gnome

Hacking Getting Things Gnome (Again)!

By pcabido in gnome, gtg No Comments Tags: , , ,

Yesterday I spent most of my day hacking Getting Things Gnome. It was kind of a come back for me. I don’t remember the last time I made any contribution but I think it was about two years ago. A very long time. Shame on me!


I got current with GTG and corrected some bugs, some small ones and two “high” ones (lp:~pcabido/gtg/hackathon). Curious thing, they were all plugin related bugs. I also started getting up to date with the gtasks backend. I will be giving it some love over the next weeks.

It was the first GTG hackathon and it was fun. I hope to be participating in hackathones more often.

Another great thing I read about yesterday was a techradar article that elects Getting Things Gnome as app number 7 on the top 50 best Linux apps of 2011. It’s a motivational boost to keep hacking and making GTG better.

My GNOME 3 experience on Ubuntu 11.04

By pcabido in gnome, linux, open source 9 Comments Tags: , , ,

I’m addicted to gnome-shell!

A week has passed since I installed GNOME 3 on Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal”, from the official GNOME 3 PPA.

I remember thinking something like “Looks nice, feels good but lots of things are missing… going back to classic GNOME…” but for some unexplained reason I didn’t make the purge and kept using GNOME 3 and the mighty gnome-shell.

Here’s my GNOME 3 sceeen shot:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This isn’t a GNOME 3 review, Ars Technica already made one that you can read here. It’s just my two cents about some things.

Problems, bugs, weird stuff and a whish list

  • Ubuntu 11.04 doesn’t have official GNOME 3 support. You have to use the PPA. I almost went Fedora because of this. Still thinking about that…
  • The window decorator couldn’t be more ugly, but I saw lots of screen shots around the web with a great looking interface. Why wasn’t mine good looking?! Seams that the problem was that the theme (Adwaita) wasn’t there. After a quick search, I found out that the theme was in a package called gnome-themes-standard that wasn’t in the GNOME 3 dependency list and that I couldn’t install because the package itself is broken. The solution was to extract the contents of the package and place the Awaita theme where it should be (/usr/share/themes) manually.
  • I also remember thinking “where the *FWORD* are my desktop icons?!” and after taking after a deep breath I read all about the philosophy of GNOME 3/gnome-shell and it kind of made some sense, although I am/was too used to having stuff all around my desktop. This was only the first weird thing I had to adapt to.
  • There are no applets in gnome-shell, the nice panel (top bar) isn’t customizable. I have a trillion passwords to memorize and I have been using revelation until now (GNOME 2) because of the nice applet that it has. I used it exhaustively because it allowed me to search within my passwords very quickly. I really miss that applet.
  • The notifications changed. In a general way I like the new notification system, it’s cool and really doesn’t bother you when your’re working and it’s a complete WIN to be able to check the notifications some time after they occurred. Yet, another habit, I use pidgin as my default IM client and I want to be able to stick the icon somewhere visible (top bar) and see when the icon changes it’s status. I liked the way that worked out in GNOME 2. It’s just weired not to have it there now.
  • Keyboard has lot’s of shortcuts. WIN! But hey some of us have razors, mx 5xx or some other mouse that has more buttons than we have fingers. There should be mouse shortcuts as well! With compiz I used two useful shortcuts within the desktop wall. I used the two buttons placed on the left side of my mouse to change to the previous and to the next workspace. This is another thing I really miss.
  • Nautilus changed the shortcuts. Now I have to press two keys to delete a file. I liked it better when I only had to press del for that.
  • Mutter breaks transparency in non-maximized windows, like gnome-terminal that I use allot. It’s a known bug but still no solution.
  • As well as some other users, I haven’t figured out how to remove the unnecessary accessibility menu from the top bar.
  • Another “philosophy” issue is that by default window controls only have the close button. No minimize or maximize. That’s because you can maximize windows with a double-click on the title bar and because you don’t have anything to see (besides your wallpaper) on your desktop, so you don’t need to minimize windows, only switch between them. That was weired at first and I added both missing controls, but sincerely after a week of using gnome-shell I don’t use them at all.
  • Lack of customization. This is a problem. I like to tweak my desktop and so do other users. I think future success depends on this issue.
  • Places should also have the option to be added as a Favorite. I have the sensation that  nautilus alone isn’t enough.

Things that keep me hooked in!

  • The coolness factor! I don’t know why neither can I explain it… but it just feels right to use gnome-shell! Almost as if it was cool to use it and if you don’t.. you’re not just cool anymore.
  • Gnome-shell. I’m still adapting but I like the changes.
  • The application switcher.
  • The workspace management is just awesome. The way they extend one after another or how they are removed when no longer necessary is just how they should always have worked.
  • I use a laptop + a LCD screen at home. The second screen, the LCD, doesn’t change when I switch workspaces. When I switch workspaces only the laptop screen workspace changes. The LCD workspace is always the same. I don’t really know if this is the default behavior, but I love this. I can put my “always showing apps” in the LCD “always showing” workspace and move throe the laptop workspaces.

  • I’m more focused on my work. Congratulations to  the GNOME 3 team because this is one of gnome-shell’s objectives and I really feel it.

I’ll keep posting my GNOME3 experience and who knows, some extensions of my own.

I am GNOME

Changes to GTG’s plugin manager

By pcabido in gnome, gtg No Comments Tags: , , , , ,

Today I just had to code. For days I’ve been studying for my last exams (I hope!). Kevin Mehall made me the suggestion to add a preferences button on the dialog manager in order to allow a user to set the preferences/configure a plugin. The idea is based on the Gedit system. I think I never gave credit to Gedit but I actually based allot of things on their plugin system.

It looks like this:
preferences_plugin_manager

You can read about it and how to make your plugin configurable in the plugin howto along with all the other info.

Getting Things Gnome 12 weeks after SoC

By pcabido in gnome, gsoc 4 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

SoC is ending and 12 weeks after I’m very happy with the experience. The first weeks were difficult, I had university assignments and exams to do and it wasn’t easy finding the equilibrium between SoC and the university stuff, some of those weeks were exhaustive. Still it was a great experience, I would do it again! My mentor, Lionel Dricot aka ploum, was always available and helpful during the hole 12 weeks. The GNOME and Getting Things Gnome communities were also very important and contributed in a very positive way to my SoC experience.

My SoC project and the goal was to add Geolocalized tasks (using geoclue and libchamplain) in Getting Things Gnome witch I achieved.

Getting Things Gnome is a task manager and if you don’t know it yet you can read all about it here and see some of the many reasons for why you should use it or try it at least. One of the concepts of the application is the “Work View”. The “Work View” concept will only show tasks that you can do “right now”, it doesn’t display tasks that depend on other tasks, tasks that cannot start before a given date or with tags you have marked as non workable. The main idea of my project is to add a here to the right now, extending the work view concept to “right here and right now”. The extension of the concept is now available if you enable the geolocalized-tasks plugin that packed allong with GTG (only in the current development version that you can get here).
To try it you will need:

  • libchamplain installed with python support
  • Geoclue installed with the main providers
  • my newly created python-geoclue module

I’ll provide the detailed instructions to test it in a few days. I’m currently in contact with Keith Preston so that the python-geoclue module can be integrated in the Geoclue project, so I’ll have some news on that (were you can get it, how to install it, how you can use it, etc) very soon.

During SoC I also added plugin support to GTG and plugins with new features are emerging. It is very satisfactory to see my work being useful. Some of the plugins that already exist are:

  • Geolocalized-tasks plugin (my plugin)
  • Hamster Time Tracker Integration by Kevin Mehall
  • Remember the milk sync plugin by Luca Invernizzi

So if you have any request for a new feature, don’t hesitate to add it to the whish list or just digg in because it’s now easier to add features to GTG.

Geolocalized tasks in Getting Things Gnome!

By pcabido in gnome, gsoc 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , ,

For the past two/three days I’ve been fighting with video in linux to make a screencast. I found out that recordmydesktop didn’t work in any of my computers (it was always so slow!). I finally got it to work in a old laptop, a compaq evo n1020v and was able to record the plugin working.
After that I had another challenge, to edit the four small videos into the final video and finally to be able to use the html5 video tag I had to add the ogg mime types to apache’s config.
Well.. the result was this video (still a little sluggish, the next one will be better):

For those that don’t have a html5 compatible browser, here is the youtube link or the direct link to the ogg video.

There are still some glitches in the plugin but in a general way it works ok. More features are coming soon!

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