GNOME Scan

Hi,

After 0.7.1, i paused my GNOME Scan development for few weeks. Luckily, i got some feedback about 0.7.1 and 0.6.X releases. Thanks to Philipp, the bugzilla is active. Today i woken up the development by adding a shiny new feature of GNOME Scan that make it actually a library, not a standalone program. This feature is inspired by the TWAIN standard i took some time to read. I call this feature « option preselection ».

Option Preselection

This feature allows end application to preselect various properties of option on all the nodes. Currently, only default value is implemented, but the final goal is to constraint logically hardware option. E.g. : only allow to select in RGB, ont Grey ; or add standard Picture format to format selector in your f-spot scanner plugin. Currently only default value is handled. I added back the “Use screen resolution as default resolution” feature in flegita.

In 0.6, application could override a value in GnomeScanSettings thus preselecting default value. This was an unpredicted feature :). But it shows its limits when it comes to constraint values.

Maintaining 0.6 branch

With Philipp, we are doing a good job on maintaining 0.6 series. This series is not that bad. Today i fixed the Gimp plugin to properly handle gray scan. We plan to release 0.6.2 a soon as possible. I would like to fix support of SANE backend using pixel unit for scan area.

There is also some bugs that cause GNOME Scan to crash randomously at startup. I suspect thread managment to cause this behaviour. Very bad bug :). That would be good to have it fixed for GNOME 2.26 in a 0.6.3 release. No plan through.

Developping 0.7 branch

For now, i want to implement a good preview handling in GNOME Scan, taking advantage of the new option infrastructure (both model and UI). After that big point, i’ll add processing back (rotation, correction, etc.) and option persistance in GConf.

Regards,

Étienne