GNOME 2.16 has been released! With new features for many of my favorite programs, numerous bugfixes, and many aesthetic improvements, GNOME 2.16 is very polished and ready for widespread deployment. Although I tested it extensively in a virtualized VMware environment (the VMware image was kindly provided by Brent Smith), I think I'll probably wait until the official release of Ubuntu Edgy before using it on my main desktop computer.
I'm very pleased with the new features in the Evolution mail client, particularly the newly added support for a vertical message pane view. Evolution got a lot of really nice performance enhancements for this release, and the developers say that IMAP loading time is up to 48 percent faster! Maybe now Jorge will complain less often about Evolution's IMAP deficiencies. Gedit now has a sidebar file browser plugin as well as support for LaTeX authoring. With a built-in snippets system and support for scripting with Python, Gedit is quickly becoming a powerful tool.
For a more comprehensive overview of new features in GNOME 2.16, check out the review I wrote for Ars Technica. Published a day before the official release, my review attracted significant attention, and has been featured on most of the open source news sites that I read on a daily basis, including: Slasdhot, OS News, Footnotes, Linux Today, and Linux Weekly News. I also submitted it to Digg, where it rapidly climbed onto the top ten list for the technology section. Needless to say, my review has spawned inevitable GNOME vs. KDE arguments in discussion threads on several sites.
The 2.16 release is the first to include Mono as an official dependency. Support for C# applications and open source .NET technology became a controversial and highly divisive issue within the GNOME community in the weeks leading up to the official module decisions. Although I was initially a sceptic when Mono was still in its infancy (at the time, I felt that it would be more productive for the open source community to focus on Parrot), the steady stream of highly impressive C# applications developed by the GNOME community quickly changed my mind. In the past year, I have been a very vocal advocate of Mono because I see .NET as the future of desktop software development. I hope that the Mono developers can keep pace with Microsoft, and I hope to see compelling new .NET features like xlinq included in Mono in the future. Released yesterday, the latest version of MonoDevelop has a lot of exciting new features, including support for inline menu editing in the Stetic GUI builder, and integrated support for ASP.net development.
My Contributions
My contributions to 2.16 were minor but much-needed. I started rewriting the documentation for various applications in the gnome-games module. I have temporarily postponed additional work on gnome-games because my professional life is quite demanding at the moment, and because at least one of the games will be removed at some point in the next cycle and I don't really know which one yet.
I also helped with the release notes for 2.16. The release notes are typically done by Davyd and Murray, both of whom are relatively articulate. For whatever reason, they weren't available to it this time, and the responsibility fell upon other volunteers from the GNOME marketing list. The whole thing was done at the last minute and Claus Schwarm ended up writing most of the initial draft. I went through it and cleaned up a lot of minor problems. I primarily fixed spelling and grammatical errors, but I also rewrote several paragraphs for the sake of clarity. Others did the same, and the end result was more or less acceptable. Brent Smith converted it to DocBook practically overnight, and included screenshots augmented by my utility. The entire process felt very rushed, and I hope that it is planned better next time. If I hadn't noticed Quim's blog entry about the release notes on PGO and posted it to the documentation mailing list, fewer members of the GNOME documentation team would have been involved. Despite the minor problems, the release notes turned out fine. Claus and Brent deserve a lot of credit for their efforts. As a aside note, now that I have seen the effects in action on numerous screenshots, I think that drop shadows should only be used on screenshots with a single window, and edge fading should only be used on screenshots that include an arbitrary portion of the screen.
I want to take this opportunity to thank everybody that was involved in making GNOME 2.16 a reality. Everybody did a great job, and I'm looking forward to contributing as we march towards GNOME 2.18!
Tags: gnome, glade, gdp, mono, monodevelop, evolution, stetic, gedit, journalism
Posted on 2006-09-07
In the dynamic world of technology journalism, there are very few universal truisms. One of the most important things I have learned is that screenshots almost always improve the quality of an article. In written works about software, particularly in reviews or tutorials, screenshots fulfill a number of crucial functions and imbue content with elegance and authority that would otherwise be absent. Failure to include a screenshot in a news article about a new program, for instance, elicits criticism and rebuke from irritated readers. They don't just appreciate screenshots, they expect screenshots.
