context switch

Sincerest Forms of Flattery

tidy: they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery:

the actual amount of code is quite small, and it’s already available in Tidy.

challenges: Luca dared me into making a Clutter-based coverflow-like plugin for Rhythmbox, but it was Iain that picked the challenge up and wrote some basic code for it. I, on the other hand, don’t like coverflow for browsing my music collection, so I finally decided to write something for the Eye of GNOME — a Ken Burns effect slide show. it’s not at all finished, and if nobody picks it up, I’ll try and do my best to have it ready for GNOME 2.24, if EOG maintainers want it, of course. it’s not the best display of Clutter features — except the animation framework — but if you have hardware acceleration it will make slideshows look a lot nicer.

json-glib: this weekend I released the first developers snapshot of JSON-GLib 0.6; the API is stable, the test suite is rocking and this release finally fixes the last bit needed for full RFC 4627 compliance (Unicode escaping). I’m probably going to release 0.6.0 in a couple of weeks.

Good Intentions

unique: this morning I released version 0.9.4 of libunique, everyone (least) favourite library for writing single instance applications. it’s mostly a bug fixing release, and since I’ve decided to release 1.0.0 soon, this is also the first release candidate for the 1.0 milestone. I’ve also moved the git repository to github, so you can clone it with:

  git clone git://github.com/ebassi/unique.git

I plan to add back a new x11 backend for the 1.2 release, targeting small embedded environments were D-Bus might not be an option, and support for a --replace command line switch. after that, I’ll try to get the same functionalities into GLib/GTK+, as part of the future “desktop platform” module.

Clutter: I did a 0.6.2 release of both the core and the Python bindings, but things are afoot in trunk. we recently landed the multi-stage branch, which means that you’ll be able to create multiple windows and multiple GtkClutterEmbed widgets per application with Clutter 0.8. we’re also about to land the massive COGL rewrite that Ivan Leben of ShivaVG fame did — which will make the GL and GLES abstraction more powerful, will reduce the code duplication and in general will rock your world. Neil Roberts has been doing loads of work on the native Win32 backend: he not only made it possible to run Clutter on WGL, but also use the GtkClutterEmbed on Windows natively:

now, only the Quartz backend is missing the party — hint hint, nudge nudge.

OpenedHand: we’re hiring!

Enterlude

I’ve just sent this to the Clutter mailing list, but I guess that more exposure is fine

as some of you might already know, we have started working on a reference “toolkit” based on Clutter called Tidy.

Tidy is a simple library containing some useful actors and interfaces which can be used by applications developers; it aims to be simple and yet provide some high-level classes that Clutter won’t provide.

it is by no mean complete, or aiming to replace other toolkits; you can think of it as a reference implementation for a toolkit based on Clutter.

Tidy works as a standalone toolkit, but it can also be used as a copy-and-paste repository, like libegg for the gtk+ stack; because of this, it doesn’t provide any kind of API or ABI guarantee, and it probably won’t be released in form of tarballs. it can be seen as a constant work in progress.

right now, Tidy is composed of these classes:

• TidyActor - a base actor class, implementing stylable actors, with padding and alignment
• TidyButton - a simple button class
• TidyFrame - a container capable of aligning its only child
• TidyListView - a list view using ClutterModel to introspect its structure and contents
  • TidyCellRenderer - base cell renderer class
  • TidyCellRendererDefault - default cell renderer
  • TidyListColumn - base column class
  • TidyListColumnDefault - default column
• TidyTextureFrame - a texture that efficiently clones a background image so that it can stretch the entire size allocation
• TidyProxyTexture - a texture class that efficiently caches the source file
  • TidyTextureCache - a cache for textures loaded from on-disk data
• TidyTextureReflection - an actor using GL to compute a reflection of the parent texture (imported from the toys)
• TidyStylable - base interface for stylable objects
  • TidyStyle - storage class for a style
• TidyScrollable - base interface for scrollable actors
  • TidyAdjustment - object for clamping a value between two boundaries (with quantum increments support)
  • TidyScrollBar - scroll bar actor controlling an adjustment
  • TidyViewport - scrollable viewport controlled by a pair of adjustments

Update@2008-02-07T10:01Z: after this announcement, Chris added two new actors:

