Another screencast

Here's some Awn/UA integration work that's being worked on. And yes there are still a few glitches.

Applet Devs: Rewrite will be hitting trunk soon. How will your applets cope?

Just a heads up. The rewrite branches will be merged into trunk some time in the next few weeks.

Core-rewrite: https://code.launchpad.net/~awn-core/awn/trunk-rewrite-and-random-breakage

Extras-rewrite: https://code.launchpad.net/~awn-extras/awn-extras/extras-trunk-rewrite-and-random-breakage

Notes

1. There may still be some API churn after the merge but it shouldn't be _overly_ severe. Things might get added but hopefully what's there won't change much.
2. Onox has done a fair amount of work in extras rewrite converting converting awnlib to the API changes. So if your applet uses awnlib your work may be relatively minimal.
3. Doing a trivial conversion of an applet can be as simple as a few minutes work. Do take the time to test with multiple orientations etc.
4. A lot of extras pplets have already been converted.
5. Once we merge rewrite, awn-testing ppa packages will soon follow. Meaning applets that have not been converted will stop working for any user of the awn-testing ppa.

This is just a heads up to start looking over rewrite, and possibly start taking advantage of some of the new things that are available in libawn. As always, if you have any questions please feel free to post here or drop by #awn on freenode.

A quick screencast

This previews some of the current features of Awn rewrite including mhr3's new Edgy panel style. Expect various details to change by release day including the preference dialogue.



That is all.

If Neil gets around to blogging I guess I better do so also

Just a quick update on things in the world of Awn.

Things seem to be picking up again as various real life commitments slow down for the various devs. I'm even finding some time to do some work. At this point in time we're getting close (weeks) to merging rewrite back into trunk. Which will mean packages in the PPA. Which will mean legions of testers. heh.

I've been spending my Awn dev time working on the system monitor rewrite. I'm quickly becoming a fan of AwnIconBox... The rewrite has multiple graph types, multiple icons per applet (cpu usage, load average etc) and a much cleaner design which will lead to eventually monitoring everything!

Over the next week or so I'm also hoping to dump the first iteration of AwnOverlaidIcon which will allow easy/consistent overlay of pixbuf/surfaces and text on applet icons. The hope is that this will allow a bit more consistency between applets for these use cases. This may also help push forward the implementation of plugin support in rewrite.

At the moment I believe the main blockers for merging rewrite back into trunk are:

1. Opening/Closing animations in the taskmanager.
2. Panel resize animations
3. Plugin support.

Regarding Awn plugin support... the consensus at this point seems to be that we do want to dump big chunks of the old API and implement something a wee bit nicer. So, we will be deprecating plugin API during the 0.4 series.

That's it for now.

A quick update

Let's see...

• Been rather busy in recent months.
• Started back to work with a small company that I've been involved with for close to a decade. It's nice... getting to work on everything from kernel level code through to shiny frontends. The negative side effect is that my awn dev time has been rather reduced.
• My awn dev time has mostly been devoted to the rewrite branch side of things, though I have backported a large number of fixes to shinyswitcher, cairo-menu and places to trunk.
• Yes a 0.3.2 release is imminent, seemingly largely lead by mhr3 but with contributions from quite a few others :-). See this and this.
• After 0.3.2 I think it fair to say that attention will begin to focus heavily on 0.4... I'll try and write a bit more about that sometime soon.

icons, icons, icons

So I've been working on awn-icons recently. The goal to provide a standardized way to change the icons used by applets (and eventually tasks/launchers).

I'm feeling lazy so I'l just point to a couple pages.

1. Sharkbaitbobby has made a nice little write up that is of most use to python devs but is definitely worth reading for others.
2. There's also a blueprint.

Todo:

• Clearing of configured icons.
• Look into using this with the awn core taskmanager/launcher.
• Convert more applets.
• Hook up some signals so changes in icons get reflected in all awn-icons users immediately.
  
• 
  

Testers Needed

Things have reached the point where I'd now like to get some testers for cairo-effects. If there are any issues/suggestions please post on the forum.