Today I managed to add a feature which uses the text under the mouse pointer to search with Google, Wikipedia and Youtube. Right now those are just hard coded, but I had in mind, to make it configurable.

Web Services

Andreas has been doing a great job chasing up some final issues on gtk.org, mainly with regards to the language bindings. Andreas has now removed all bindings that have no support for 2.6 and above and all bindings which are supported by GNOME are illustrated nicely too. So, if your language binding isn’t listed there and you know it is supported, please let us know on the gtk-devel list so we can rectify the pages!

I want to thank Andreas Nilsson for helping out with the design and Tim Janik for help with the final touches in getting the pages installed, not to mention everyone who commented.

I think people miss the point. People blog about what they want to blog about. It is the writer’s choice to write what they want as much as it is the reader’s choice to read what they want.

Feel free to ignore my blog

Lucas Rocha sent me a great patch for including the help manual translators to the release note generated.

Xavier Claessens is using the script for his Empathy releases and added support for getting the project website (and adding it to the release note) and making it possible to run the “install-module” script on master.gnome.org.

So thanks to both for their contributions!

I decided to add support for generating the email you send so all you have to do is literally click “Send”. It saves a lot of time and works quite nicely.

Try it out:
http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/maintainer

The OTHER problem we have with Gossip at the moment is that it is not fun to hack on. I don’t think it is directly the result of integrating Telepathy into Gossip and I am not saying that Telepathy is the reason it is not fun to hack on, I think the same problem would exist had libgaim materialised and we were able to use that instead.

To summarise, the problem is really insufficient man power and the complexity of supporting multiple protocols.

Recently, Micke, Richard and I decided to remove the Telepathy integration completely and become a Jabber ONLY client. By doing this, we can focus on smaller, nicer and more useful features than just supporting another protocol.

• http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2007-May/msg00282.html

For those not interested in the debate, the first draft is available here:

• http://www.imendio.com/~martyn/gtk/

FOSDEM was a hoot this year. I didn’t get a chance to see many talks but I did get a chance to meet people I haven’t met before like Xavier Claessens who is writing the Telepathy backend for Gossip and Nat Friedman who was also experiencing his first time at FOSDEM. It was good to see Nat and find out what he is up to since things have been quiet there for a while. I also met up with Ralph Meijer.

GTK+ Maintenance

I attended the GTK+ talk which was interesting. I don’t think people are really aware of the problems we are having with GTK+ at the moment with the lack of resources to keep things ticking along.

WE NEED GTK+ MAINTAINERS.

Also discussed was GTK+ 3.0 and if we should break API/ABI compatibility to clean up the code and remove deprecated cruft. I agree that we should do this since I believe it makes maintaining the project easier. This can also be done in stages to cause less interruption to users.

You can see the full announcement here:
http://lists.imendio.com/pipermail/gossip-dev/2007-January/009099.html

I would especially like to thank:

• Xavier Claessens
• Eitan Isaacson
• Raphael Slinckx
• Sjoerd Simons

They have all worked very hard to help make this happen and of course thank you to the Telepathy team for their support along the way.

Here is a glimpse of what is currently available (bear in mind the interface is generated and needs some love

http://developer.imendio.com/projects/misc/maintainer

Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!