a few very new or unreleased libraries (goocanvasmm, giomm, glibmm-utils, etc).

Here’s a little screencast of what I’ve done so far:

I’ve set up a repository on github for anybody that’s interested in playing around with it.

Also, I’ll be taking over some glibmm maintainer duties from murray after the 2.16.0 release.

Things with nemiver are coming along at a decent pace and we’ll probably be doing another release in the near future. The next release should bring quite a few nice new features and a lot of bugfixes, most of which Dodji has already mentioned.

I recently bought a new Digital SLR camera, the Nikon D40. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the best camera I could find, just something reasonably priced that took decent pictures. The D40 is relatively small so I don’t feel like I’m lugging a huge camera around (which is important or I probably wouldn’t end up using it as much), it’s cheap (it comes with a reasonable lens kit for around 600 US, which isn’t much more than I paid for my old point-and-shoot digital back in the day), and it takes vastly better pictures than my old camera. I’m really loving the fact that I can actually get decent pictures even if the lighting and environment is less than ideal. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a decent entry-level DSLR. I still clearly have a lot to learn about photography (this camera just lets me take better-looking crappy photos). But I’m slowly learning, and I’m getting lots of practice, like any new parent.

Keep in mind that this is just at an experimental stage at the moment, so I may just throw it away if I decide that it doesn’t work well. I do think it gives a better sense of how the colors are related, though.

In any case, it’s been fun playing around a little bit with cairomm for once. In the end though, I’d probably want to implement this using some sort of canvas library, but I haven’t done enough research on the options that are currently available.

Why was it looking in /usr/local/...??? I scoured my source code for hard-coded references to /usr/local, and not finding any, I sat scratching my head for a good long while. Now, somebody more familiar with gtk icon theme issues may have recognized the problem immediately, but it took me quite a while to figure it out, so I thought I’d post the solution in case anybody else runs in to the same issue. The problem only shows up if you’ve first installed the application to /usr/local (the default) and then uninstalled it and installed it to /usr.

The GNOME Goal page mentioned above suggests an install-data-hook rule which updates the gtk icon cache after the program’s icons are installed. So the icon cache in /usr/local gets updated when you first install the program to /usr/local. Unfortunately, after uninstalling the application, the icon cache is not updated, so gtk still thinks there are application icons located under /usr/local.

Since /usr/local/ is in the icon theme search path before /usr, when the application is installed to /usr, it will find the stale icon cache in /usr/local and think it found the icon you’ve requested. Unfortunately the icon that it ‘found’ has already been deleted, so it will try to load an icon from /usr/local that doesn’t exist, and the program crashes. The solution is to simply add an uninstall-hook that also updates the gtk icon cache so that you don’t have a stale icon cache after you run `make uninstall`. Something like the following:

gtk_update_icon_cache = gtk-update-icon-cache -f -t $(datadir)/icons/hicolor
install-data-hook: update-icon-cache
uninstall-hook: update-icon-cache
update-icon-cache:
        @-if test -z "$(DESTDIR)"; then
                 echo "Updating Gtk icon cache.";
                 $(gtk_update_icon_cache);
         else
                 echo "*** Icon cache not updated.  After install, run this:";
                 echo "***   $(gtk_update_icon_cache)";
         fi

Other than the name change / re-branding, there’s not a lot of major changes, but there are few minor improvements and an additional translation (Catalan). And now that I’ve got the name-change release out of the way, I can get back to working on some bigger changes to the application. I’ve been working on a branch to implement a custom TreeModel which can use standard C++ containers (e.g. std::vector) as its data store. This is of course completely uninteresting from a user perspective, but it makes the code much cleaner and maintainable as I don’t have to keep a standard container synchronized with the data in a ListModel and vice versa. I’ve just merged these changes back into master.

I have hopes that at some point a generic standard-container-based TreeModel can be shipped with gtkmm, but I think it needs a bit of testing here before I can propose adding anything to gtkmm. The implementation I’m using right now is still a bit rough around the edges since this is the first time I’ve ever implemented a custom TreeModel, but I think it’ll get there eventually.

In addition, I’ve got a few ideas regarding improving the UI for picking colors, and some other things. So that should start picking up soon as well.

In addition, with many thanks to Ross Burton, Agave is making its way into the Debian repository. You can keep an eye on its progress in the Debian NEW queue. Also, it looks like you can grab it from Ross’s personal repository if you want to try it out before it actually gets accepted into the official repository. Thanks Ross.

Nevertheless, I’ve been getting a fair number of requests from people who want to use colorscheme but don’t have the necessary expertise to install it from source. And I’d really like to get more people using it and giving me feedback. So I’ve made a couple experimental colorscheme packages for Ubuntu Breezy (i386 and amd64). Hopefully this is just a temporary stop-gap measure until the software gets packaged for more distributions.

I make no guarantee that the packages will even work. Nor will I guarantee any support for them (remember, I don’t actually know what I’m doing — I just whipped those up in an afternoon). So I don’t particularly condone using them, but if you want to use the application and can’t get it installed from source, it’s an option.

I still have a bunch of things to figure out — the most important being: How do I host the git repository so that it can be easily accessed by other people? Right now I’m just rsyncing my local repository to the download/release area, so theoretically people can clone my repository over plain http and work on it locally, but there’s no good way for potential contributors to commit to it or to host their own repositories at the project site. Granted, this is sort of a theoretical issue yet, since I don’t have many contributors other than translators at the moment, and repository access isn’t as critical for translators.

But back to the topic at hand: the new Colorscheme release. There’s a bunch of new stuff in this release, including:

• Added basic drag and drop support
  • You can drop from any application that provides an application/x-color
    target (such as the Gimp color selector)
  • You can drag a color from Colorscheme to any application that accepts a
    text target (e.g. Gedit) or an application/x-color target (e.g. the
    Gimp or the GNOME desktop background)
• Added the ability to export your favorite colors list as a Gimp Palette
  file
• Remembers your last viewed color and automatically loads it on startup
• Remembers your window size between sessions
• Added support for pasting a textual description of a color from the
  clipboard. Supported formats include hex string style colors (e.g.
  #FFFFFF) and all named colors that are understood by Gtk
• Add support for selecting multiple colors in the favorites list for
  removing multiple colors at once
• Removed dependency on GnomeVFS
• Added dependency on GConfmm

This release is indended to be a preview release leading up to an official release of 0.4.0, so please test it out and report any bugs you find. Translations are very welcome as well.