Fer's blog

I got more and interesting feedback about how GNOME applications should handle devices:

• Luke Hutchison suggested adding a system to .desktop files for an app that allows for the app to be activated when a specific D-BUS signal was raised. e.g. in gnome-cd.desktop :

  Capability[0]=/org/freedesktop/hw-events/insert-cdda-cd
  Capability_Exec[0]=gnome-cd --unique --play --device %d

• Jerry Haltom pointed to two more threads about using MIME types:
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/utopia-list/2004-August/msg00066.html
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-August/msg00123.html
• David Zeuthen blogged about extending .desktop files with sections things like [System Action MediaAudioDiscInserted]
• Luca Ferretti pointed me to
  • http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-November/msg00187.html
  • http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164991

  and also sent me his unfinished answer to Thomas mail, proposing also a way to extend .desktop file to handle events, like X-GNOME-HANDLE-BLANKCD=true

• hadess also agrees on extending .desktop file for handling events.

So it seems that there is some agrement on extending .desktop files, and that it should be proposed/done at fd.org level.

My friend arc posted a list of the worst things in GNOME 2.8 (in Spanish). These are my comments (in italic):

• Non homogeneus and outdated developer docs. BIG CALL FOR VOLUNTEERS!
• Applets consume too many system resources:

  arc       5635  0.0  2.5 16844 6416 ?        S    Dec08   0:01 /usr/libexec/clock-applet

• Lack of integrated and official multimedia player.It will be fixed on next releases with Totem, rb and sound-juicer aditions
• Non high quality pdf support. Dude, have you tried Evince?
• Printer configutarion is not solid neither stable.I hadn’t have a printer anytime before, buf configuring at work the SMB ones with my FC2 “just worked” ™
• Where is no easy way to change between users and having simultaneus sessions.Have you tried Jimbob’s User Selector Applet?. Maybe it should be included on GNOME 2.12 🙂
• Cannot manage user account. Revelation?
• Lack of an IDE/RAD tool. 100% agree
• Lack of “whole” theme file format.
• File-roller needs to extract the full archive to /tmp when droping a single file

The new and fancy Muine plugin system plus the C# and Gtk# combination allow you to do things like this in 100 lines of code:

a plugin to show the lyrics of the song you are listening. I’m using http://lyrc.com.ar/because they have lot of Spanish lyrics.Here is the code: Lyrics.cs. To compile, use the following command:

mcs -target:library -out:Lyrics.dll Lyrics.cs -pkg:muine-plugin

and copy the .dll to you plugin dir. Some improvements that can be done:

• Better UI: now it’s only a window+scrollview+textview
• Use a local cache for lyrics
• Instead of retrieving from the server the first match, if there are more than one, allow the user to select it

I also updated my burn patch for Muine, making it a plugin. I’ll import it to GNOME CVS when I get rid of some weirness on it (like don’t wrapping burn-drive-selection widget, because when I wrote it, muine used Gtk# 1.0 without the combo box. Here is the pre-alpha version if you want to try it:muine-burn-0.0.0.tar.bz2.

I got a lot of possitive feedback about the default applications to handle devices. I’ll try to summarize it tomorrow.

I wrote a patch (already in eel CVS HEAD) for the add application for mime type dialog. Now you can select it from a list of know applications instead of writing an obscure command:

Also wrote a patch for prettify the select app page, showing icons from the apps:

Two tips for gnome-lovers:

• Fix the the first code (eel/eel-open-with-dialog.c) to load correctly every icon using the code in the second patch.
• Fix the obvious bug in the second patch 🙂

More work helping users to use “Application” concept instead of “command” concept:

with this work in progress patch for gnome-volume-manager it presents a ComboBox with the know applications that can handle CDs. For knowing that I’m adding a new gnome-cd-play.desktop that handles mime type: “audio/x-cd-cdda”, has the NoDisplay=true, and the Exec is “gnome-cd –device=%d”. Now we need to discuss some open points:

• What’s the right UI for this?. I don’t like the combo with an “Custom” entry
• Should we use special mime types for devices? Should we propose to fd.org?
• Totem and camera programs should support a “–device=/dev/XXX” or HAL UDI stuff

Update:I’ve received some feedback. This mockup from Stefan Ihringer:

and these two threads about these special mime types (From Kristof Vansant):

• http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2004-August/004461.html
• 
  http://lists.freedesktop.org/pipermail/xdg/2005-January/005686.html

Tonigh I implemented one of the most requested features of MSN gaim users (or at least of my friends using gaim): previews for transfered images:

I’m not putting the patch here yet, because I’m not really sure about the UI (comments welcome) and because last time I did it the patch was directly committed with my really horrible icons:

Finally my friend Fidel cooked up better icons:

. Maybe a icon like the “no parking” sign would be better for the blocked users.