• TidyScrollView - a viewport with scoll bars
• TidyFingerScroll - a viewport with kinetic scrolling

Plus a lot of bug fixes.

there are examples for basically every class and functionality under the tests/ directory.

since everybody want screencasts these days:

this is still in the prototyping stage; meaning: if it breaks (and it will break) you get to keep both the pieces. also, there are rough edges and missing functionality. we’ll keep working on it and adding new classes between now and Clutter 0.6 (and after), and also use Tidy as a testing ground for Clutter functionality and staging ground for actors/data structures/interfaces.

you can check out Tidy from SVN using:

  svn co http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/tidy/trunk tidy

or browse the repository from your web browser via:

  http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/tidy/trunk/ (raw)
  http://svn.o-hand.com/view/tidy/trunk/ (viewcvs)

in other, Clutter-related news:

• Iain has been working on a Clutter and WebKit-based browser actor; you’ll find a very cool screencast of it on Iain’s blog.
• In Clutter trunk we landed initial support for FBOs and we’re fixing bugs/updating bindings/updating documentation toward the 0.6.0 release.
• It’s a bit old, but I’ve been updating the Vala bindings for Clutter and Clutter-GTK, so you can now use all the bling with Vala; you’ll need Vala trunk, but it’s worth it.

Kingdom of Spain

Clutter: Today I released the first developers snapshot of Clutter 0.6 - Clutter 0.5.0. The full announcement is on the Clutter blog, and since it’s very long, I won’t copy and paste it here. You can grab 0.5.0 here; as usual, this is a unstable snapshot, and it’s meant to be used to play with the new API, start binding it and find the inevitable bugs that might have creeped in - and help us fixing them as well.

Last week I also went through the huge list of changes, additions and removals in the public API; the result is a collection of seven emails (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7) I sent on the clutter-list - complete of mistakes which I can only attribute to the amount of food, wine and beer I had during the Xmas break.

I’m incredibly proud of how much Clutter grew since the 0.4 release we did after GUADEC; the amount of bug fixes alone makes it worth to check it out - and the new features list is impressive. A lot happened, and a lot more will happen in the near future; some things are already here - but will be announced in due time.

As always, kudos to everyone that has helped by filing bugs and patches; started writing bindings; and last, but not least, contributed documentation.

Stinging Velvet

Clutter - If release 0.4 rocked hard, release 0.6 of Clutter will blow your mind away. Just to list some features landed in the past couple of weeks after ClutterScript got in:

• new event handling, borrowing from the W3C DOM event - that is, two event phases: capture, which traverses the scene from the stage to the actor that received the event, and bubble which traverses the scene from the actor to the stage. You can block the event chain in any point of both phases by simply returning TRUE in the signal handlers (like GTK+); kudos to mallum and Pippin
• improved text scaling, at least for downscaling at ~50%; kudos to Pippin
• build and test on win32 using the SDL backend, complete with VS2005 build files; kudos to tf
• time-based timelines, so you can define a ClutterTimeline by giving its length in milliseconds; and without even breaking the API.

Still, there’s plenty more coming - so keep looking at trunk.

JSON-GLib - The code base has been consolidated a lot while working on ClutterScript, so I feel confident about making a release of the out-of-tree repository. The release is bagged, tagged and signed as json-glib-0.2.1 in the git repository¹. You can grab the tarball here. Work on seamless GObject-JSON (de)serialization will continue in the master branch towards a 0.4.0 release. Update@2007-10-16T23:30+0100: obviously, as soon as I got back home and checked the repository I found two bugs in the generator code; hence, brown paper bag release 0.2.1. Tarball, documentation and tag updated.

1. As usual, at http://folks.o-hand.com/~ebassi/git/json-glib.git [↩]

Flying Teapot

Clutter 0.4.0 was, finally, released two days ago. Not only the core and add-on libraries but also the language bindings are available for this new stable release cycle.

We already started working on trunk for the 0.5/0.6 development cycle, which should hopefully lead up to another stable release in six months; there already is a nice list of features we are working on, but I’d like to see more requests, more patches ( ) and people working on even more language bindings.

