Posts

First release of new Deskbar-Applet

In the last week I wasn’t able to work much on Deskbar-Applet and this will continue till the end of this month, because the final exams are coming closer. Nevertheless, I, with the generous help of Nickolay Shmyrev, was able to solve a threading issue that almost made me go insane. That means no more random Xlib errors. Because this bug has been solved now I decided on releasing the first tarballs of the new Deskbar-Applet.
Sebastian Pölsterl
2 min read

Work on Deskbar is slowing down

Unfortunatly, I made even less changes to Deskbar-Applet than last week. I did some minor changes and started on integrating new-stuff-manager support for Deskbar.

I ran into a very annoying problem with threads in GTK+. I know that GTK+ is only thread-aware and you have to surround the critical parts with gtk.gdk.threads_enter() and gtk.gdk.threads_leave(). I already did this where the results are added to the ListStore/TreeView storing the matches. However, now and then I get a Xlib asynchronous error. I couldn’t find a situation where I can reproduce this error reliably. I would be glad if anybody could give some tips on working with threads and GTK+.

Sebastian Pölsterl
1 min read

This week's tiny SoC Report

Due to some awful laziness I wasn’t as productive as I wished I was. Nevertheless, I was able to make some small changes.First and foremost, I worked on the preferences dialog. The modules will now be re-ordered if one has been enabled/disabledand I added buttons to move the selected module around. Changes in detail: History shows last used item always at top Modules will be loaded from user’s dir, too Added top/up/down/bottom buttons to preferences to move modules Searches will actually start with a small delay.
Sebastian Pölsterl
1 min read

Newest edition of Weekly SoC Report

The most noticeable change I made during the last week is that the preferences dialog is back and working featuring a new tab that shows you which modules couldn’t be loaded and why. In addition, I wrote a guide “Writing new-style modules for Deskbar-Applet” that demonstrates the changes that were made to the module and match interfaces. Please check it out and let me know if it has been helpful.
Sebastian Pölsterl
2 min read

Deskbar-Applet has changed again

As promised this week’s report comes along with more news. I continued working on displaying and saving history items. After that, I made Deskbar-Applet to an applet again. So now you can add it to your panel as usual and the keybinding works again, too. You can now browse the history in a sidebar or you can cycle through it in the entry like you browse previous commands in the terminal.
Sebastian Pölsterl
2 min read

Latest Deskbar-Applet development

This week I spend a lot of time working on Deskbar-Applet. First of all, I continued on implementing the Core functions. Now that the core was almost finished I started working on the GUI part. First of all, I designed interfaces for the view and the controller (according to MVC). I decided to get the Window UI working first. Additionally, it’s the UI that most likely will still be available in 2.
Sebastian Pölsterl
2 min read

new-stuff-manager-0.2.3 released

After a very long time I’m proud to present the newest version of new-stuff-manager. This release depends on managed D-Bus version 0.5.2 or higher. This is necessaray because versions prior to this aren’t thread-safe and therefore cause weird behavior. In addition, I added a DownloadManager interface to allow applications to easily download files from the internet. Downloading from a FTP site won’t show download progress due to a bug in Mono.
Sebastian Pölsterl
1 min read

Google Summer of Code

First of all, I want to apologize for the long time without any news, but live’s busy. This year I deciced to apply for awesome Google Summer of Code for the first time. I applied for ‘Refactoring Deskbar-Applet’ as part of GNOME. Thanks to Raphaël Slinckx who’s part of GNOME’s 2007 SoC comittee, maintainer of Deskbar-Applet and last but least my maintainer for this year’s GSoC, I was accepted. My task is to refactor Deskbar-Applet to make it easier for 3rd-party applications to embed Deskbar and to make Deskbar maintainable again.
Sebastian Pölsterl
2 min read

new-stuff-manager 0.2.2 released

The last release has been about a month ago. Now this version has some major improvements: spec file for Deskbar-Applet has been added (actually, the URL of the repositry might not work, yet. kikidonk has to set it up first). A bug has been fixed that said that the service could not be found configure script now checks for ndesk-dbus-1.0 and only uses the internal version of dbus-sharp if it isn’t available.
Sebastian Pölsterl
1 min read

Documentation updated

Sebastian Pölsterl
1 min read