Ubuntu includes a social networking desktop service, Gwibber. Gwibber isn’t new to Ubuntu, it has been included for quite a while now. The intent isn’t just to provide a twitter or facebook client, but it is to provide a means for you to interact with your favorite social networks.

Gwibber does include a client application that aggregates the social networking sites you love to use, into one convenient place as well as allow you to post to multiple accounts simultaneously.

For 11.10, the Gwibber client received a complete face lift, in fact a complete re-write. The previous version had many great features, but ended up being quite limiting when we wanted to improve the overall user experience.

With the new Gwibber client, there aren’t really many new “features” however it is important to note not all previous features made it in. The most notable missing feature is the multi-column view, we’ll work hard to make sure it returns in Gwibber 3.4 in Ubuntu 12.04.

Now lets talk a bit about other ways you can use your favorite social networking services from Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Integration

Messaging Menu

• Displays unseen counts
• Update Status

Unity Launcher

• Displays total unseen count
• Quick menus for:
  • Update Status
  • Refresh
  • Accounts
  • Preferences

Update Status Poster

• Quick way to update your status without needing to have the Gwibber client running

Unity Lens

• Display all posts including videos, photos, links, replies, etc

• Search and filter results

• Note: the lens isn’t included in the default install, you need to install unity-lens-gwibber

  • http://apt.ubuntu.com/p/unity-lens-gwibber

  • or “sudo apt-get install unity-lens-gwibber”

Plans for Gwibber 3.4 (Ubuntu 12.04)

• Multi-column view
• Google +
• Live search (filters)
• Performance improvements
  • further reduce memory usage
  • speed up startup time
• Improved account management
• In-line viewing of more content (Videos, Images)
• Photo/Video uploads
• Smooth scrolling
• User guide
• Lens: improve filter selection (including filter by accounts) and categorization
• Lens: clicking on a tile should raise the client and view the post
• GNOME Shell integration, we would love someone to help improve the experience in GNOME Shell.

Do you want to help?

We need developers, designers, bug triage and documentation writers. For example we have a great user guide the Vancouver loco wrote, however it needs to be updated to match the current version of Gwibber and converted to a format we can include in the help viewer. We also want a new logo and some design help figuring out how Google + circles can best fit into Gwibber.

If you are interested in helping in any way, please join us in #gwibber on Freenode.

This is a very simple addition that looks nice and adds useful information where it is easily visible without having to focus the application.  This is done using the new Launcher API in libunity.

Using this simple API, I added the unseen message count to the Unity launcher in xchat-indicator.  We’ll get similar support in empathy and evolution soon.  The API currently includes support for adding a count, progress bar, and quicklists.

If you want to try it out in xchat or xchat-gnome, packages are available in Natty.  Simply install xchat-gnome-indicator for xchat-gnome or xchat-indicator for xchat and enable the message indicator plug-in in the preferences.  You will get message notifications in the messaging menu as well as the count in the Unity launcher.

A brief introduction to libgwibber, a library (C, vala, mono, and python) for using the Gwibber Service as well as provide some GTK widgets to easily embed into existing GTK applications.  Bindings for as many languages as possible was very important to me, I really want to make it as easy as possible for any desktop application to use Gwibber as a desktop service.

The API currently provides access to the common things an application developer might care about:

• signals for service availability and account changes
• refresh
• start and stop gwibber-service
• retrieving accounts
• toggling send_enabled status on an account
• looking up an account
• posting a status update
• URL shortening
• retrieving the version of the current running gwibber-service

I just finished porting the MeMenu from the Ayatana project to use libgwibber, which will be in the next release.

So far libgwibber-gtk includes just one widget, a posting entry.  This widget includes:

• A TextView
  • with an overlay character counter
  • built in URL shortening
  • integrated with NetworkManager, disabled when in offline mode
• AccountTargetBar
  • includes toggle buttons for each account, connected to signals to track the current status globally
• Send button

Some examples of the Gwibber entry widget can already be found embedded in the Ubuntu Software Center and the Ubuntu One Music Store plugin in rhythmbox.

Other widgets I hope to add in the future include:

• stream view (message view of any stream)
• stream navigation
• search
• friend browser (browse friends based on type of content, like friends with images that can be displayed in shotwell or f-spot)
• profile (view your own or someone else’s profile)
• comment (comment on various types of shared content, photos, links, etc)
• image uploader

I would love suggestions for these or others, please let me know!