Take it or leave it

After the comments on my latest blog post, I got back at Unique and did some rearrangements in the code base. Now the backends are all compiled in (obviously, depending on whether you have the dependencies to compile them) and the backend to be used can be defined at runtime. The default backend is chosen at compile time and can be overridden by setting the UNIQUE_BACKEND environment variable. Obviously, if you launch an instance with UNIQUE_BACKEND=dbus and another one with UNIQUE_BACKEND=bacon you will have two instances running - but that’s only to be expected.

I’ve also updated the API to something I can probably call “semi-frozen” (small API additions notwithstanding); the constructor changed to always accept a startup notification id (it will try to be clever and find it for you if you pass NULL, though) and allows you to define custom commands with a single call.

As usual, you can clone the Git repository from here:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~ebassi/git/unique.git

or grab the tarball for 0.9.20.9.3 from here.

I’ll keep working on making a 1.0.0 release at GUADEC (probably it’ll happen right at GUADEC), API/ABI stable and with the Xlibs backend. Then I’ll resume working on the GtkApplication class, which will have the Unique features but will (hopefully) be integrated in GTK+.

Update@2007-07-12T12:54+0100: New release, with full API reference documentation, a couple of stupid bugs squashed and workspace support.

Strange news from another star

I’ve been promising a release of GtkUnique for a while now, but work and other stuff got in the way of the namespace change-slash-rewrite. Yesterday I finally got around finishing the porting of the Unix domain sockets backend (or “bacon”) so I cooked up a preliminary release with the D-Bus and Bacon backends working. You can find the tarball here or, if you’re feeling in hacking mood, you can check out the git repository from here:

  git clone http://www.gnome.org/~ebassi/git/unique.git

the unique-0.9.1 is the tag for this release. I’ll work on finishing the port of the Xlibs backend and target a stable 1.0.0 release for GUADEC.

The API of Unique changed a bit since the last GtkUnique release, and I think it’ll change a bit more in order to be usable with the smallest impact possible. Now you can register custom commands and there’s convenience API for sending strings and URI lists; the command registration and construction API might change to something similar to the GtkDialog API - and I might switch to a more signal based approach (construct the message payload inside a signal handler) before 1.0. I also might add a –replace command line switch that gets slurped and does The Right Thing for you.

The biggest change is happening under the hood, though; with this release, the UniqueApp instance will request the specified name as soon as it is created, so you’ll be guaranteed to either be the first running instance or be able to send messages to the currently running instance at the same moment that the UniqueApp constructor returns. Hence, no more race conditions between the constructor and the “is running” request. Finally, the “window watching” functions have been removed - even though I might add a “watch window” function to handle the startup notification sequence for you (now that we have the API to do that in GTK+ 2.11).

This release also means that the code in SVN under the gtkunique module is to be considered deprecated. I’m going to ask the svnmaster to move it into the attic, as the delta is too big for a simple check-in. As soon as 1.0.0 is out I’ll also ask the release-team for “blessing” Unique as a dependency, so if you want your module to depend on it you’ll be able to safely do it. Again, sorry for taking this long to finish up this work.

Update@2007-07-09T15:16+0100: I’ve just rolled a 0.9.1 to fix some build issues and add licensing terms. Thanks to Christian Persch for the heads up.

Shazam!

GNOME 2.18 is out! Go and check it out!

Obviously, the release of GNOME 2.18 means that we can now start working on 2.20 - after a well deserved beer.

Small Stakes

Tonight I released version 2.17.90 of the GNOME Utilities package.

It’s not just another release: it marks the end of the work on the interactive dialog of the screenshot utility:

Now every command line switch is replicated on the interactive dialog that comes up when you launch the screenshot utility either from the menu or from the command line using the --interactive switch; each setting is taken into account, so calling gnome-screenshot --interactive --delay=5 --window --border-effect=border will change the UI accordingly (this very command line produced the dialog above).

