Arrfinity ;)

What a week! Its weird how so many things come up at once! I won't bore you with the details, but lets just say that 5 days without a net connection wasn't the worst thing that happended!

Anyway, being without the internet gave me some much-needed time with Awn, the fruits of which you'll see over the coming days! However, it did also push me back a few days with some important stuff, so with out further ado:



Yep, thats really Affinity, no mockups, just real code, which you can get here!

Now, as this is a 0.1 release, I ask you to be gentle ;). Here's a break down of some basic features:

* Front-end to both the Beagle & Tracker desktop search engines.
* Has actions (configurable through Desktop files), which should help to speed up common tasks.
* Has in-built, user-configurable, filters which work in the the entry box, so typing 'pics:london' will only bring up pictures.
* Super-fast application searching through an in-built list of applications.
* Colours can be customised to your taste.
* Lives in the system-tray, but can be called by a global key stroke. Default is Ctrl+Alt+a, but you can change it to anything you like!
* Written in C for minimal impact on your system, but maximum speed!

More info is available on the project page. I have removed 'Favourites' for now as it was a bit unstable, but it should be back in over the weekend.

Please bear in mind that Affinity currently only works on gtk+-2.0 >= 2.10, I am working on 2.8 support. Also, Affinity should work without RGBA (i.e. without Beryl or Compiz), but this has not been extensively tested.

OTH, it shouldn't take down your system or anything ;p. One bug that I do know about is that scrolling up & down fast on the treeview widget will cause artifacts to appear, which disappear when you move your mouse over them or press a key. I'm sure that this is just some teething pains between Gtk + RGBA, but I'll try and fix this ASAP.

Also, an I probably should have blogged about this sooner, shortly after I published the Affinity mockups, I got an email from a person who wanted to make something similar for OS X! Lol...who'da thunk it? The application is called Loro, and is free software. He is working on some really cool ideas, such as Google maps integration, check out his blog for more info.

Anyway, better get to bed, I'll leave you with some more screenshots:

Awn Updates

I've been spending all of my free time on Awn recently, cleaning up the code, adding some missing features, and merging some excellant patches, here's a breakdown:

• Merged a patch by Chirstian Kirbach which cleans up a lot of warning during compilation
• Fixed a mem leak caused by applications which change their icon many times (ie. Gimp). Also, on my system, g-s-m reports Awn using only 2.6Mb after several hours usage :).
• Separator will position itself correctly when adding new launchers
• Fixed bug when closing lots of windows at once, and Awn getting 'stuck'
• Merged a patch from James Willcox which makes the icons actually 'bounce' on hover, rather than go up & down. I blame him for wasting the next 30 mins of mine as I sat there watching the icons bouncing ;)!
• When in auto-hide mode, the bar will pop-up when you are dragging a file
• Launcher icons will change when you change your theme (GNOME/Gtk)

Last week I was talking about having the ability to add menu items to the popup menu of a task through D-Bus, well, now its here!

I have added another Rhythmbox plugin under the plugins/Rhythmbox directory. It's called awn-menus, and you have to move the awn-menus.rb-plugin & awn-menus folder to your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins. Heres a preview:



AddTaskMenuItemByName ("rhythmbox", "gtk-media-previous", " "):
where arg1 is the name of the task, arg2 is optionally a gtk-stock-id, and arg3 is a normal name (if you can't use a stock id).

AddTaskCheckItemByName("rhythmbox", "P_lay", False):
where arg1 is the name of the task, arg2 is a mnemonic name for the item, and arg3 is a bool, as to whether it is 'checked' or not.

Both return an ID integer. You then listen for "MenuItemClicked" & "CheckItemClicked" signals on com.google.code.Awn. The "MenuItemClicked" will come with one arg, which is the ID, so if it matches your ID, you should do something. "CheckItemClicked" will come with two args, the ID, and a bool telling you whether the check is active or not.

You can also use AddTaskCheckItemByName ( name, ID, bool) to set the check from your plugin after you've created it. The rhythmbox plugin is the best example, so have a look at it ;). At the moment, I have put a limit of 5 extra items per task, as I think more than that looks a bit over-the-top. I still need to add the code for removing an item, and disabling an item.

Okay, thats it for now, expect lots more bug fixes over the weekend, and some brand new auto-hide code!

I'm not even supposed to be here today

I have had practically no time for hacking this weekend. I am somewhat behind on Awn, but I have been bug-fixing in my personal copy, so expect an update tomorrow, when I get the last little problems sorted out, then on to 0.2 :).

In what little time I had, I brought together some ideas which were floating around in my head, and started some preliminary work on them:

Introducing Arena...

