Would you like to see Geary 0.4 available on Ubuntu 12.04 / elementary Luna?

7 November 2013 Jim 7 Comments

We’ve received a lot of complaints from users that Geary 0.4 isn’t available for Ubuntu 12.04 (Precise Pangolin) and elementary Luna. It wasn’t an arbitrary decision on our part. As we developed Geary 0.4, we learned that more and more components that Geary relied on were changing or simply unavailable in 12.04/Luna. There’s a tangible engineering cost to maintaining backward compatibility. At some point this summer we realized it was too much work to maintain support for 12.04/Luna as well as newer versions of Ubuntu, Fedora, and all the other distros out there.

But Ubuntu 12.04 and elementary Luna (which is based off of 12.04) has a steady fan base who would really like to run Geary 0.4. What to do?

We have limited resources, but we don’t want to leave users out in the cold. We believe this is a problem both Yorba and the community can solve. So we’ve created a bounty for the problem — if someone out there (or a group of people) solves this problem for us (and therefore everyone else!), they’re rewarded with cold, hard cash. It’s that simple.

If you’re interested, read on:

There’s two pages you should read: the issue ticket at Yorba’s project server (which details the problem and the stipulations for collecting the bounty) as well as the bounty page at Bountysource.com (where the promised funds are listed).

If you want to see Geary 0.4 work on 12.04/Luna, you can help. Go to the bounty page at Bountysource.com and pledge what you can. The more the community offers, the more motivation developers have to take on this challenge. It’s not easy what we’re asking for — whomever takes this on deserves a reward for their time, energy, and expertise. What’s more, if no one solves this problem, you get your money back (minus Bountysource.com’s fee).

If you have the right stuff to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna, dive right in. Make sure you read the issue ticket first for all the stipulations. This isn’t a simple matter of getting Geary to compile on 12.04. You have to make sure anyone running 12.04 can install it via their package manager. Yorba’s developers are willing to guide you along, offer advice, point out resources or commits that you might be interested in. But you need to make it happen.

Just to show that we’re serious about this, Yorba has already pledged $500 toward this bounty. We’re hoping the community will toss in more money to further sweeten the pot. If everyone who has asked us to backport Geary 0.4 to 12.04/Luna offered $10, $25, or $50 toward the job, there would be no problem finding someone to do the work.

(Note: Yorba employees are prohibited from collecting any bounty money for Yorba-related projects.)

GNOME, Shotwell, Yorba

GIMP meets gexiv2

6 November 2013 Jim 4 Comments

The past couple of weeks we’ve seen new interest in gexiv2, the photo metadata library Yorba developed specifically for Shotwell Photo Manager. The reason? GIMP has adopted gexiv2 (and therefore Exiv2) for their photo metadata needs.

So what is gexiv2, and how is it related to Exiv2, beyond the name past the initial “g-“?

In 2010, as Yorba was adding features and expanding file format support in Shotwell, we realized its photo metadata support was lacking. Shotwell was using libexif, a workable but spare library that only offered support for (surprise) Exif, one of three major photo metadata formats. The other two (IPTC and XMP) are not nearly as widely-used as Exif, in particular with JPEGs, but are still out there and needed to be supported.

So we started looking around for alternatives. We found our solution in Exiv2, a Swiss army knife for photo metadata. There was a problem: Exiv2 is written in C++, a language we can’t directly call from Vala. We needed an adapter of some kind, a C-to-C++ bridge. It would be even better if that adapter spoke GObject. We began to hash out how such a wrapper might work.

It turned out someone was one step ahead of us. Mike Gemünde had started a project called gexiv2 that wrapped Exiv2’s C++ with a C GObject interface — perfect! (The original repository is still available here.) It was incomplete, so we contacted him asking if we could contribute. Mike was focused on a C# photo metadata library and suggested we take gexiv2 over. We’ve been developing it since.

It’s been great working with the GIMP developers so far, in particular Michael Natterer and Jehan Pagès. We’ve received two significant patches from them, including a rework to move gexiv2 to autotools. This in turn allows gexiv2 to build on Windows, something we’d not targeted at all when we began development but is obviously a hard requirement for GIMP.