This point release also marks the beginning of the work for the next development cycle; instead on working on the main trunk, I’ll open branches for the features I plan to add to the various components of the Utilities package:

• plugin support for the System Log Viewer; this has already been written by the (great and incredibly patient) Lin Ma from Sun, but it still needs some cleaning up;
• local sources for the Dictionary; as above, there already is a patch but needs to be cleaned up;
• a new save dialog for the Screenshot utility;
• add an area selector for the Screenshot, so you can pick a specific part of the desktop;

I’m also considering dropping the Dictionary applet from the Utilities, as its functionalities are pretty much covered by the plugin of the deskbar applet, and the deskbar applet is considerably more worth your panel space. The only thing that keeps me from removing the applet is that the deskbar applet is written in Python, and this might be an issue for slower machines; I could move the applet out of tree into its own package and let the distributions or the single users pick it up.

What I would really like to do in the next cycle is to revive GFloppy. At the moment, is compiled conditionally and it’s pretty much useless unless you have a floppy drive and the floppy utilities installed (it can use HAL to check for the available drives, but HAL doesn’t have the ability to programmatically format a volume); since not many computers come with a floppy drive anymore, I’d like for someone with HAL knowledge to pick GFloppy up and find a way to make it work with removable devices, like USB or flash solid state memories. Otherwise, I’ll have to consider dropping GFloppy too, as I don’t have a floppy drive anymore and can’t obviously maintain an application I can’t test.

Finally: if you have a small utility you deem useful enough to end up into the Utilities package, send me an email and propose it for inclusion.

John Saw That Number

Thanks to Ross and his mad python-fu skillz, now we have a working Python binding for gtkunique - for the brave souls which may want to use it.

The repositories locations have been changed, after the servers update at OpenedHand, so here’s where the fun is:

  trunk:  bzr branch http://folks.o-hand.com/~ebassi/bzr/gtkunique
  python: bzr branch http://folks.o-hand.com/~ebassi/bzr/pygtkunique
  perl:   bzr branch http://folks.o-hand.com/~ebassi/bzr/gtkunique-perl

Testing is greatly appreciated.

gtkunique future: GtkUnique is API frozen, and feature complete as far as I’m concerned (bug fixing and eventual feature requests notwithstanding). I’ve opened a bug for integration into GTK+: #378260. You can watch it and give your opinion there.

Song for Sunshine

I just made two releases for gnome-utils: the first is 2.16.2, another release in the stable branch, which fixes a couple of bugs in Baobab and Screenshot that were also fixed in HEAD and deemed important enough to be backported.

The second release is - finally - 2.17.0, the first release of the new unstable release cycle which will lead to gnome-utils 2.18.0.

The major change in this release is in Baobab, which acquired the new, spiffy, cairo-based ringchart view, thanks to the hard work of Fabio, Paolo, Alejandro and Miguel. Baobab also dropped the search option, which mostly replicated the Search Tool already included in gnome-utils. Baobab user interface was cleaned up, its memory consumption was reduced and many bugs were fixed.

The other modules in gnome-utils got some love, but not much; my development tree still doesn’t build well and it’s not ready for inclusion in HEAD, but I plan to work on it before the next release.

As usual, download, test and file bugs.

Little Earthquakes

After two weeks without working on it, this evening I finally returned to GtkUnique and finished the bacon-like backend. Now, beside using D-Bus and Xlibs, you can use Un*x sockets as an IPC method to send a command to a running instance of an application which is using GtkUnique.

Next items in the TODO are:

• Add more documentation on the protocol used in the three backends;
• Fix the Perl bindings;
• Finish and publish the Python bindings;

In the meantime, you can grab GtkUnique 0.5.0 here or pull it from the bazaar repository.

Special Delivery

I almost forgot - this should tell you how bad a maintainer I am - but Lennart’s blog reminded me: the ringchart code hit Baobab HEAD:

The ringchart view is really nice - even though I still very much like the treemap - but the real improvements are in Baobab’s user interface, which got streamlined and made simpler. Kudos to both Fabio Marzocca, Paolo Borelli and to all the people at Igalia who worked really hard in order to make the next stable release of Baobab rock.

I did not package a gnome-utils tarball in time for 2.17.1, as I’m still working on my development tree for both the dictionary and the screenshot tool; but since I got a couple of bug fixes (backported to the stable branch) I plan to do a 2.16.2 release this weekend and a 2.17.1 before the end of the month. In the meantime: grab a snapshot from CVS and test away!

Clutter

Behold the power of Clutter!

