Wednesday, May 27, 2009

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.