The screenshot rule isn't entirely applicable to documentation. Although screenshots are still important in documentation, it is a context in which they should be used sparingly. There are many reasons for this, but I think the most important one is that screenshots are more likely to be superfluous in task-oriented reference material that is meant to be used alongside the actual program. In many cases, screenshots in the GNOME documentation are used to help the user confirm that they are reading about the right program.
Although I routinely use screenshots to break up large blocks of text in articles in order to increase readability, screenshots in documentation actually have the opposite effect. As the GNOME documentation style guide points out, breaking up documentation text with screenshots inconveniences readers by making them do additional scrolling. There are also some pragmatic reasons. Each screenshot included in the documentation has to be replicated by translators in each of the 42 languages supported by GNOME (Update: the GDP is evaluating ways to automate this process). Screenshots also have to be updated constantly as continued development alters the appearance of applications.
One of the points mentioned in the style guide has been of particular concern to the GDP lately. Usability studies have shown that users confuse screenshots in documentation with real windows. Although this may seem far fetched, it is apparently a very real concern, and one that we are actively trying to address. Joachim suggests fading the edges of screenshots to make the distinction between windows and images more apparent to users. I think this is a great idea, but as Joachim points out in a comment on bug #348495, there is no way to ensure that the fading effect will be consistent in all screenshots. Additionally, opening up the GIMP and doing that sort of operation for every image could become very time consuming.
For the sake of simplicity and consistency, I think we need to automate the process. In order to facilitate discussion on the possibility of leveraging automated image effects, I have developed a simple proof-of-concept utility that automatically blurs the edges of PNG images and applies a drop shadow.
The New Utility
Written in Python, my new utility leverages Cairo, PIL, and GTK. I initially wanted to do all of the image processing with ImageMagick, but the ImageMagick bindings for Python don't appear to be maintained or widely distributed. When I discovered the binding deficiency, I thought about using Ruby instead of Python, but the utility really needs to be built with a language that is used and understood by other GNOME developers. I also want to avoid foisting Ruby/GNOME dependency headaches on other documentation writers. It would have been nice to be able to avoid using PIL, but Cairo doesn't seem to have a working guassian blur filter yet, and I need that in order to produce a drop shadow. There is actually a value in Cairo::Filter called FILTER_GAUSSIAN, but apparently it doesn't do anything yet.
Using PIL to render the drop shadow is problematic because there is no simple way to convert Cairo surfaces into PIL image instances with version 1.0.2 of Cairo. Right now, the only way to do it is to save the Cairo surface to disk and load it back into a PIL image instance. Since the Python Cairo bindings don't use Python's file interface conventions, I can't just save to a StringIO instance like I do when I want to get a PIL image into a GDK pixbuf. There are some nasty hacks that involve wrapping a Cairo surface around a binary array, but that particular trick causes some peculiar problems and distorts the images in some cases. Fortunately, a new surface method called to_rgba() is already in CVS, and possibly even in the next major version of Cairo. For now, I have the script automatically save the image and load it back in again, but hopefully I'll be able to eliminate that step in the future.
My working prototype isn't particularly elegant, but it is effective. I spent an extra hour adding a user interface that allows the user to customize the parameters of the operation. Users can drag sliders to change several values:
- border - specifies the size of the faded regions
- filled - specifies how far from the edges the fades should end
- offset - specifies the drop shadow offset
The UI is currently very kludgy, but it will make it easy to compare various configurations and determine exactly which values should be used by default for documentation screenshots. If there is sufficient interest, I plan to eventually produce a complete, streamlined screenshot utility specifically for use by documentation writers. It will include support for screen region selection and it will make it possible to capture multiple images and then choose which ones to save. (Update: It looks like other members of the GDP team are also interested in automation and have some very cool ideas of their own. I particularly like the idea of using DogTail for automatically grabbing the images.)
The current implementation of my utility can be run as a stand-alone script or loaded into other Python scripts as a module. To execute it in stand-alone mode, simply run it from the command line and provide the path to a png file as a parameter:
python edge_fader.py screenshot.png
The following example shows how to use the edge fader as a module:
import edge_fader
img = edge_fader.fade_edges("original.png",
border = 30, filled = 2, offset = 6, show_shadow = True)
edge_fader.save_to_disk(img, "output.png")
View the source code here, and download it here. In order to run it, you will need PIL, and Python bindings for Cairo and GTK. An example of the program's output can be found here, and this is a screenshot of the program itself. Comments and criticism are greatly appreciated.
Tags: programming, screenshots, python, gnome, cairo, gdp
Posted on 2006-08-02
