0.1 + 0.1 = ?

Well there you have it, Awn 0.2 has been released!

With over six months since the last release, you'd think we were working on something as complicated as Gnome, but I think there are enough new features to show where the time has gone ;-).

I'd like to highlight a few of the main features that have landed into trunk over the recent weeks, and others that I maybe haven't mentioned before.

Icon Effects

You can have user-selectable colours and a 3d-look bar, but the ability to choose whether your icons bounce like cartoon characters, spin like a coin, or have a spotlight cast on them has to be the best blingy feature :-D!

(you may need to click the blog title to see the video)

Awn Manager

After having to endure my simple preferences dialog (and my lack of updating it to reflect new features), a few brave souls from the forums decided to create a proper configuration dialog for Awn:



Together with wrapping all the gconf options, the ability to load/save and share your Awn theme was also included, which is a very cool feature. Themes have already started popping up in gnome-look.org!

Applets

I've been over applets before, but we've been working very hard to make sure there is a continuous look and feel across applets and the main launcher/task bar. As of now, 99% of the applets behave the same on the bar (including animations & reflections).


I'll be making a stable release of applets in the next few days, but you can get to them via launchpad if you can't wait!

Stability

In addition to new features, Awn has grown more and more stable. Many 'hacks' that were put in place in January have either been swapped for newly available APIs, or have been replaced with standard Gtk widgets (although you can't tell ;-).

Future

From now on, I hope to make more regular releases of Awn, especially as there are many more people involved now, and a lot of code is being written. Also, I may take some time off from writing code for Awn myself, as I'd really like to spend some time on Affinity and Arena, plus help out on some other projects.

Thanks

I'd just like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has been on the forums, wiki and launchpad trawling through questions/bugs etc, and all the tranlsators (43 languauges!). I'd also like to say special thanks to Jeff Fortin, Mike Jones, haytjes, Miika-Petteri Matikainen, Anthony Arobone, Ryan Rushton, Michal Hruby, Julien Lavergne, who have all picked up the slack when I couldn't work on Awn as much as I wanted to.