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Xfce alive and well: new version on its way

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On 7 November, Jannis Pohlmann announced the first preview release of Xfce 4.8. The new version of Xfce, which is planned to be released on January 16th, brings much-requested features, and will close a development cycle in which the project made great strides forward.

Let’s first focus on the improvements coming in the next release of Xubuntu’s main component. Perhaps the most requested feature is support for remote filesystems. Much clamoured for, the feature required rewriting big parts of the core – something which has finally been completed.

Apart from that, the application that provides the panel(s) on your desktop has been completely rewritten, bringing a huge number of improvements, most notably in the support for multi-monitor setups, and a pet peeve of mine: the ability to drag application files to the panel to create launchers.

Also high on the wish list of many users was the ability to graphically edit the menus. Although Xfce still doesn’t ship its own menu editor, it is now possible to edit it using menu editors for other standards compliant desktops, such as Alacarte.

So, a lot has been rewritten in this release cycle – we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg above. Most important, however, are the improvements made to the release process in general, which will make the project more future-proof and will increase the speed with which new releases can be made, and lower the entry barrier to new contributors.

To start with the latter point, Xfce was one of the first of now many projects using the Transifex translation environment. Transifex makes it easier than ever for translators to help translating Xfce, as translators can now simply download the current translations and update their new translations via the web interface. I have used it myself, and it really is a huge improvement over the previous, cumbersome process. The new translation process has already attracted quite a few new translators, ensuring more of Xfce has been translated than ever, with even higher quality.

While the size of the development team has fluctuated over time (it has never been large, yet some people moved on – luckily there were new contributions as well), the team has managed to keep the desktop up-to-date with recent technologies, and has rewritten parts of the code, improving the quality to ensure it can be built on properly in the future.

Finally, the release process has been revised, now encouraging many small releases for sub-projects, as opposed to releasing all of them at once with a new version of Xfce. It is now much less work to release a new version, making that task less daunting and thus less likely to be postponed. Automatic release announcements also result in improved publicity for a new release, making it clear the project is alive and well, and more attractive for third-party contributors to help out. It also gets updated translations out faster.

All in all, the new release is shaping up to be a very solid one, closing a few big gaps in the feature set. Xfce is a truly modern desktop environment again, and what’s more important: its future, starting with the release of the new version on January 16th, is looking exceptionally bright.

In other news: as you might notice, this blog has not been updated in a while. Unfortunately, this post does not signify a change in the lack of updates. I’m really too busy with other things in my life that I’m hardly even tinkering with my computer, or actively involved with Xubuntu. So yeah, this blog is still dead. Also, it is not an official Xubuntu blog in any way, so do not draw any conclusions about the status of Xubuntu from this blog post; it is still awesome :)



It has arrived: Xfce 4.8

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The Xfce development team has announced the release of Xfce 4.8, the culmination of almost two years of work. The release makes Xfce once again a truly modern desktop environment by making use of recent desktop frameworks that, for example, finally allow you to browse remote shares or to edit the menu using a menu editor like Alacarte. Unfortunately, as the Xfce team makes clear in the release announcement, these frameworks often do not properly support non-Linux open source systems, meaning the Xfce team could not support those systems as well they would like to. For Xubuntu, being Linux-based, this has no effect.

Apart from adding many crucial modern features (which also meant completely rewriting the application that displays the panels), Xfce’s development process has been formalized, and the first steps have been taken in forming a non-profit organization, to ensure a viable future for Xfce. I covered the renewed development process and new features in my look at the first preview release. For a more detailed update by the Xfce team, check out the tour on new features in Xfce 4.8, part of (do these guys ever sleep?) the new website to accompany the new release.

The new version of Xfce is scheduled to be included in Xubuntu 11.04, to be released in April of this year.


Xfce goings on (Gtk+3 port etc.)

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So I’ve been busy lately porting Xfce apps and components to Gtk+3 (you can see on the roadmap page for 4.14 that we’ve come some way already – only the really uncomfortable behemoths are missing 🙂 ) and since I’ve been working on apps which I haven’t touched before (and which haven’t really seen much or any development in a while).

