Sunday 5 October 2008

Hackfesting

As per usual, I'll start off by apologising about not writing enough blog posts and how I'll be better in the future. Although, this time there may actually be a chance of me sticking by my word as I've got a few posts lined up with talk about Ubuntu Netbook Remix, specifically the individual apps that make up the conversion of Gnome from desktop->netbook. There's been quite a few articles and reviews about UNR, but there seems to be some features that people have missed so I thought I'd be nice to get those code-paths tested out :-).

Currently I'm in Boston for the UI hackfest, which should be really cool and hopefully very fruitful. I'm here to pimp Awn and I guess Clutter too (although I doubt it needs pimping anymore :-). It will be nice to meet up and chat with other people who've worked on panels/docks/sidebars/applet server etc, and try and figure out how we can combine our work into something great for Gnome.

As you may have guessed, the planned hiatus from working on Awn didn't quite pan out. Actually, the very opposite happened and I've been busy rewriting Awn in a private branch to add all the features and fix all the bugs people having been asking for since the begining. To sum up the work, I'd say that the rewrite makes Awn a panel rather than a dock, and that's an important distinction. Some of the features that are beingworked on are not currently available in any other panel/dock and I hope will really push things forward in desktop experience.

You can follow the work on the rewrite in #awn on irc.freenode.net, it's not usable just yet as there's been a lot of breakage, but we're getting there and things have recently started to come together. I'll write a post detailing whats changed and the new features as soon as it's ready to be tested. It's funny,suddenly all my ideas for the desktop revolve around making Awn absolutely great :-).

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sounds great! I've been running netbook remix on my Acer Aspire One and love it, the perfect UI for the screen.

I'm interested in the work with AWN too - I can't run Compiz at the moment as it seems to conflict with UME - hopefully fixes will see the both of them be able to work together. With your work on it being a panel, will it be integrated into the UME?

Mark said...

I hope you recruit some more hackers for Awn :)

digital spaghetti: You know, you can use Metacity with Awn. See http://wiki.awn-project.org/Installation for details.

Anonymous said...

I can't wait to try your private fork in a stable form. Thanks heaps for your hard work. AWN is indispensable on my desktop.

Anonymous said...

Hey Neil,

Your posts look quite fascinating.

Anonymous said...

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Anonymous said...

Maybe you should pass your project onto a community! Your work has been great but the AWN project would really benefit from community input, with regards to speed of the implementation of new features...

Anonymous said...

thanks for the great work on AWN :)