Ah, tomorrow I’m going back to work after Xmas holydays, and it’s 4:45am here… dam!

Madrid ha muerto is a great book written by Luis Antonio de Villena. The title comes from a sentence pronounced by Miguel Pi

In Spain we have the ancient tradition during Xmas of children asking for presents to the Three Wise Men, instead of that ugly Coca Cola man. So here is my letter for the GNOME community:
Dear Three Wise Men
This year I’ve been a good boy, and I would like to ask for some presents for me a for my friends in the GNOME community:

Congratulations to my friend Chus that is going to marry!

Eclipse: Recently I’ve been playing with eclipse + cdt to use it as a GNOME platform development evironement. I needed to rebuild the swt-gtk/mozilla bindings because the binary provided by eclipse.org is linked agains mozilla 1.6, and both, my Fedora Core 3 and my GNOME 2.9 jhbuild env are using 1.7, and of course they are not ABI compatible. The best part of eclipse is that it’s really easy to extend. For example, I’ve been using Red Hat libhover patch to get inline info about glibc functions. I should be able to extract also this kind of function-description XML from GNOME platform gtkdoc. In the meantime, I wrote siple doc plugin to browse the full GNOME documentation inside eclipse. Also tried the ChangeLog plugin, and definitively it’s quicker than a vi myfile; prepareChangeLog.pl; vi ChangeLod; cvs commit sequence. Also tried the bugzilla plugin, but it only works with stock bugzilla, not GNOME customized one. Maybe we should wait until bugzilla 2.18 XML-RPC interface for this stuff. I’m really happy with the function autocompletion and the CVS integration diff-viewer. It would like to see a GLADE ui Builder component based on the Visual Editor Project.

Buddy List: Another issu to take on consideration when designing software is not only user cases, is also “personas” using it. I can understand that most of us (hackers, techies, etc…) are doing IM simultaneously with other task like web sufring, e-mail reading, programming, etc… But not all people is doing this. Maybe a half of my contacts, after eating dinner, sit on front of their computers just to talk over IM. They don’t want to talk to a concrete person, they just want to talk to whoever is online and spend 1 hour only doing that, so they want a full list of every on line buddy, that is a buddy list or a “search for all my online buddies groupped by groups”

Jeff, Jakub: I can I agree with you don’t like/using buddy contact list for IM, but again, we shouldn’t develop applications for hackers (as we did with GNOME 1.4). 99% of IM users wants a buddy list, just because some of the most cases of use:

• Alice has Just arrived home and is reading her email: she takes a quick look to her buddies screen names (this is because lot of users change their screen name to show their feelings) and if her friend Bob screen name is “I hate the world” she would talk with him
• Alice is bored: she chooses one of her old friends she hasn’t talked with in three months
• Alice wants to have sex: she has to see the full list of buddies, because she hasn’t a group called “fuck friends” (and cannot do a search), because she is very polite
• Alice…

This is my random (and maybe flaming) list:

• Why Red Hat is not making any Java-GNOME application? If they want to promote java as a platform for the linux desktop and bindings are stable, why not use them for their custom apps instead of pygtk?. Novell (and lot of more people) are doing cool .NET apps for Linux Desktops.
• Why garnacho is not yet on p.g.o? (He should blog more frecuently)
• Why GNOME people are not forking gaim?
• Why Microsoft has delayed so much Longhorn?Maybe to allow Linux to get a decent market share?
• Why all of us are not using Eclipse instead of Emacs or vi for developing GNOME?
• Which one would be the killer UI Builder for GNOME, glade-3 or Gazpacho
• Why we are not coding in scheme as the original GNOME Annouce said? (I’m puttig this one here just because I’m a dissaster with bookmarks)
• Whould gnome-keyring-manager be included on GNOME 2.10? It’s on FC3!
• Who will wear the pants at Stuttgard?
• How many eastern eggs do we have in GNOME?If you answer with more than 4, you win the prize