I thought I’d do a quick overview of some of my recent activities so everyone knows Xfce is still alive.


gtk-paste  clipman

I have ported clipman to Gtk+3 mostly as an exercise, to get back to coding and to re-acquaint myself with the “fun” that is porting to Gtk+3 (including the obligatory #ifdefs for different Gtk+3 releases).

I didn’t really have the energy to add any new features there (apart from general Gtk+3 stuff like symbolic icons, which is nice for the panel plugin), but it had the intended effect for me plus Eric and Florian helped out, which made it more fun. In the end we even got Steve to sit down and crank out a very nice fix for an extremely widespread issue in Xfce.


notifyconf  notifyd

Basically Ali did all the hard work of porting notifyd to Gtk+3. I was left with the hard work of polishing the edges and making it release-ready (which ended up being much more work than I anticipated and now that I’m mostly familiar with the codebase I’ve also started to add – for now: small – features). So yeah, 0.3.0 is out! Hooray! 🙂

I also managed to write down some basic docs for notifyd (they’ll be linked to in the 0.3.1 release) which also explains the theming aspect a little bit.

For now I’ve planned some features – we’ll see when and if I get to them, but amongst others:

  • “Do not disturb” mode (still have to figure out where and how to display the “missed” stuff or whether to bother with that at all)
  • More themes by default (currently we only have good ‘ol Smoke and evergreen ZOMG PONIES!)
  • More bugfixing
  • Better docs

preferences-desktop  settings

This is actually Sean’s project and he already ported most of the dialogs (only display missing at the time of writing) and this is really exciting as it is one of the core components. Can’t wait to install this beast on a productive machine to see what will happen 🙂


libxfce4ui  libxfce4ui

I didn’t do much here apart from handling the release and fixing the theming of XfceTitledDialog for Gtk3.20 (and below) in accordance with the Gtk+ Devs (still unreleased, will come with libxfce4ui-4.13.1). Generally speaking now that Glade support is fixed and we have working dialogs I guess there’s not much more to do in that lib (I may be wrong though).


terminal  terminal

This is Igor’s playground now, I merely helped with porting the settings dialog and getting rid of some rough edges there. I’m using the Gtk+3 port of the terminal on a daily basis though and am very happy with it – nice work Igor! 🙂

Greybird 3.20.0 (to be clear: with support for Gtk+3.20) released

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Finally – 5 months after the release of Gtk+3.20 – I’m happy to announce the release of the first version of Greybird supporting it.

Why has it taken so long? – you

The Widget Factory - 3.20
The Widget Factory – 3.20

may ask yourselves – and one reason was certainly me being totally busy with other things, but another one was that Ubuntu didn’t ship it in its 16.04 LTS release (which was a totally sane decision, by the way). Because of the latter it took some time before the issue of having a theme that supports Gtk+3.20 became pressing enough for me to take action.

Anyway, now it is done. (At least mostly.)

While porting the theme (in this case really: porting, not just: adding support for) I also decided to rebase it on Adwaita. Over the last releases so much stuff had piled up, so many quick fixes or patching up visual nuisances to support “the next Gtk+ release” that the theme had become an unmaintainable jungle – I frankly couldn’t have told you which line mattered anymore. While rebasing, I also went from CSS to SASS, which was the only right decision, as I’m sure now after having gone through with it. It made the code so much more maintainable and readable (kind of reminding me of the first Gtk+3 releases, when themes were still a lot leaner in terms of LOC).

So yeah, I’m pretty happy with where this has been going. There are still some rough edges (e.g. progressbars are probably not 100% greybirdy) and things I haven’t added support back for (e.g. elementary’s Granite widgets), but I think what is there now warrants an initial release as things still look consistent between Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 applications.

One final note: Greybird has recently switched to a new versioning scheme, which basically mirrors the Gtk+3 release numbers the theme works best with.

Download

https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.20.0

Preview: Per application settings and Do-not-disturb mode in xfce4-notifyd

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Per application settingsAs previously announced I’ve been working on per-application settings and a “Do not disturb” mode for xfce4-notifyd, which is Xfce’s notification daemon.

