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.

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.

• Gnome-shell extensions. They represent additional functionality for gnome-shell. There is a collection of extensions available at the GNOME GIT source code repository. I two articles: one about those extra extensions available at the GNOME GIT and another article with nice code examples and explanations. Adding to this while browsing the web for some kind of gnome-shell integration with pidgin I found this extension that integrates pidgin with gnome-shell the same way Empathy is integrated (thanks to Mohd Izhar Firdaus Ismail).

• There are lots of nice themes emerging (Smooth Inset and Elementary).  This Tron Legacy gnome-shell theme is for an older version of gnome-shell but you can get the idea.

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

I won’t duplicate the release post, it’s a great post and you can read it here!

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:

• 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.

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!

A quick explanation (each point corresponds to a image):

1. The button Set/View location is added to the task editor window;
2. Viewing the task’s location on the map. This task (as you can see on the first image) has three tags, two of them with location and on of the tags that has a location doesn’t have a color set so that gray is the default color;
3. A task with a tag named “CGE” with the color attribute defined to pink and with the location defined. Because the task has already a location defined, it only shows the location;
4. A task that doesn’t have tags (so no location). Using geoclue (pygeoclue) the markers position is set to the current location. It’s also possible to move the marker around to the desired position. There is a gtk.entry to define the tag’s name;
5. This task has tags but no location is defined. Again, using geoclue the markers position is set to the current location. Now it’s possible to create a new tag to associate with the location or to associate the location to a existing tag;

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:

• added libchamplain to geolocalized-tasks plugin in GTG!
  • learned how clutter/libchamplain works
  • tested and experimented with the python bindings (view, layers and markers mostly)
  • coded an example (demo in python) of how to change a marker’s position on the map. The demo is available here: http://paulocabido.com/soc/libchamplain/move_marker.py
• fixed several bugs in the plugin-engine

All the code (plugin + plugin-engine) is available at my plugin-engine branch: https://code.launchpad.net/~pcabido/gtg/plugin-engine

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

• The Plugin Manager that handles the GUI for the plug-ins
• The Plugin Engine that handles the load, initialization, activation, etc for the plug-ins
• A third part that is the plug-in API (the methods that are allowed for a plug-in to use)

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.

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:

• Implement the plug-in system on GTG!
• Build the python-geoclue lib/module
• Finish the mockup

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.