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.

awn-cairo-effects

So I've done some work on my awn-cairo-effects branch in the last few days.

This initial work more or less involves replacing all the pixbuf related code in awn-effects with pure cairo code - a task that is progressing. I've decided to take a somewhat iterative approach to this work. Instead trying to completely replace the whole awn-effects engine I'm trying to replace bits and pieces.... I guess we'll see how that turns out.

At the moment there's no real point in trying my branch unless you modify an applet to specifically access the code in question. However, I expect within a few days the old awn_draw_icons() will become a thin wrapper to awn_draw_icons_cairo() in which case it'll be time for testing... whether all current effects will be implement at that time is up in the air ( saturate being real PITA I'm thinking).

Shinyswitcher and standalone-launcher

A lot of the work I've pushed recently has very little visible effect for most users. Yet. It's basically been a lot of reorganization with the goal of future, shiny, goodness.

However, in recent days, I've pushed a few commits that do have a visible effect:

1. I've modified the default configuration of Shinyswitcher to be more pleasing in a wider range of Window Managers. By default it only grabs an image of the currently active window, this will more or less get rid of the black square issue that happens with a lot of configurations. The maximum time for updates has also been lowered from 30 seconds to 7, so corrupted grabs won't tend to linger as long. I've also defaulted the layout to 3x2, remember that this only applies to non-compiz configuration... if compiz is in use it will use whatever config compiz is configured with. I've also tweaked some of the scales and opacity values. As always the configuration values can be changed in the normal place. And yes I do know that a configuration utility is needed for shinyswitcher.
2. Standalone-launcher will now bring the managed task to the foreground when a drag and drop motion occurs on the icon. So if you grab an icon from you desktop and drag it over a nautilus task it will activate the nautilus window. If the applet is managing multiple open windows it is possible to cycle through them by moving the pointer and and off the icon (this is a temporary behavior which will be replaced by opening up the task list dialog eventually).

A quick note on vala support. Currently we require version 0.1.7 or 0.2.0 of vala. Versions > 0.2.0 will not work. At this time the newest version is 0.3.2. We anticipate upgrading when vala 0.3.4 arrives, though this is not a firm decision... it could happen with 0.3.3 or even, though hopefully not, a later version.


Other (not necessarily an exhaustive list) news:

1. aantn continues to make progress on Universal applets.
2. Tehk has pushed his rewrite of arss into awn-extras.
3. malept continues work on making the trash applet gvfs aware.

Plumbing

Still keeping rather busy with non-awn related things. But I have managed to do a few things here and there :-)

Things I have been up to...

Some plumbing changes in awn core:

1. Committed the refactor of the src/xutils* related code. This removed a large chunk of unused code from xutils.c and made some modifications so that FreeBSD builds (and potentially other) work. I was rather pleased to set #161028 to "fix committed". And yes... this has lead to a different default icon being used when awn is unable to find a match. Speak up now if you are unhappy with this.
2. Pushed my reorganization of awn-effects.c code. I'm not done with it yet but it basically broke awn-effects.c into multiple source files and began work on chopping some of the larger functions into more manageable sizes.
   

A bunch of small fixes/changes in awn-extras:

1. libawn-extras: Make it real simple to access shared key values... Several applets now used the shared key that specifies whether the applet dialog should close on loss of focus or not. The list of applets that are now using this include awnterm, awn-system-monitor, places, main-menu and (I believe) any applet using AWNLib.
   
2. awn-notification-daemon: Basic toggling on/off of notification window display which is available if one configures it to display an icon. If anyone likes to design icons please read my request.
   
3. standalone-launcher: Some initial support for specifying workspaces. An advanced edit option,
   
4. awn-system-monitor: Some fixes for sorting of process that use more than 2G of memory.
5. places: Now checks for XDG_DESKTOP_DIR.
6. webapplet: malept and myself have also done some initial work on a simple webapplet. It's quite basic at the moment but the initial design seems fairly solid and I believe it will end up being useful. It is necessary to either use the awn-testing ppa to get it or to build with --with-webkit. Yes it is webkit based at the moment but the longterm plan is to allow the use of webkit and/or gtkmozembed.

Things others have been up to (probably not as complete)

What else has been happening in awn land...

• pavpanchekha continues work on AWNlib. It really is a good idea to use it if you're starting a new python applet.
• aantn continues his work on Universal Applets. This is really quite cool. And hopefully he'll push some support into awn for this some day soon :-)
• malept continues to do numerous bits of magic with the build system and has done numerous conversions of applets to awn config client, various bug fixes and has been working on converting the trash applet to gvfs... meaning the problem with the Trash applet on Hardy will soon be fixed.
• Yes the weather applet had an issue recently. It has been fixed in trunk. This affected a lot of weather applets out there and was due to changes made by weather.com. Mosburger quickly restored everything to working order.
• gilir continues to make progress of insinuating awn into Debian and Ubuntu and has added a tomboy applet of his own creation to awn-extras.
  
• Moses had committed several useful fixes/features to the comics applet.
• Matt continues to work on the file-browser-launcher.
• Andrewsomething's recent Remember the milk applet seems to be quite popular.
• tehk has returned after a several month absence is beavering away on a new and improved arss. Showing up in trunk real soon.
  
• There are also several new applets available only on the forums that will, hopefully, soon make there way into trunk.

I've almost certainly have forgotten some interesting things... if so just leave a comment.