Toolbars without bonobo?
7. March 2007
After Murray pointed out that bonobo will be deprecated in GNOME 2.18 (thanks!) I wonder how to implement this nice dockable toolbars in the future. Of course HIG-fetishists will say that they are overkill but in feature and UI monsters like Anjuta they are not really avoidable.
It depends very much on your workflow which toolbars you find useful and which not and how you want to arrange them especially on small screens. Without being able to dock them this is difficult to archive.
P.S: Some complained it’s difficult to contact me! It’s not: jhs(at)gnome.org
Quo vadis bonobo?
5. March 2007
Recently I hacked on the Anjuta toolbar system to split the big toolbars into several smaller ones. Of course the layout of those toolbars needs to be saved across sessions. This is not really difficult but I soon found me in the situation where I just scrolled around svn.gnome.org to find out what the methods in libbonoboui do because there is no real documentation.
The code is mostly clean and the functionality is also great but this seems one of the parts of GNOME that are not really maintained. I never found any notice that bonobo is deprecated so I guess other also find this useful. At least this is the easiest way to get plugable toolbars which are really useful for applications that provide a lot of toolbar buttons. Of course libbonoboui might be able to do much more, I just did not hit other parts yet.
So, what is the status of bonobo? Is there some roadmap and will it survive project ridley?
Bad ideas!
19. February 2007
It was a real bad idea to fix the anjuta .desktop file recently to allow proper bugs reports in bugzilla. People just file to many crash bugs now…
Linus’ metacity patches
17. February 2007
So, I just read Christan Schaller’s blog about the patches Linux Torvalds submitted to metacity and control center.
As that is not really mentioned anywhere (and I had to search various mailing list archives) here is the original mail, so anyone can get an idea of what these patches do and why someone would want to have this options. I don’t know if this patches a good, useful, whatever.
I am just a bit upset about the way this communication happened between people from GNOME and some contributor. I say some contributor here because we should not make any difference between people willing to help us. Linus is like anyone else and if he sent patches to the wrong mailing list than we can politely tell him. Of course, Linus might not have ever been fair to the GNOME community but nevertheless nobody should treat him differently than anybody else therefore (see Code of Conduct).
GNOME rocks! Let’s make it even better!
Anjuta 2.1.1
12. February 2007
So not even one month after the last release, anjuta 2.1.1 hits the road. We have fixed a lot of annoying bugs so I hope you will enjoy this release. We will continue to concentrate on bug-fixing but will probably create some interesting branches in the meantime to get even more cool feature in. Grab it from Anjuta.org!
As Murray already posted we at Openismus are still working on finishing libgdamm and libgnomedbmm. We did not expect that we would have to work so much on the C sources (see my previous post) but I hope we can finish them soon.
Use construct properties
2. February 2007
This is a comment for all people writing GObject-style libraries that may have to be wrapped for other programming languages (C++, etc). And as you only write cool libraries which will be that useful that they will one day be wrapped, this applies to all your libraries.
Construct properties
Add a property for every parameter of your _new method. These parameters can be restricted to G_PARAM_WRITABLE|G_PARAM_CONSTRUCT_ONLY if it is useless to set them after initialisation. The actual setting is done by overriding the set_property method of GObject. You can also ref/unref you parameters if necessary there.
The *_new method
The new method should just consist of one call to g_object_new(MY_TYPE, “foo”, foo, “bar”, bar, …, NULL). NEVER add anything else to this method!
The _init method
Here you can do as much initialisation work as you like. This method is called by the GObject system and thus will be accessed from all language bindings.
Why?
When wrapping a library it is lots of work and takes lots of time to convert every parameter to a construction property and to move all other initialisation code from _new to _init. Besides it is clean and everybody will start loving you…(and you would have saved me at least two hours today!)
Anjuta 2.1.0 is out!
15. January 2007
The Anjuta team is proud to annouce Anjuta 2.1.0, the first beta release of the anjuta 2.x series. This release is also the first that is sticking to the x.1.x = unstable convention as many people have been confused by this before. Read the full release note and get if from our website.
Take your bounty!
23. November 2006
There are still bountys left for Anjuta. For example Fixing the project wizards shouldn’t really be that difficult and does not even require any coding.
Go on, ask on the ML, file a bug about it and earn the money!
Getting cool auto-indent in vim
10. November 2006
Usually, I think there are better ways to write code today but often vim is simply useful because you are on an ssh connection or in a virtual environment or whatever.
Anyway, to get the IMHO quite cool auto-indent feature when pressing
“Tab” like emacs does, simply put this in your .vimrc:
set cindent
set smartindent
set autoindent
set expandtab
set tabstop=2
set shiftwidth=2
set cinkeys=0{,0},:,0#,!,!^F
Of course you can read more about the vim indenting feature in the documentation. Of course, I think most of you will know that already, so this entry is more a reminder for me.
[EDIT] uws remindend me, that the first three lines were missing. Seems the default on my system already included them. Thanks!
non-DRM stores
29. October 2006
In reply to Rodney’s post:
I pointed to akuma as a non-DRM store last time. They save see music as mp3 you downloaded an you can restore it ONCE. To protect their mp3s they add a watermark.
But it may have some disadvantages (for you):
– It’s in german (though you can pay by paypal for example)
– They don’t have all and every music availible
The second issue is due to the fact that the big labels like Sony and BMG simply do not allow selling their music as mp3. Of course this does not mean that there is only bad music in the store, they really have a lot of good music but they don’t have the music some would call “mainstream”.