Some GTK examples:

C example

entry-c.c
To build entry-c.c:

gcc `pkg-config --cflags gwibber-gtk` entry-c.c `pkg-config --libs gwibber-gtk` -o entry-c

Vala example

entry-vala.vala
To build entry-vala.vala:

valac --pkg gtk+-2.0 --pkg gwibber --pkg gwibber-gtk entry-vala.vala

Mono example

entry-mono.cs
To build entry-mono.cs

gmcs -target:exe -out:entry.exe -pkg:gwibber-gtk-sharp-0.0 entry-mono.cs

Python example

entry-python.py
Nothing to build, so just run it with:

python entry-python.py

Here are some examples of using libgwibber with python and gobject introspection:

# Import Gwibber using introspection
from gi.repository import Gwibber

# Get a service object
service = Gwibber.Service()

# Get the current Gwibber version
version = service.version()

# Make the Gwibber service refresh
service.refresh()

# Post a status update to all your enabled accounts
service.send_message("Something very interesting here, blah, blah, blah")

Some applications I would love to see use libgwibber:

Shotwell and F-Spot: Browse online photos from your social networks from right inside you existing photo library tool.  Including the ability to comment, tag, like and share.

gnome-utils: Add image upload support to gnome-screenshot

Evolution: Display the last status update from a contact when viewing an email or browsing contacts.

GTG: Status updates when tasks are complete

I am generating gtk-doc docs for libgwibber, but they aren’t very useful yet.  libgwibber is written in vala and I haven’t figured out a way to get docstrings to pass from vala to the generated C.  If anyone knows how to do that, please let me know.

Hopefully people find libgwibber useful, please let me know if you have suggestions, bug reports, or want to contribute!

This has changed now, not because pidgin has gotten better at IRC, but because of the message indicator applet. The message indicator grabs notifications from notify-osd that are based on human to human interaction, and stores them in a little applet in the panel that indicates what might need your attention. Currently only evolution and pidgin support it, but hopefully many more soon (gwibber, please gwibber!). Now when people highlight me in a chat, IM or private message me I see the nice little indicator with a star showing it needs attention.

I am very happy to say I can use Pidgin for my daily IRC use… Yay for a single client finally!

I am sure nobody will be surprised to hear that the indicator-applet is included in Foresight as well, just add it to your panel.

I am trying to resist the urge to make predictions for 2009.  Let’s just say we’ll kick ass in 2009, and leave it at that.

Road map

Please look over it, if you have other objectives you would like to add, please file issues assigning the fix version to 2.5. That will make them show up in the table on the wiki page. I am setting a deadline of Wednesday, Nov 19 1200 UTC. To find the time in UTC, run ‘date -u’.

Please get your submissions in! We will quickly review the submissions and update the issues to reflect fix version. I want to start the planning stages pretty quickly after the deadline, gathering requirements and designing the solutions. Please include as much detail as possible in the issues, and please review the issues we already have adding comments. The more information the better.

Shamless donation request below

You can run “cvc explain [method]” to get the documentation for that method.  Here is an example:


$ cvc explain DanglingSymlinks
Conary API Documentation: PackageRecipe.DanglingSymlinks

NAME
====

r.DanglingSymlinks() – Disallow dangling symbolic links

SYNOPSIS
========

r.DanglingSymlinks([filterexp] || [exceptions=filterexp)

DESCRIPTION
===========

The r.DanglingSymlinks() policy enforces the absence of dangling
symbolic links; that is, symbolic links pointing to targets which no
longer exist.

If you know that a dangling symbolic link created by your package
is fulfilled by another package on which your package depends,
you may set up an exception for that file.

EXAMPLES
========

r.DanglingSymlinks(exceptions=’%(htconfdir)s/run’)

The %(htconfdir)s/run file is a symlink that is intentionally
left dangling within this package, because we know that it will
be satisfied by runtime dependencies at installation time.

Foresight Linux is a Linux distribution for your desktop that features a rolling release schedule that always keeps your desktop up to date. Foresight includes innovative applications that make using your computer easy, including Banshee for music management, F-Spot for photo management, as well as vibrant user and developer community.

New in Foresight 2.0:

The Foresight 2.0 features a new tar-based installer, that should install in less than 10 minutes, including formatting a 200 GB hard drive. Foresight is also developing new editions including KDE and XFCE in addition to GNOME available for x86 and x86_64 processors. Foresight is proud to be the first distribution to ship with:

• PackageKit to help users update their system and add and remove software
• Syslinux, a new bootloader to replace GRUB.
• GNOME-Do: GNOME Do allows you to quickly search for many items present in your GNOME desktop environment (applications, Evolution contacts, Firefox bookmarks, files, artists and albums in Rhythmbox, Pidgin buddies, etc.) and perform commonly used actions on those items (Run, Open, Email, Chat, Play, etc.).

Users should also find it much easier to use binary video card drivers from Nvidia and ATI than in Foresight 1.x. Transmission is also included as the default Bittorrent application.

For more information, please visit http://www.foresightlinux.org/

Because your desktop should be cool.

Updated: