That’s it! Getting Things Gnome! 2.0, code name “Gorignak”, was released this week!
I won’t duplicate the release post, it’s a great post and you can read it here!
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:
You can read about it and how to make your plugin configurable in the plugin howto along with all the other info.
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:
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:
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.
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!
This week I worked with libchamplain and added it to the GTG! geolocalized-tasks plugin that I’m making. I have a working version as planned. It’s now possible to add a location to a task or view a task (that has a defined location) on the map. It will have some more features in a few days. Some images of libchamplain + geoclue + GTG! in action:
A quick explanation (each point corresponds to a image):
Some new features will be available in the next days along with a screencast.
Learning libchamplain was a challenge, I had some problems and spent allot of time figuring out how to solve them but the libchamplain team was wonderful and help me thru the problems, many thanks to Victor and Pierre-Luc!
So this week I:
All the code (plugin + plugin-engine) is available at my plugin-engine branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine
I’m glad to be working with the GTG! community, it’s growing real fast! This week, Getting Things Gnome! 0.1.2 was released.
More screenshots here.
For the curious ones a review of GTG! made by Ryan Paul is available here. There are still lots of new features coming up! Anyone that wants to join us, feel free to do it at IRC (gimp net at #gtg).
I just received an e-mail from Google notifying me that I have successfully passed the Midterm Evaluations. I already knew that I was going to pass but the confirmation is always good. 
In week 7 I mainly worked on the python-geoclue module. A list of the module’s features are available here.
I also made a test file to test the module’s features and added the setup to install the module.
Suggestions to improve the module are welcome! I already got the suggestion to add gobject-introspection support, so keep those suggestions coming!
The code is available at https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/+junk/pygeoclue.
I updated the wiki page that I left behind on the past weeks and created a page (http://live.gnome.org/gtg/soc/whatihavelearned) that is kind of a general report of what I done until now. The idea is to share what I have learned and it is intended to be allot more technical than it is now. It is also a good starting point for all the documentation that I’ll have to do.
Now I’m starting to work with libchamplain. I plan to have a working plugin with geoclue+libchamplin by the end of this week.
All of this part of my work is available here: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine
On week three I accomplished an important part of the project, that was to have by the end of the week a “working prototype” of the plug-in engine. Its not complete but the difficult part and the part where I was (very) confused is done.
Plug-ins are loading and working. Briefly, the system is divided into three parts:
And for the screen shot lovers here are some images of what is done:
The first screen shot is obvious, it’s the Plug-in Manager GUI and the second screen shot is the features that the plug-ins are implementing. The plug-ins are copys of each other, the each add a menu to the Plug-in menu on the menu bar and by clicking that menu you can see the action on the gnome-terminal and the last two buttons on the ToolBar are also put there by the plug-ins (you can also see the output on the gnome-terminal that resulted by a click on a button). New screen shots or maybe a video next week!
For week 4 I have the intention to finish the plug-in engine, it will be a work in progress but I want to finish all the main parts, and start the geoclue-python module that I will later use with a plug-in in GTG!.
Besides this I will continue my university marathon, here in Portugal the professors seam to wait for each other and set the tasks we have to do all at the same time. I still have 3 exams and 4 assignments to submit during June.
Here’s what I have done after the first official summer of code week…
First of all I created a wiki page that concentrates all of the projects info and where you can follow my progress on the project (this page is a work in progress).
An important part of my project is Geoclue and integrating it on GTG!. I have dedicated some time to understand how Geoclue works and I made some examples of how Geoclue can be used with Python/D-Bus.
This led to the idea of creating a python-geoclue lib/module to facilitate the Geoclue integration on python projects.
The examples are available here.
I’m thinking on creating a git branch to upload all my soc work.
We (me and Lionel) decided that this integration is best made as a GTG! plug-in because there may be some users that don’t want to use such features and also GTG! will benefit from a plug-in system. So I’ll be implementing a plug-in system on GTG! and most of this weeks time was spent on research for the best way to implement a plug-in system, talking or trying to talk to developers who have implemented such systems.
For the next week/weeks the TODO list is:
I also have to mention Bertrand Rousseau, the other GTG! developer, who as always been available and helping.
Like other students my final exams and assignments discussions for the university have started and until mid June I’ll be dividing my time with soc and the university.
Also, during the past week I received the debt card and already have the 505 dollars there. I’m now thinking on the best way to get them into my account (to Portugal in euros). If anyone has a good idea, please let me know.
I created a wiki page within the gtg’s wiki to help me organize my google summer of code project. If you want to follow my work on the project you can check out my project’s wiki page @ live.gnome.org. Feel free to make any suggestion.
À cerca de 4 anos nasceu o Amarok e rapidamente tornou-se numa referência. Entretanto, os utilizadores deste programa inovador queriam ainda mais novidades desta aplicação e foi então que os programadores do Amarok, depois de 2 anos de desenvolvimento, criaram o Amarok2.0, recheado de novidades capazes de pôr todos os blogs de informática a falar delas. Como este blog não é excepção, escrevo este artigo, para você se actualizar com esta maravilha do Open Source.
Os programadores do Amarok já deixaram bem claro que esta versão é apenas a versão estável de um novo Amarok que está nas suas capacidades mínimas. E que nos próximos meses aparecerão muitas actualizações e novidades. Assim, a lista de novidades não é muito extensa, visto o objectivo primordial ser a estabilidade de um novo sistema.
Apesar de tudo isso, existem muitas novidades, das quais descrevo algumas:
A instalação é muito simples e é independente da versão anterior do Amarok, a 1.4. Por isso, se não quer a versão anterior, desinstale através do Gestor de Pacotes Synaptic (Sistema → Administração → Gestor de Pacotes Synaptic), ou através do terminal, escrevendo:
sudo apt-get remove amarok
De seguida, adicione o seguinte repositório oficial do Amarok (se não sabe como adicionar repositórios, visite este artigo):
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-members-kde4/ubuntu intrepid main
Depois de ter as listas de programas actualizadas, aparecerá o ícone das actualizações. Actualize, de modo a ter as bibliotecas necessárias do KDE actualizadas.
Depois de actualizar, instale o novo Amarok 2.0 clicando aqui, ou através do terminal:
sudo apt-get install amarok-kde4
Se o quiser importar as definições (estatísticas, capas, local das colecções, etc.) do Amarok anterior, basta ir ao menu Settings → Configure Amarok → Import Collection.
É possível que dê este erro:
Error: Could not open Amarok 1.4 database: Driver not loaded Driver not loaded
Failed: Unable to import statistics
Se isso acontecer, instale a biblioteca libqt4-sql-sqlite para o SQLlite, clicando aqui, ou escrevendo no terminal:
sudo apt-get install libqt4-sql-sqlite
Reinicie o Amarok e volte a tentar importar!