Clutter is a pretty raw user interface toolkit for building heavily visually applications for platforms such as media boxes and kiosks. It’s built on various GNOME libraries such as Pango and GObject, uses Gstreamer for media playback, and all this sits upon OpenGL for fast graphics rendering.

Yes, it’ll soon have bindings for Perl (like it already has bindings for another high-level language with funny syntax that begins with P).

Tap Dancing on a Mine

I’ve just released version 1.031 of the Gnome2::GConf Perl module binding libgconf. In this release, thanks to Laurent Simonneau, I dropped the Gtk2 dependency, making Gnome2::GConf depend only on the Glib Perl module (and the libgconf C library, obviously).

Gnome2::GConf is mostly in maintenance mode these days so, even if this is supposed to be a development release there are no known issues preventing it from working in a stable environment. I don’t plan any more releases in this development cycle (remember that Gnome2::GConf is part of the GNOME Platform Perl bindings and as such it follows the GNOME release schedule) unless upstream API changes.

You can get Gnome2::GConf either from Sourceforge.net or from CPAN (as soon as both update their state).

On a releated note: as the next release of Gtk2 will support GTK+ 2.10, and it’ll have printing support, I plan to discontinue the Gnome2::Print module binding libgnomeprint and libgnomeprintui; obviously, I’ll still maintain this module, but I don’t plan making any new releases unless for (serious) bug fixing.

The Mariner’s Revenge Song

From the libegg’s ChangeLog:

2006-05-07  Emmanuele Bassi  

	Finally deprecate EggRecent.  So long, and thanks for all the bugs.

	* libegg/recent-files/THIS_IS_DEPRECATED_USE_GTK_RECENT_CHOOSER:
	* libegg/recent-files/egg-recent-model.h: Deprecate the EggRecent code,
	now that GTK 2.9.0 is out; if you want to compile it, you
	must define EGG_ENABLE_RECENT_FILES before including
	egg-recent-model.h.

This is the first version of the so-called “Ramone Deprecation System”: it means that if you blindly re-sync with libegg HEAD, or if you decide to use the EggRecent code now, a guy called Ramone will be sent directly to your home by the Gtk+ Cabal; he will politely knock at your door and once you’ve opened, he will beat the crap out of you.

Next, the Gtk+ Cabal will implement the “Puppies Deprecation System”. And believe me: you don’t want to know how that works.

Now listening: The Decemberists, Picaresque

Gtk+ 2.9.0 released

Finally, the first development release of GTK+ (codenamed The Magic Project Ridley aka libgnome sucks release by a developer whose name won’t be disclosed in this blog) has been finally sealed by Matthias Clasen yesterday, after battling with make distcheck.

There is so much goodness in this release that I’ll just wait for Kris to make a blog about it, and link the NEWS file and let you see the enormous work that has been done in the past nine months. So, find the contributor nearest to you and hug him (or buy him a beer); to help this hugging (and beer buying) procedure, here’s a list:

Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason, Akkana Peck, Alexander Larsson, Alexander Nedotuskov, Alex Graveley, Anders Carlsson, Andrei Yurkevich, Andrew Conkling, Andrew S. Dixon, Arjan van de Ven, Arnaud Charlet, Bastien Nocera, Behdad Esfahbod, Benedikt Meurer, Benjamin Berg, Benjamin Otte, Benoît Carpentier, Bodo-Merle Sandor, Bogdan Nicula, Brad Taylor, Calum Benson, Carlos Garnacho Parro, Carl Worth, Chris Lahey, Chris Lord, Christian Kirbach, Christian Lohmaier, Christian Neumair, Christian Persch, Christian Stimming, Christophe Belle, Claudio Saavedra, Clytie Siddall, Colin Walters, Cory Dodt, Coverity, Crispin Flowerday, Damien Carbery, Damon Chaplin, Daniel Drake, Daniel Kasak, Dan Winship, Dave Andreoli, David Baron, David Trowbridge, Davyd Madeley, Denis Auroux, Dennis Cranston, Diego González, Dom Lachowicz, Donald Straney, Duncan Coutts, Ed Catmur, Elie De Brauwer, Emmanuel Rodriguez, Eric Cazeaux, Evert Verhellen, Francisco Javier F. Serrador, Frederic Croszat, Guilherme de S. Pastore, Guillaume Cottenceau, Gustavo Carneiro, Hamed Malek, Hans Breuer, Havoc Pennington, Hylke van der Schaaf, Ian McDonald, Itai Bar-Haim, Jaap A. Haitsma, James Su, Jean-Yves Lefort, Jens Granseuer, Jeremy Cook, Jody Goldberg, Joe Marcus Clarke, Joe Wreschnig, Johan Dahlin, John Cupitt, John Ehresman, John Finlay, John Palmieri, John Spray, Jonathan Blandford, Jorn Baayen, JP Rosevaar, Jürg Billeter, Kalle Vahlmann, Kathy Fernandez, Kazuki Iwamoto, Kean Johnston, Kjartan Maraas, Kristian Rietveld, Larry Ewing, Leena Gunda, Lillian Angel, Li Yuan, Lorenzo Gil Sanchez, Maciej Katafiasz, Magnus Bergmann, Markku Vire, Mark McLoughlin, Marko Anastasov, Mark Wielaard, Mart Raudsepp, Martyn Russell, Mathias Hasselmann, Matthijs Douze, Maxim Udushlivy, Michael Emmel, Michael Natterer, Milosz Derezynski, Morten Welinder, Murray Cumming, Nickolay V. Shmyrev, Nicolas Setton, Niklas Knutsson, Olexiy Avramchenko, Owen Taylor, Paolo Borelli, Paolo Maggi, Peter Breitenlohner, Peter Harvey, Peter Lund, Peter Zelezny, Philip Langdale, Raphael Slinckx, Ray Strode, Richard Hult, Robert Ögren, Rodney Dawes, Ross Burton, Ryan Lovett, Sadrul Habib Chowdhury, Sebastien Bacher, Søren Sandmann, Stanislav Brabec, Stefan Kost, Stephane Chauveau, Steve Chaplin, Steve Frécinaux, Sven Herzberg, Sven Neumann, Thomas Broyer, Thomas Fitzsimmons, Thomas Klausner, Thomas Leonard, Tim Evans, Tim Janik, Todd Berman, Tommi Komulainen, Torbjörn Andersson, Tor Lillqvist (and his Evil Twin), Torsten Schoenfeld, Tze’ela Hebron, Vincent Untz, Wolfgang Thaller, Wouter Bolsterlee, Yang Hong, Yevgen Muntyan, Yong Wang. And, obviously, our fearless maintainer Matthias Clasen.

Kudos to all of them.

The API has landed

The GtkRecent code is finally in gtk+ HEAD branch.

A couple of things are still missing, mostly documentation and examples (the exact list is here, if you want to check).

The code needed a year to take shape (I was beginning to mull over it a bit too much), but it is cleaner, more efficient and works better than the EggRecent code, that has been copied and pasted all around the world.

The heroes of this tale are undoubtedly: James Willcox, for writing the original code (even if he didn’t reply to my email about its state bad boy, bad boy); Federico Mena-Quintero, for listening to me while we were waiting at a terrible restourant in Stuttgart, and for saying: Go ahead, implement it, and everyone will love you!; Matthias Clasen (still no blog, Matthias?), for helping and suggesting and asking and for maintaining the Best. Toolkit. Ever.

This work is dedicated to my soon-to-be wife, Marta, and for the patience she had while I hacked till the wee hours of the morning. I love you.

And this is just the beginning… I sense bug reports coming…

Gnome-utils 2.13.95 - “Escape Velocity”

Seems like I forgot to announce the new release of gnome-utils; actually, this week-end I had a bad cold (I’m not completely cured, though), and standing in front of my laptop made my eyes sore after two or three minutes.

Anyway, the last release before March 15th is out. It should have been 2.13.94 (and it’s advertised as such inside the README and the NEWS files of the tarball, but who reads those files anyway?), but there has been some misunderstanding between the working copy I checked out from CVS in order to build the release and me. Well, it’s not the first time I fuck up something in the release process - and I’ve got the feeling that it won’t be the last.

The release contains just a couple of last minute fixes, like the handling of the transparency of the applet when the panel is set to a solid color and low opacity; also, the applet’s window can be closed using the Esc key.

Go get it and try it out.