art.gnome.org updates

I poked around with art.gnome.org recently and added support for sorting backgrounds and themes by popularity. This throws up some interesting results, such as showing the XP look-a-like theme being the fourth most popular on the site.

Even more interestingly still, I hacked up support to allow most themes (gtk, metacity and icon themes) to be installed directly from the web page. This is achieved by setting the content-type to application/x-gnome-theme-package and allowing Firefox (or, I assume, any other web browser) to open the download with the default handler for this type, which is the Theme Installer. This ties in with the longer term plan we’re thinking of, which is to remove the extra themes from gnome-themes and place them (and more) on the website. Users would then install the themes straight from the theme manager or from a browser. Hylke’s already posted some mockups to the control center mailing list on what the new theme manager may look like.

Now, if only there was a nice way to set your desktop background from the browser, without going through right click menus…

A new Clutter Widget Toolkit

If you’ve been following Moblin development closely, you’ll know that we have been using a library called “Nbtk” (netbook toolkit) to implement the common user interface elements. People have been quite interested in this, since it is based on Clutter. However, Nbtk was developed with very short term goals, so that we could accomplish the Moblin 2.0 UI as quickly as possible. Now that Moblin 2.0 (and indeed, 2.1) is out, we have some time before 2.2 to start thinking about a more serious toolkit.

The Moblin Toolkit

The first goal was to rename the library to something less specific to the “netbook” platform. We chose ‘mx’ as the name space, because the goal of toolkit is to support the Moblin User Experience. Mx provides a set of standard user interface elements, including buttons, progress bars, tooltips, scroll bars and others. It also implements some standard layout managers, although some of these will be available in Clutter itself when Clutter 1.2 is available. One other interesting feature is the possibility of setting style properties from a css-like file.

What’s New

Followers of Nbtk will be interested to know what’s new compared to Nbtk. The latest additions include:

  • notebook – a multi-child container that shows only one child at a time (similar to a slide show). The notebook widget itself does not implement tabs, but these can easily be added by hooking it up to the new button-group widget.
  • button group – allows buttons to be grouped so that the toggle state can be mutually exclusive across the buttons in the group (e.g. such as a group of radio buttons might behave.). Also features a property to allow no buttons to be toggled if desired.
  • toggle widget – a widget that implements a boolean state and looks similar to a light switch or slider switch. This is a Clutter version of the MxGtkLightSwitch already available. The advantages of the Clutter version are that it provides better animated feedback on user interaction.

There have also been some behind the scenes clean ups, including:

  • re-written table layout algorithm – this had much better support for correct minimum and preferred sizes, especially related to columns spanning.
  • the stylable interface is now much simpler and has less dependencies
  • the Widget base class implements hover and active states (if the actor is reactive)
  • all constructors return ClutterActor, since this is the most useful base type.

Try It

Although the new project started as a branch in the Nbtk source code repository, it now has it’s own git repository at git.moblin.org. I am also making tarball releases on the brand new download.moblin.org. I have released a first version for testing purposes and it is important to note that the project is not API stable yet.

Fedora 12 Beta – First Impressions

A lot of blog posts about Fedora 12 recently. It’s been a while since I last tried Fedora, so I thought I’d try it out and post some of my thoughts.

Likes

  • Sweet KMS enabled boot screen – very nice
  • Yum is fast enough to be usable (but maybe that’s because of my quad core now?)
  • Custom icons for Documents/Downloads/Music/Videos etc
  • Installer re-assigned ownership attributes for old home directory. Very handy.
  • Clearlooks is the default theme (not Nodoka)
  • Control Center (Preferences) menu is no longer grouped by categories

Dislikes

  • Notifications (what is that horrible massive black square on my screen)
  • Package manager UI (often just too confusing, too animated, or too awkward)
  • Bluetooth keyboard didn’t work in the final setup screens (setting up username etc…)
  • Every other folder in Nautilus tells me I can share it using Personal File Sharing (well, at least $HOME and $HOME/Downloads – why would I want to share $HOME and why do I have to see this notice all the time?)
  • Doesn’t remember my preferred language (en_GB)

All in all, looking good apart from the few niggles I’m sure will be fixed before release. If anyone knows whether there is a meta-package to install enough packages to allow GNOME development (e.g. including gcc, intltool, libtool, gtk-doc, etc), that would be awesome.

Update: I just found sudo yum install @gnome-devel @development-tools via the Jhbuild page. It’s a start, but doesn’t include everything needed to build GTK+ for example. Shame the package manager UI doesn’t make this more obvious.

Unfortunately, I’m not going to file bugs just yet, because these are just my first impressions, and I’m not yet a Fedora user!