Finally I’ve come to a point where I’m ok with pointing to the code and encouraging people to try it and spot potential issues with it. As both of these features have been long-time requested I hope it’ll Do not disturb modemake quite a few people happy. I know I’ve been quite happy myself since I can use it 🙂

The way that the “known applications” are handled by xfce4-notifyd is that they are remembered once they have sent an application. This means that you can only mute applications which have – at some point since you’ve been running the code from the branch – actually sent notifications. I’ve been previously thinking about trying to collect all potential candidates somehow but this turned out too pesky and personally I think most users will want to mute those applications that send notifications often and those will quickly appear in that (alphabetically sorted) list.

Caveats: Some of this isn’t final – I might still be updating the wording on some of the labels or even some of the functionality might be amended a little, but generally I’m quite pleased with how things are working. Furthermore there may be memory leaks, I just haven’t had the time to really get to that (bugreports and patches are warmly welcomed ;)).

If you have feedback or suggestions please feel free to add some comments to this post or contact me on other communication channels.

So here’s the code: https://git.xfce.org/users/ochosi/xfce4-notifyd/log/?h=private/per_app_settings

Related bugreports:

Bugfixes incoming: xfce4-notifyd 0.3.1 released!

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notifyd

More good news in notification-land: I just released a new version of xfce4-notifyd – aka 0.3.1 – which fixes some nasty issues, amongst others

  • memory leaks (thanks Tony!)
  • an issue which caused build problems on Gtk<=3.18 systems (thanks Michał!)

I also added a Help button which links to the docs I wrote for notifyd a while ago: http://docs.xfce.org/apps/notifyd/start

I hope this will make 0.3 smoother in everyone’s daily usage and the Gtk+3 port more regression-free.

Read more here: https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/2016-September/000457.html

Upcoming changes

On the plate for the next release are more default themes (hint: “Retro” has already been pushed to git master) and pootentially the per-application settings and “Do not disturb” mode which I previously teased. The latter might also warrant a major version number bump so we’ll see whether it’ll really end up in 0.3.2.

Stay tuned!

Featurette: xfce4-notifyd 0.3.2 released

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This release came a bit sooner than expected, but it’s primary goal is to fix a showstopper regression which slipped into 0.3.1 and practically rendered xfce4-notifyd useless on systems with Gtk+3 <=3.18 (i.e. not showing any notifications). Thanks to Olivier for noticing immediately and posting a patch!

notifyd_retro_and_bright
the “Retro” and “Bright” themes

But while this had to be a fast release I still managed to put in some feature-goodness. For instance I came through on my promise to add more default themes and in this release I added “Retro” and “Bright“.

notifyd_symbolic_zomgponies
(symbolic) audio volume icon recolored ZOMG-PONIES! style

The biggest feature in this release however is the support for symbolic icons. For those of you who haven’t heard of the feature before: it’s basically Gtk+ coloring your icon with the color of the font of that particular context, so the icon will color-wise match the font. This is especially useful for monochrome icons and (usually) prevents white-on-white scenarios. It also gives users and theme-makers more freedom (instead of having a “dark panel” or a separate “dark notifications” variant of an icon-theme). Note that your notification-sending application also has to request a symbolic icon, xfce4-notifyd is not enforcing symbolic icons.

Another notable fix (that I forgot to mention in the release notes) is the fix of styles of the progressbars in notifications. Those were not styled according to the notifyd-theme selected but always used the style of the base (as in: screen-wide) Gtk+ theme.

Finally, a minor improvement is that all themes are now sorted alphabetically in the Settings Dialog.

With this bugfix release out of the way it won’t be long until I merge my feature branch and get more testing for the “Do not disturb” mode.

Enjoy!

Greybird 3.20.1 released (mostly bugfixes)

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Plank theme (by Sean Davis)
theme for Plank (a simple dock) by Sean

So the first bugfix release for Greybird 3.20 is here and while the changelog isn’t an overly exciting read, there are some goodies in this one!

The single new feature in this – otherwise – bugfix release is a Greybirdy theme for Plank (a simple dock), contributed by Sean.

Other than that I have tweaked or fixed the following:

  • less padding on some widgets, e.g. buttons (makes the whole theme feel more like the original and matches Gtk2)
  • less bold input focus line on GtkEntries
  • improved progressbar theming (no more tiny artifacts when the fraction is 0.00), also fixes LP #1617705
  • tweak the look of OSDs
  • mention librsvg build-dependency in the README

Download

https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.20.1


xfce4-clipman 1.4.0 (Gtk3 port) and libxfce4ui 4.13.1 released!

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clipmanxfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.0 released

So finally I’ve decided to release xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.0, which is the Gtk+3 port of the plugin. For a while I was unsure whether to do a development or a stable release – to be clear: this was not a decision based on the stability of the product itself but the fact that it relied on the development release of a Xfce core component (libxfce4ui-4.13.0). However I decided to revert the commit that introduced the dependency (I will apply it again latest when 4.14 is out).

As the port is a 1:1 port there are practically no new features. The only notable difference is that the panel plugin’s icon is now a symbolic icon.

Thanks to Eric, Steve and Florian for helping me get this off the ground!


libxfce4uilibxfce4ui 4.13.1

This is only a smaller bugfix release that replaces a deprecated call and – more importantly – fixes the default theming of XfceHeading in all Gtk+3 settings dialogs of Xfce.

Improved media-key handling with xfce4-volumed-pulse 0.2.2

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Background

So xfce4-volumed has been around a while and automagically handling your media keys – originally written by Steve around 2009 – but lingering unmaintained in Xfce’s Git repository. This version of the media-key daemon uses gstreamer 0.10’s mixer interface, which has been deprecated in gstreamer 1.0.

It’s been almost as long that Lionel forked the project into xfce4-volumed-pulse in 2012 – hosted on Launchpad ever since – notably adding support for PulseAudio.

Migration to xfce.org

Not much has happened since then, until Sean and me decided to move the project over to the official Xfce infrastructure for more distributions to enjoy. This means the code is now on git.xfce.org and bugs are tracked on bugs.xfce.org.

I also went ahead and added some small features to it (all documented in the Readme). Amongst others I merged a feature branch adding support for the Microphone Mute key (thanks goes to Christian Pointner for the feature). I also added support for symbolic icons, which means your audio volume change notifications can now be shown – presuming you have at least xfce4-notifyd 0.3.2 installed – with always correctly colored monochrome icons. This latter feature has been made optional through an “icon-style” xfconf property in the newly created xfce4-volumed-pulse channel. This same channel now also handles the “volume-step-size” property, which used to live in the xfce4-mixer channel (this really didn’t make sense to me anymore with xfce4-mixer not supporting PulseAudio). Finally we cleaned up the repository a bit and Sean was kind enough to knock out the 0.2.2 release while I was afk.

Anyway, without further ado here’s the code:

https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-volumed-pulse

PS: It might be worth noting that if you’re using the xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin you already have your volume keys handled by it.

Another bugfix release for xfce4-notifyd: 0.3.3 is out!

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notifydWhile I had planned to make the next release about features, I ended up fixing a few issues and doing a bugfix release instead. So 0.3.3 is about getting things right.

Test-driven development

Generally speaking Xfce has very few unit tests – or tests at all – but since Jerome had laid a foundation for notification tests in xfce4-notifyd I decided to extend that to testing the icons in notifications. What inspired me to do so was that I noticed that notifyd was not in line with the fd.o notifications specification in two aspects:

  • it didn’t support the “image-path” hint and
  • the priorities of how to handle the icons were mixed up.

So my new “test-icons” test – which I wrote before(!) I implemented the fix for the priorities, even if I checked it into git only until later 😉 – checks whether the server handles all icon-related properties, hints and features and also checks whether the priority is in accordance with the specification. I also started some documentation on what parts of the freedesktop.org specification are implemented in xfce4-notifyd and which ones are not (prominent example which is not implemented: sound).

Other than that a thank-you goes to Olivier for contributing another build-fix. Finally I managed to get a few more bugs fixed, most notably a general theming issue (action buttons were sometimes mis-styled) and hiding notification buttons without label. Together with the translation updates I think this makes 0.3.3 a worthwhile release.

Final note: currently there are only 12 bugs open on the tracker, of which several are feature requests so things seem to be going quite well!

xfce4-notifyd 0.3.4 released – Do not disturb and per application settings

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notifydI’ve finally gotten round to doing a 0.3.4 release and get some of the features I’ve had ready for a while “out there”. On the way a lot of translation updates have trickled in and Christian Hesse supplied a patch to fix internal themes with Gtk+3.22.

