Tuesday 20 February 2007

Where'd You Go...

...not that far actually, just been very busy at home!

I have, however, had time to straighten up some cool tracker stuff!

Nautilus Metadata Tile
After speaking to Alex in #nautilus, it seems that we could really make something very cool, utilizing nautilus & tracker/beagle. He has given me direction regarding what would be accepted into Nautilus. He had some sweet ideas regarding file previews etc. As far as I know, no other OS has these capabilities. I am going to dedicate a whole entry to it later on in the week, with mockups etc.

Tracker Search Tool (TST)
I have been adding the code from Nautilus Metadata Tile into TST recently, trying to get it in before the 0.6 release of tracker (at the time of writing I still don't know whether it will make it) :(. However, to whet your appetite, I can show you some early screenshots :


As you can see, it works quite well :). The tags bit is my favourite, because it is really simple to add/remove tags:
  • Clicking the "add" button shows you a GtkEntry, where you type in tags separated by spaces, then click "apply" to apply or "cancel" to, er, cancel.
  • The tags themselves are clickable, so they will launch a new TST, and set it to search for the tag.
  • Right clicking the tag gives you a popup, letting you search for the tag, or delete it.
I am going to send the patch tomorrow, and hopefully, Jamie can add it to tracker svn ASAP (if I, you know, haven't broken every single coding rule known to man).

Avant Window Navigator
I have been a bit short of time regarding Awn, but I am dedicating tomorrow to it, so expect some cool stuff (as per usual), and thanks to everyone who has been bug reporting, sending translations and sending patches! Translations and patches will be merged tomorrow. Also, I have a little ace up my sleeve...only thing I can say is that it concerns setting up an array of pixbufs at incremental sizes for the launchers & tasks ;).

16 comments:

Mike Jones said...

that nautilus stuff looks spiffy and can't wait to get my hands on it! ALso can't wait to see some more awn stuff. I am really just waiting for the dock apps lol. But i am being patient.

Mike Jones said...

one more thing, where can i learn to code, so i can maybe help around with awn? like any good programs for ubuntu that can help teach a newbie?

Rob2687 said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rob2687 said...

Here's a newbies tutorial to C / C++

http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial.html

Type the code in a text editor of your choice. Then all you need is a compiler. :P

Joel Calado said...

That array of pixmaps thigie looks alot like a macosx-ish zoom coming :)

Unknown said...

Really cool. I'm crossing my fingers for that you get this into Tracker 0.6, but if you don't I'm confident that we will get your goodies to the masses later on.

Keep it rocking! :-D

Anonymous said...

Awesome!

Can't wait for code :) . One thing I noticed in your screen shot is that tags are to be separated by spaces? You sure that is a good idea? After all, if I want to tag something "Niagara Falls" I wouldn't want it to have two separate tags, one for Niagara and one for Falls.

Would it not be better to have the tags separated by commas?

Signed,

The loyal lurker who is too lazy to have his password resent ;-)

TreviƱo said...

Thanks for including my patches... If you want I can integrate some of them in avant-preferences ;)

Jack Kerouac said...

Neil,

Looks great.

Awesome AWN changes!

I'm using sudo checkinstall instead of make install and it works better, just thought I'd let you know.

Question: Is there any way to control the amount or speed of zooming?

Anonymous said...

I too use checkinstall (it's available in the Ubuntu repos if anybody here uses Ubuntu)

Basically everything in the compile process goes along like normal but you substitute "checkinstall" for "make install." Basically checkinstall allows for removal through apt-get. Really handy.

PeterStJ said...

Please please please tell me how to revert to the previous mouse over mode (the jumping)
The zooming is not really a good idea and I will tell you why at least it should be changable (to revert to the original jump on mouse over)
When zooming high resolution icon graphics it looks awfull really. The image quality drops way down and it looks ugly:(
Please please please make this configurable! Or at least please expain how to get a previous version from the svn I really don't know.

Many thanks

Neil J. Patel said...

Okay, just a quick update, I left the zoom on over night by accident :). As you can see its not nearly ready yet, but I am going to have it as an option because I am going to try and work on it over the weekend. svn, as of now, reverts to orignal effect, soz about that.

PeterStJ said...

Actually I sort of like the idea. I was frreaked out because of the bad image quality but it is good to have this and especially jump when window title changes (for example when browser is ready the title changes nad you know the page is fully loaded)
I also noticed a glitch - I dont know what I did but I was starting an mp3 from nautilus and totem started and when I mouse over the nautilus icon it zooms but when it gets to the original state it changes to zomewhat zommed totem icon. I guess it is a minor bug but decided to let you know wht to look for:)
Good luck with the hacking this weekend:) cant wait to see the result!
And many thanks for the great App i dont know how i'd use my desktop without it!

Unknown said...

great work on awn. I love the new zooming. :)

Mike Jones said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jack Kerouac said...

Neil,

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what language are you programming AWN in (Python, C, C++, etc.)? You're doing Avant-Preferences in Glade, right?