I’m certain there are a lot more work and improvements to come. Shotwell has gotten plenty of mileage out of Exiv2, but GIMP will definitely exercise all its control paths.

GNOME, Yorba

October miscellany

31 October 2013 Jim 4 Comments

It’s been a wild October! It started with us releasing Geary 0.4 and Shotwell 0.15, and then a whole lotta more stuff happened. Some quick bits regarding the past four weeks (or so):

Montreal Summit

I’d like to extend my (belated) thanks to everyone who organized and hosted the Summit this year, it was a great event! Thank you Savoir Faire Linux for organizing everything and CRIM for hosting all of us. Lots of familiar faces and some new ones too. In particular it was good to hear about GTK/GLib things to come, like GNotifications and a formal model for GtkListBox, both things we’d like to take advantage of in Geary.

Montreal is a beautiful city and fortunately I had a chance to explore it before the Hackfest opened. I’m pleased to report that while there I enjoyed what sounds to be the Montreal culinary trifecta: bagels, smoked meat, and poutine.

We’ve moved (physically)

CC BY 2.0 ~ Gary Soup — “Enjoy some spicy food”

Yorba resided in San Francisco’s Mission District for over four and a half years, but the time has come for a change. We’ve been selling off furniture, cleaning off desks, and boxing up things for our big move, which happened today. Fortunately the move was painless and quick, and we’re now settled in our new office on the hairy edge of the Financial District down the hill from Chinatown. (We celebrated finishing the move with a great meal at Henry’s Hunan; go see this fellow, who has eaten and reviewed every item on their menu to teach himself Tomcat. That floors me for a lot of reasons.)

Unfortunately the preparations for the move has taken our attention off of patches and coding, but that should soon change now that we’re settled.

We’re moving (virtually)

Coincidentally, Yorba is also moving virtually — we’re transitioning from our self-hosted server to (tada!) the GNOME infrastructure. Yes, soon all of Yorba’s projects will live under the GNOME umbrella. We’re starting small to work out the kinks, but by the end of the process Shotwell, Geary, Valencia, and gexiv2 will be available at gnome.org. More information coming soon as things firm up.

GNOME, Yorba

Yorba at Montreal Hackfest 2013

12 October 2013 Jim Leave a comment

It’s a tad late to announce, but Yorba is here in Montreal this weekend for the 2013 GNOME Summit. We’ll be around all three days. Look for us or ask someone who might know us to point us out, we’re happy to talk to anyone!

Announcements, Shotwell

Shotwell 0.15 has arrived

3 October 2013 Jim 14 Comments

We at Yorba are pleased to bring you Shotwell 0.15. This version has several enhancements:

Copy and paste color adjustments between photos
Highlights detail adjustment
YouTube plugin now uses OAuth / OpenID
Videos in Missing Files now re-import properly
Improvements when thumbnailing videos
Numerous bug fixes

The Shotwell 0.15 tarball is available for download. See the installation guide for information on getting Shotwell on your system. Report bugs and feature requests at Yorba’s Redmine server. (You must create an account before adding or modifying tickets there.)

Ubuntu users can also find a version for Raring Ringtail (13.04) and Quantal Quetzal (12.10) on Yorba’s PPA. Adventurous users may also wish to subscribe to Yorba’s Daily PPA.

Announcements, Geary

Geary 0.4 is here!

3 October 2013 Jim 24 Comments

Yorba is proud to announce the release of Geary 0.4, the newest version of our lightweight email client. This release includes many enhancements:

Per-account full text search
Automatic save to draft
Refreshed user interface
Per-folder unread email count
Experimental support for Outlook.com
Enhanced “show external images” preference
Find bar for locating text within a conversation (Ctrl+F)
Improved handling of attachments
Malicious link checker
Passwords stored with libsecret instead of GNOME Keyring
Hundreds of bugs fixed and small improvements

The Geary 0.4 tarball is available for download. See Yorba’s wiki for information on building, running, and contributing to Geary. Report bugs and feature requests at Yorba’s Redmine server. (You must create an account before adding or modifying tickets there.)