Features:

As announced already a while ago, this release features a “Do not disturb” mode so you can suppress notification bubbles when in/convenient. So this should satisfy users who want to silence notifications for a limited time-frame.do_not_disturb

For users who want to suppress certain applications, they can now do so with a list of “known applications” – which gets populated over the life-time of xfce4-notifyd by all apps that send notifications.
If an application does not show up in this list it simply hasn’t sent a notification since you have upgraded to 0.3.4 🙂

Another – slightly hidden – feature is defining a screen for notification bubbles to appear. While by default notifications are shown on the screen where the mouse-pointer resides, you can now select the “primary monitor” – the “primary monitor” can be set globally e.g. through xfce4-display-settings – as default place for notification bubbles to end up on.
To enable this feature in xfce4-notifyd, add the (Boolean) property “/primary-monitor” to the xfce4-notifyd channel and set it to True.
In a future release this option may be moved to the settings dialog.

Bugfixes

The only real bugfix in this release makes sure that internal themes work with Gtk+3.22, which dropped support for the “font” css shorthand in favor of “font-weight”, “font-family” etc.

Outlook

Finally I’ll soon merge my “logging” branch – which brings the persistence feature to xfce4-notifyd – to master to give people a chance to test and translators some time to do their magic.

Clipman 1.4.1 released

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xfce4-clipman-pluginWhile I haven’t been very active in terms of clipman lately I decided to push out a maintenance release in the 1.4 series nevertheless, as some useful patches had piled up in the master branch.

The probably single most important patch was contributed by Rinat and fixes the menu of clipman when used in a bottom-aligned panel. As I myself am using a panel at the top of my screen I didn’t notice this at all when releasing 1.4.0.

Other than that I improved the icon sizing for the panel plugin, which was another common – and understandable complaint – with 1.4.0. So the icon doesn’t remain at 16px, but scales in (meaningful) steps – very much like the power manager’s plugin.

Finally I decided to draw up a new application icon for clipman, as the old one was quite dusty already, low resolution and inconsistently looking at different sizes. Gaze at it in all its glory 🙂

clipman_1-4-1

Download

As always, wait patiently until your favorite distribution packages up clipman 1.4.1 or grab the tarball from here:

https://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin/snapshot/xfce4-clipman-plugin-1.4.1.tar.bz2

 

Pidgin elementary style

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Status icon theme

A while ago I started working on making Xubuntu’s default messenger app Pidgin look a little more integrated by creating a status-icon theme for it. As Xubuntu relies on the wonderful elementary set for iconography (in a variant maintained by me which is while being distro agnostic slightly misleadingly labeled “elementary-xfce”) the Pidgin theme was obviously done in that vein.

available busy chat offline person away

 

Smiley themepidgin_elementary

Last week I extended this effort to emoticons and created an initial smiley theme for Pidgin. While it may not support all protocol standards yet it should be pretty usable already. I’m hoping for people to submit some bug-reports on github if they encounter a lack of support for a protocol standard for emoticons.
It makes use of all meaningful emotes provided by upstream elementary.

face-worried face-wink face-uncertain face-tired face-surprise face-star face-smirk face-smile-crying face-smile-big-squint face-smile-big face-sick face-smile face-sad face-raspberry-wink face-raspberry-squint face-raspberry face-laugh face-mail face-plain face-heart-broken face-kiss face-happy face-heart face-devilish face-embarrassed face-crying face-angry face-cool

Download and install

You can get both themes from the same github repository. To my knowledge, neither of them have been packaged in any distribution, so you will have to run the Makefile I included to install both themes.

https://github.com/shimmerproject/pidgin-elementary

Caveat: As Pidgin does not support system-wide status-icon themes, you will have to install that theme locally and it will only be available on a per-user basis. Hopefully this will be fixed/implemented in Pidgin upstream in the future.

Install the status-icon theme
make install-status
Install the smiley theme
sudo make install-emotes

Releases, releases, releases!

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So it’s not that I’ve been quiet and lazy – I was actually busy preparing some releases and hacking on stuff. So here’s an update on what’s been going on and what’s to come.

xfce4-taskmanager 1.2.0

This is a new release which brings a handy feature, i.e. identifying windows by clicking on them. Just use the crosshair-button in the toolbar and click on a window. This will result in the appropriate/associated process being selected in the tree or listview. Thanks a lot to Florian for helping getting this feature release-ready!
Some small improvements to keyboard navigation have also been pushed with this release, namely hitting the Delete or Shift+Delete keys will let you terminate or kill processes respectively.
Finally Olivier improved the memory usage for the FreeBSD.