...which you could best describe as a tracker-based media browser/player. It will look like this:

At the moment, I have no code to show, as I am constructing the bits and pieces which make up a program of this type, for instance, the all-important tree-based menu structure. What I can tell you is the following few facts:

• It is more Front Row than MS Media Center, and therefore has no intended support for TV cards and such (at this time). More likely, however, is a built in Internet TV browsing/viewing.
• I is written in C, using the rock-tastic Clutter.
• Pictures don't do it justice. I have had a past life as a Flash designer (shock! horror!), and I have been getting to grips with Clutters effect-code, and its hard to describe the feeling of seeing album covers flying around on screen :). I will try and do a screen cast of some of my example code soon.
  
• It will be GNOME-based, as is mostly everything that I do, I'll give you no excuses, it just makes my life easier :).
• I'd like to add support for more media-providers ie. Avahi (zeroconf).
• It will do its darn-best to honor different layouts of media & the corresponding cover-art stuff, such as cover.jpg, album.jpg etc.
• UI is not final, but pretty darn close, unless something drastic happens :). I still need to add some more info in places, but on the whole, I want it as simple as possible.
• I like the look because I don't think its a blind rip-off of any current app, if it is, let me know :).
  

I think that's it for now, I can hopefully link to some code in the next week. Okay, now I have that out of my system, my head feels lighter! I promise, no more projects, I am all maxed out on time now :).

If you have suggestions/criticisms, leave comments as per usual, and I'll try my best to get back to you. I'll leave you with another mockup (more here):

Hi pgo!

Hi Planet GNOME'ers!

Firstly, let me say thanks to Jeff for adding me so fast :)! My name is Neil J. Patel, I am 23 years old, and am a Pharmacologist (yes, you read correctly) who lives in London, England. I love GNOME and spend my spare time working on a few projects:

Avant Window Navigator
Avant window navigator (Awn) was my first project, it is a Gnome-based dock which, as taken from the website, "sits on the bottom of your desktop in all its composited glory" and handles the launching of applications & active windows. It also has a D-Bus backend which allows applications to control their icons. Some examples are Rhythmbox setting the album art ask its icon, Evolution displaying the number of unread emails on its icon, Firefox showing its progress on its icons, and Gaim showing your status as your icon. A picture says a thousand words, so :


Awn also has a wiki & forum, and you can also catch me on #awn on irc.gnome.org.

Metadata & Desktop Search
Tracker is where the rest of my free time goes! I work on several projects surrounding GNOME regarding metadata & search:

1. Nautilus & Metadata Integration : I am working with John Stowers on a proposal for including metadata & tagging/emblem support in Nautilus, where by Nautilus can use Beagle/Tracker to pull info regarding a file + display it in a metadata tile, and it can use the FreeDesktop emblem spec for emblems, so you have a uniform experience across the desktop:
2. libtracker-gtk : This is another effort by John and myself to have a more integrated experience across the desktop, by having a set of reusable widgets which can be easily added to any application. Therefore, you now have a library which will consist of many cool and useful widgets such as a model-view-controller based list of results, a metadata-tile, a GtkEntry with automatic keyword-completion, a tag cloud etc.
3. A new blingy search tool/media browser/viewer: based somewhat on these mockups, and using a Tracker backend, but more on that later :).

Er, what else? I think that's it for now, I have lots of mockups for different UI ideas which can be found here, I can't bring all of them into reality, but if you want to, let me know if you need help with some of the more extravagant looking Gtk stuff :).

Updates

I've been quite busy recently, but have still managed to do some hacking, so heres some updates:

Awn

• Awn svn compiles on < gtk+-2.10 :).
• Lots of small fixes, most should be committed tomorrow.
• Working on support for notifications above the task.
• Working on support for adding menu items to a tasks pop-up menu.

Also, I'd just like to point you to a whole bunch of plugins using the DBus backend on our wiki. I have also just used the Gaim plugin which on the wiki, and I have to say, its amazing. Speaking to the author, I know that he is determined to get rid of the need for the gaim-systray plugin, so expect some cool stuff!

Tracker
libtracker-gtk has now committed into tracker svn :), so if you want to include tracker support in your application, be sure to let John Stowers or myself know if there is anything you'd like to see in there to make your life easier!
I have been working on polishing up the metadata-tile & tag bar, and while I was at it, I made this:

Hopefully, if I can fix the little problems that it has, it will be in libtracker-gtk before the next release + it can be the default view when you start tracker-search-tool. Speaking of tracker-search-tool, I added support for D&D-ing emails to the desktop and nautilus. They are basically desktop files which will open evolution viewer :
Anyway, that's it for now, if everything goes to plan, expect some cool stuff tomorrow ;)!