Create the vision
10. June 2008
(for all who are just not interested in useless “Future of GNOME”-discussion – just open a beer or scroll down)
Personally, I think Andy has started the right discussion and the approaching GUADEC is also a good time for it.
The whole GNOME community really needs to start thinking about the next generation Desktop – whatever that will be. Maybe it’s very similar to the current Desktop but sure it will just be better. Andy mentions some good ideas though 3D and desktop effects may not be the only truth.
But let’s assume we want to go into the desktop effects direction, what would we want there? GNOME was always meant to be clean and easy to use and we should continue this. Until now, desktop effects are just “effects”, they look spectacular but there is now real need to have them despite impressing your neighbor. Let’s change this! Let’s have desktop effects in a way that they improve the user interaction. Usually that means that computers should act more like the physical world but not by copying the annoyances of the physical world but by using work-flows developed thousands of years ago. That could mean to put documents aside or to stack them or do whatever you find appropriate.
The main problem of such abstract visions is that they are visions. We don’t need more visions, we need implementations. When you compare our current development libraries with those available before last GUADEC we have made a big step with clutter and other things now available. Perhaps it’s now time to include such things in mainline GNOME in an incremental way without breaking everything. So everybody: take the ideas that are mentioned on the planet and create the next generation desktop instead of talking of it. I already said to much…
BTW, the first thing I would love to see is a more fancy (and useful) GNOME panel…
LinuxTag 2008 Berlin
29. May 2008
If anyone is attending LinuxTag, I will have a talk about the GNOME Development tools on Saturday 15:00 o’clock in Room “Paris”. It will be in German, a short description is available through the link below:
I won’t have much time to be there at other times so don’t really expect to meet me at the conference.
Update: The slides
Anjuta status update
30. April 2008
So, we all have been busy to improve anjuta over the past weeks. Now, there are also some user visible changes in the UI:
- Sebastien implemented a new Run plugin which eliminates the mess of having a Build->Execute and Debug->Execute which both do not really fit. Instead, there is now a new “Run” menu which allows you to run programs (with or without debugger) and set a lot of parameters including environment variables of all kind.
- Due to popular request I started a document-manager bug-fixing day and added some of gedit features to anjuta (#529528 and #453702). There is now a “Documents” menu that allows switching between the open documents (by the menu and by keyboard). To avoid cluttering the menu bar too much, the “Goto” menu is now a submenu of the “View” menu as I guess people either use accels to access these items or rarely use them.
- Work on the new symbol database continues. Massimo is doing a great job and the project-wide symbol are already working great (requires libgda-v4). Now, we have to work on the system wide symbols to autocomplete all libraries bound to the project.
Screenshots coming soon…
Give more color to the world!
31. March 2008
When looking into screenshots of KDE, Windows Vista or MacOS X you will notice that they killed most of the grey from their Desktop and replaced it by colors or black. None of the themes is absolutely great but they all look very pretty and modern.
I am a really bad artist but when I look at our Clearlooks or Ubuntu Human themes I feel they are very drab. This is not about usability which is definitely great but just about the impression you get the first time you fire-up your GNOME Desktop. Everything grey, grey panels, grey window, grey taskbar, etc. Too much grey. Too much 90’s.
Of course grey has the advantage of being a neutral color but couldn’t we set some colored accents on the Desktop? Has everything to be clean, cold and neutral?
As I said before, I am bad artist and won’t be much help on this topic but might anybody want to add a bit more color to the clearlooks theme? The clearlooks engine is really rocking but I think we could gain a much better user impression with more and better colors. I searched on art.gnome.org but did not find anything that could fill this gap for me.
Anjuta Python-Binding
20. March 2008
Sébastien put up a nice website for the Anjuta Python-Bindings!
No more excuses not to write plugins!
Anjuta 2.4
15. March 2008
So, I haven’t yet written about our new release, the first one that is included in mainline GNOME. Partly motivated by Miguels’s post on MonoDevelop (which would actually share a lot of code with anjuta in case they hadn’t rewritten all the libraries in C#) I will present the new and improved features. Some were already mentioned in an older post.
Editing
Code editing is probably the most essential part of an IDE. While it’s pretty unlikely to convert people using vim/emacs to an IDE we at least try to make people happy that have used IDEs on other operating system or are coding using GEdit. There have been plenty of improvements in code completion and auto-indentation in this release and it should work pretty well for C/C++ now. We always look for people to write language-support plugins for more languages (yeah, it’s easy…). This release also features the latest and best version of GtkSourceView.
In addition we also improved the way to quickly search in a file using the new “Quick Search Bar”. (c) of this is probably from the vim/emacs and firefox developers, but why shouldn’t we copy it if it’s good!