Looking a little into the future, I’ve also been busy porting taskmanager to Gtk3 entirely, i.e. dropping support for Gtk2. This will happen with the next major release (2.x), which means no more feature-releases are planned for the 1.x series and Gtk2. It’s not out of the question though, that there will be a bugfix or maintenance release for 1.x later on.

So far the Gtk3 branch already works and has feature-parity with master. I also cleaned up the interface a little. If you want, you can check it out here (also seen the screenshot on the right)
https://github.com/ochosi/xfce4-taskmanager/tree/gtk3_only

xfce4-notifyd 0.3.5

This long-awaited feature release finally brings the persistence support I have been working on for a while. So you can now enable a notification log and get your “away log” easily this way. There are even some options to only get the log for certain apps or only with “do not disturb” mode enabled.
Handy, right?

I have also – and this is maybe even more important – reworked the settings dialog towards something that I would hope could be the future direction of Xfce settings dialogs in general (or to the least open the discussion about it). Initially we settled on doing a 1:1 port from Gtk2 to Gtk3 to keep the disturbance and changes for users as small as possible. However, Gnome’s HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) that Xfce originally relied on – and still relies on – have changed dramatically and with that most Gtk+3 applications. So personally I think we should re-think the Xfce HIG and the new xfce4-notifyd settings dialog tries to be a best practice for some things. I’ll probably do a separate writeup of that though as this article is already long enough and there are still some releases to be announced.

Thunar 1.6.11

This maintenance release brings some important fixes that have made users complain a lot in the recent past – and understandably so. Thunar was fairly unstable with copy, rename, move and drag-and-drop operations and would simply crash. While a lot of people in the community did testing (and whining :)), several folks got to work, identified the underlying issue and submitted patches (that I pushed recently).
So hopefully this new release will provide a new baseline for testers and we can close many of the existing up- and downstream reports, many of which may be duplicates (at least in the sense that they were caused by the same pieces of code).

Greybird 3.22.1

This is mostly a maintenance release, which fixes a bug in Geary’s conversation view and improves the readability of OSDs.
However, it also features a new (round) style for GtkSwitches, which makes them take up less space. Sweet!

What’s next?

Currently I’ve been hacking a little on Xfce’s display dialog to add a feature I once rejected (mea culpa, live and learn…). At the time I was more optimistic about me – or anyone else for that matter – finding the time to implement proper colord support in Xfce, which means support for color profiles. Unfortunately we didn’t make it, so what I can offer now is the rebasing and improvement of a patch that was once written against Gtk2 and merge-ready for Gtk3 (including a small rework of the settings dialog as a whole) and an honest apology to Andreas Lampersberger, the author of the original patch.
There are still more things I’d like to fix in display dialog land, like scaled mirror mode by default if two displays don’t share any resolutions (which is generally supported by XRandR, but not implemented yet).

The other thing I’ll probably get back to now is the panel. The gtk3_css branch that I was last working at needs some revisiting and I hope that some of the recent activity on the IRC channel and mailing list will also lead to more people testing the code and helping out with the porting or just smaller patches even.

Anyway, there’s a lot to do and your help is much appreciated along the way! So get in touch with us if you feel like contributing.


Releases, releases, releases! Part 2

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Testing Xfce

Xfce – like many other open source projects – is not exactly following a test-driven development workflow. I would argue that we need a slight mindset change here plus we need some (standardized) infrastructure to make testing easier for people who want to get involved.

Luckily what we have been waiting for in terms of the latter is already here! xfce-test is a Docker-based setup built by Florian which enables anyone to quickly spin up a container (based on Xubuntu 17.04 for now) with some components integrated from Git master, e.g. the Gtk3 panel. The great thing is it does not create the overhead of a real virtual machine for a tester but instead stays in the lightweight world of containers. This also makes it easy for everyone to adapt and rebuild the container and to create a reproducible environment that can be shared.

