Ryan's Web Site

Calendar

Recent Bookmarks

GNOME 2.16 Released

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 0 comments

A Screenshot Utility Is Born

GNOME's built-in screenshot utility really sucks. It must be invoked every time a single screenshot is taken, the interface doesn't facilitate capture of specific windows or screen regions, there is no easy way to save the same capture to more than one location, and the tiny preview makes it difficult to evaluate the captured image before I choose to save it. When I need to make screenshots for my articles, I typically use the import command provided by ImageMagick. I finally got tired of putting up with suboptimal screen capture tools and decided to write my own.

My new screenshot utility features a full-size preview, the ability to capture individual windows or specific screen regions, an integrated file selection component, support for saving the captured image directly to a remote location, and support for saving the same capture to multiple locations. The entire utility took me about an hour to build, including time spent researching the various APIs. The current version is approximately 25 lines code, not including comments or blank lines. I designed the interface with Glade and wrote the code with Ruby. The network transparency features are all implemented with GNOME's VFS library and the screen capture functionality is provided by Ruby ImageMagick bindings.

The effectiveness of my utility, the relative ease with which I developed it, and the brevity of the code are all a testement to the power of Ruby and GNOME. I'm convinced that Ruby and Glade provide the best solution available for rapid application development on Linux. The GNOME bindings for Ruby are excellent and relatively complete, but there are still problems in a few places. The GnomeVFS bindings are currently undocumented, and the API does not behave the way one would expect it to. GnomeVFS::File diverges from the traditional File class in several respects. The most frustrating difference relates to file creation. It should be possible to create a new remote file thusly:

GnomeVFS::File.new("sftp://cixar.com/home/segphault/test.txt", 2)

Unfortunately, the above yields a "File not found" error. I queried the folks in the relevant IRC channel, but didn't get much help. After a great deal of experimentation, I filed a bug report. I then proceeded to examine the relevant source code to see if I could find out why file creation was raising a "File not found" error. Careful examination of the file_initialize function revealed that file creation only transpires when the File.new method is passed three arguments. The missing argument indicates whether or not the program should refuse to overwrite existing files. The following successfully performs the creation operation:

GnomeVFS::File.new("sftp://cixar.com/home/segphault/test.txt", 2, false)

In any event, my new utility works quite well, and you can benefit from it too, because I am distributing it under the GPL. You can read the code or download the utility. Keep in mind that it has quite a few dependencies, so you might not be able to run it if you can't get the necessary libraries.

Tags: ruby, programming, imagemagick, gnome, glade

Posted on 2005-08-24 1 comments