I’ve also spent some time in the past week adding a marginally useful feature to nemiver: highlighting memory values when they’ve changed since the last time the debugger stopped. Adding this functionality required some significant modifications to the shared GtkHex widget that we use, so it’s not checked into svn yet, but hopefully will be soon. I’m not sure how people did significant refactorings and API additions before tools like git-svn were available. It’s so nice to be able to try out different things and make changes locally with full version control support instead of trying to maintain a mega-patch or committing half-baked ideas to the central repository.

I also released a new version of cairomm to coincide with the 1.6 release of cairo.

cairomm

I’ve been hacking on cairomm and gtkmm for quite a while now, but cairomm has up to now been in a development state. For the gtkmm 2.10 release, we needed to depend on cairomm, so it had to be declared stable. So that happened over the weekend with version 1.2.0, followed on quickly by a 1.2.1 release to fix a small Windows compilation issue.

gtkmm

There was a slightly nasty gtkmm bug that popped up just after Murray released version 2.10.0 and went on vacation, so I had to try to get a new release cut in time for the GNOME release cutoff today. I’ve been developing my own Agave application for a while, but this is really the first time I’ve had to release software that A) matters, and B) needs to get done on a tight schedule. All in all a little nerve-wracking, but exhilarating at the same time.

Summer of Code

It’s great to see a updates on lot of the great summer of code projects within GNOME. It seems like this year was a really great year for SoC projects within GNOME. Great job to all the participants.

Life

This weekend I actually got some excercise. Sunday Joanne and I decided to go to the park across the street and play a little bit of tennis. I’ve never really played much tennis in my life, but I’ve decided that I really like it. I even went and bought some new tennis balls since the ones we had in the house were all old and flat and barely bounced. Maybe I’ve finally found the thing to get me off my ass and get some excercise every now and then.

Update: for those who don’t have any idea who I am, I wrote a little introductory post that didn’t seem to get picked up by planet GNOME when I posted it.

There are a couple of significant issues to deal with before an official 1.2.0 release of cairomm, the most important of which is that the Cairo::RefPtr implementation leaks memory by not deleting the C++ wrapper object (although the underlying C object does get destroyed). Murray’s got a good start on this in bug #7442, so it should be solved pretty quickly. There are a couple other minor things to sort out before I want to declare the API stable, but I’m feeling pretty good about it now.

So if you’re interested in having good C++ bindings for GNOME / GTK+, feel free to download the latest cairomm 1.1.10 release and give it a spin and let me know what you think.

I’ll be leaving the computer at home, so no coding for the next week or so. To make up for it, though, I committed a few things to cairomm before leaving. I spent a little time this afternoon checking out cairomm on Windows. It turns out that it didn’t compile cleanly (surprise, surprise), but the fixes were just a matter of changing a few #include statements. Well, I hope so at least. I didn’t get around to testing out the functionality, I just verified that it now compiles. In addition, I committed a small example to the repository showing how to display text with cairomm. It’s basically just a translation of a cairo test into C++ / cairomm.

Papyrus is a 2d C++ scenegraph library that utilizes the cairo library to perform drawing operations. In this respect, it is similar to the Gnome::Canvas library.

It’s good to see people start using cairomm. Hopefully we’ll get some good real-world feedback once more people start trying it out.

Up until now, my main free software experiences have been as a user and infrequent bug reporter, and as a developer of my pet projects (see colorscheme). In the process of working on my colorscheme app, I learned a bit about the Gdk drawing API, and I didn’t particularly like what I found. So I’ve been quite excited by the new API provided by cairo, and in an effort to learn to use cairo, I began contributing tutorials and documentation for gtkmm and cairomm, and eventually started contributing code.

So I accepted the position of co-maintainer at this point. At some point I may take over completely since Murray’s got a ton of stuff on his plate. In any case, this is a pretty significant step for me, and I’m pretty excited about it. I’ve learned a lot in just the last year or so, and I expect I’ll continue to learn a lot as I take on additional responsibilities with cairomm. Hopefully we can get cairomm into a good, stable state as soon as possible so that it can be used extensively in the next gtkmm release.