Just check out these few steps to try it in action – it really does all the heavy lifting for you!

xfce-test in action

Kudos also go out to the Gnome team for setting up a real nice contribution workflow for their community. We should really strive to reach that level at some point!

xfce4-notifyd 0.3.6

And another bugfix release for xfce4-notifyd is out! The best part about this is that apart from code-review there was nothing for me to do to get there!

So a big shout-out goes to both Mattias and Igor for fixing some of my – slowly but surely traditional – shortcomings (memleaks here we go again!).

Greybird 3.22.2 and 3.22.3

So there are also new releases out for Greybird, and not a bad ones I may add. On the feature side I added a preliminary version of a dark theme, which I hope will please some of the Gnome users of this theme.

Furthermore I did some polishing on making GtkPopover and Headerbar buttons more integrated and tight. Finally some fixes went into Nautilus notifications, the xfce4-notifyd theme and GtkCalendar looks acceptable at last (which makes the Gtk3 version of the panel usable)!

So all in all two micro-releases worth upgrading to!

Download:
https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.22.2
https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.22.3

elementary-xfce 0.8

This release adds support for the new icon names of Gnome 3.24. I also pulled in several icons from upstream elementary, especially updated mimetypes (thanks Dan!) plus I added support for Pantheon Photos.

Finally I added more sizes to some of the icons, ridding the theme of some inconsistencies.

Download:
https://github.com/shimmerproject/elementary-xfce/releases/tag/v0.8

xfce4-panel 4.13.0 in the works

As hinted at in the previous installment of “Releases, releases, releases!” I’ve been pouring quite some time into getting xfce4-panel close to a first 4.13 development release. This should help testers to get a packaged up stable point of reference and it should also help us to track the remaining issues in our issue tracker like normal human beings instead of collecting everything in the wiki roadmap page.

So while there are still some issues remaining (one of the more prominent disfunctions is broken drag-and-drop in certain contexts) I use the panel on a daily basis and it hasn’t crashed upon me once and does pretty much what it should – even with Gtk2 plugins in it (nnnice!).

Feel free to test it out with xfce-test 😉

The first Gtk+3 release of xfce4-panel is out!

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After a looong waiting time – the original port of the panel was first kicked off in March 2013 by Nick – the first development release of the xfce4-panel is out and I am happy to say it is usable! 🙂 There are however some regressions and of course a lot of potential bugs that simply haven’t been uncovered because of the limited usage and testing so far (I guess I haven’t gone through all possible kinds of panel setups).

xfce4-panel 4.13.0
A very simple setup

General functionality and features

I know this is very boring, but the Gtk+3 version of the panel is on par with 4.12.1. Most of the functionality is there (see regressions and known issues), but no dramatic new features were introduced (apart from what the Gtk+3 toolkit brings to the table itself).

One notable feature that people have also been requesting for a while – in fact yours truly originally reported the bug – is support for RandR’s “primary monitor” feature. This means the panel will not stay on the left-most monitor by default but jump to the monitor that you define as “primary” in xfce4-settings Display dialogue.

Known issues and regressions

  • Not all panel settings may be kept as the configuration is not 100% backward compatible (e.g. we’re using GdkRGBA instead of GdkColor for the background)
  • Moving panel plugins via drag and drop on the panel directly via the plugins context menu action “Move” is currently broken (works fine in preferences dialog)
  • Small regression with intelligent hiding (when opening a menu, the panel hides and comes back immediately while it should just remain visible)
  • Enter/leave opacity does not work for Gtk2 plugins
  • The panel is not visually focused by default (fixed in Xfwm4>=4.12.4)

There is also one deprecation that is worth mentioning. While the panel relied on xfce_panel_image in Gtk+2 (i.e. pixbuf drawing and scaling) we decided to deprecate this approach in favor of using the toolkit’s features directly (which is now possible more efficiently with Gtk+3). The newly added xfce_panel_plugin_get_icon_size relies on GtkImage directly and which introduces defined, meaningful icon size-steps to avoid fuzzy icons in the panel.

Theming

I have already added some basic theming for the panel to Greybird and I hope this will help others. I’ve also noticed that the GtkCalendar widget in Gtk+3 is visually broken (actually also codewise really terrible, and likely therefore unmaintained) and made some effort to improve that in Greybird.

What’s next?

Well, there are still a lot of things to do. The top two of the todo list for the panel are of course fixing all known and not yet reported bugs as well as cleaning up more deprecations (currently your terminal’s backlog is filled with warnings when running make, which makes it hard to distinguish the meaningful from the meaningless information).