UI Design
With this release we made a big step towards better glade integration also thanks to the glade-3 developers. The old and ugly “Glade”-menu is now gone and instead the “File” and “Edit” menu items will now also work on the opened glade file. And the glade file is displayed like any other source file in the central editor window.
But there is still room for improvements!
Version Control
The Subversion plugin was improved in many ways and it a pleasure to use now. It gives you much better control over operations then the command line frontend. You can for example select which files to commit, resolve conflicts and view logs now in the GUI:
The great work on subversion plugin was done by James Liggett (who is looking for a part-time job in case you need a talented GTK+ hacker…).
Debugger
With this release, the debugger doesn’t suck any more. You can debug your code with nearly all features available from gdb, inspect variables, set breakpoints, set watches, etc. And it’s rocking stable now and should make your live on killing bugs much easier:
Thanks!
Thanks to everyone who made this release possible, especially, Naba, Sébastien, Massimo, James, Tom, Rob and all the translator who fought this 1700 string monster (and reported all these l10n bugs).
Future
Anjuta follows the GNOME approach to try to keep things simple and our Roadmap reflects that. The goal is to make the existing features perfect before adding yet another. Of course that does not mean we are not interested in new plugins. Everybody who wants to contribute is highly welcome, especially for supporting more languages.
FOSDEM and GTK+ bugs
26. February 2008
FOSDEM was great fun and I had a great time with Jürg and the Swiss Vala Gang.
Here is a photo from the “What you dislike” part of the GNOME wall (sorry for the bad quality):
Would be cool if the Gtk+ Hackweek would result in a fix.
And if someone wants to fix the anjuta top-crasher (which is a gdl/gtk+ bug), review the patch at bug #467698 – Thanks!
Update: I did not write that note but the bug number is #56070. Thanks to andre and ebassi for pointing out!
svn:externals for noobs!
20. February 2008
As I am usually far to lazy to RTFM I had to learn how to add externals definition to subversion the hard way. But as other might probably need it, too, here is how it works (mind the dot at the end…):
svn propset svn:externals "<directory name> -r<revision> http://svn.gnome.org/svn/yourmodule/trunk/your_directory" .
The problem is that after that command it will not work because you have to commit the property change first:
svn commit -m "Changed external property"
So here is the final example:
svn propset svn:externals "eggtoolpalette -r853 http://svn.gnome.org/svn/libegg/trunk/libegg/toolpalette/" .
svn commit -m "Added eggtoolpalette"
svn update
And now you will have eggtoolpalette revision 853 in your tree. Thanks to herzi for helping me solving this problem on IRC.
Ubuntu Packaging, Anjuta, Glom, i18n
29. January 2008
Joining the recent discussion about Ubuntu packaging policies I would really prefer if they would update their versions to the stable branch. For us developers it’s a lot of work to backport things to the stable branch and fix the major bugs in it. We do that because we don’t want to force people to use unstable versions and because the stable version has lots of users and therefore lots of testing. In general it is unlikely that a x.0 version will ever be released without some minor/major bugs because the development version has never enough testers and something will be missed. Anyway, we do more stable releases for the one and only reason that distributions can update their packages and give their users better software. If you don’t trust us that our new stable version won’t brake everything than we really can’t help you that much.
Anjuta 2.3.3 was released yesterday and this will mean that UI should now be frozen. We did a lot of bug-fixing in the last weeks. Thanks to all those people testing and reporting bugs and writing patches. Also thanks to my two GHOP Students, Philipp Kerling and Boleslaw Kulbabinski for their work and I hope to see future constributions from them. [EDIT] Forgot that I wanted to ask for some volunteer artists to have a look at #511000 and maybe also #510047.
In the meantime I have been working on the Glom drag & drop stuff for Openismus. Unfortunately there is still nothing that could be shown but be sure that I will post a screencast once it is finished.
There has been a lot of discussion about locking upstream translations in Launchpad. Many translation teams agreed here but we probably have to sent some official request to the Launchpad people. I hope that is no big deal as we usually have a good relationship with Ubuntu.
GtkSourceView 2.1 in Anjuta
5. January 2008
After Paolo Borelli, Paolo Maggi and others helped a lot in adding support for marks in GtkSourceView 2.0 (#487098), I was finally able to update Anjuta to use the new and much nicer version. The obligatory screenshot:
Please also notice the new symbol-db plugin on the right-hand side which is constantly getting better thanks to Massimo Cora’ and should be end-user ready within some weeks. We are also very pleased that OpenedHand is supporting us with a patch.
For those interested, I also opened a new GHOP task for anjuta.
Happy coding!