How can you help?

Do some testing, either by using something like VirtualBox or xfce-test or use a distribution that is brave enough to package the panel (I presume we will see it in some Ubuntu PPA in the near future). Set the panel up your way and just use it and hopefully we will manage to cover all existing use-cases and have them working in 4.14 as well.

Please report bugs against the 4.13.0 version of the panel so that we can get a clean todo list for the next development release!

Thanks to everyone involved!

Finally let me give a big shout-out to everyone involved in the port – more people than I could meaningfully mention here.

The translators, everybody who reported bugs or did testing so far and of course the developers who invested a lot of their free time and energy in this enterprise.

New hotness: xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0

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After quite some development time I have decided to push out xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0 today. This is not just a bugfix, but a feature-packed release.

Panel plugin

Among the biggest changes there is a panel plugin which displays the most recent notifications as well as allowing for quick access to the do-not-disturb mode. It also serves as a status indicator for the do-not-disturb mode, so you can easily see whether notifications are shown or hidden overall.

The new panel plugin

Improved logging

I’ve also spent some time on improving the notification image handling in the log. While handling icon-names is easy (just save them as string) handling the pixbufs was a little more challenging. I decided to do it the Git way and deduplicate these pixbufs based on their (unique) hashes, so that each picture would only be saved once. All of those pictures end up in a sub-directory of the log (which by default is ~/.cache/xfce4/notifyd/icons). Currently there is no monitoring of how much space these images consume and no button to clear them away, maybe I’ll add that later if people feel it would be useful/necessary. After using this feature for several months I have accumulated less than 7MB.
The log also received some more love in terms of markup support and character escaping. Multi-line notifications should now be correctly logged.

New animation: slide-out

Just for the fun of it I also worked out a new animation optional addon to the standard fade-out. I called it slide-out and it’s a fairly wide-spread animation mix of fade-out and sliding the bubble (depending on its location on the screen of course) off-screen.

New logo

As this turned out to be a bigger release I went for a bigger version jump and also included the new logo I had been working on for a while. I evaluated several “notification” metaphors and went for the ‘ol bell (notification bubbles felt a little odd and not easy to depict, as they look usually very diverse).

Bugfixes

Some people may be happy to know that I dropped the feature that let xfce4-notifyd exit after 10 minutes of inactivity. I can only guess but I presume this was implemented to save resources. Nowadays it feels more annoying if a daemon has to be restarted and the first notification that’s that split-second longer to appear.

A few more tweaks have been done to the geometry of the notification bubble windows to not take more space than needed and distribute things evenly (no more strange margins) and the configuration dialog now shows a warning if xfce4-notifyd is not detected as running.

Download

As always, you can download and build/install the tarball or wait for your favorite distribution to package and ship it to you.

https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-notifyd/snapshot/xfce4-notifyd-0.4.0.tar.bz2

Second xfce4-panel devel release, clipman and Greybird releases

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Most of this post is fairly old news, but still worth to be mentioned.

Also as a small gimmick (and because it was requested in my previous post), here is a gif of the new slide-out animation of xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0

I have read your comments and bugreports and have already been working towards some further improvements of notifyd, so I guess 0.4.1 is around the corner.

Finally, here goes the “historic news”.

xfce4-panel 4.13.1

After a longer waiting time I pushed out another development release of the panel. This one includes among as major change the port to GDBus, which was done by Ali. This means the panel now depends on xfconf 4.13 – recommended is at least 4.13.3 – and is not compatible anymore with xfconf 4.12.

A lot of bugfixes and translation updates accumulated over the last months since 4.13.0, the most prominent one is the fix of drag and drop (one of the bigger known regressions of the Gtk+3 port) thanks to Peter. A nice new improvement is the re-ordering of systray items, which was implemented by Viktor.

xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.2

We’ve had a lot of problems with keyboard shortcuts not working reliably with the panel plugin and systray version of clipman so Mike rolled up his sleeves and ported both to GtkApplication. I haven’t had a problem with my keyboard shortcuts since!

Greybird 3.22.5

This release features some small improvements including slimmer CSD/headerbars to save some vertical pixels, initial support for Xfdesktop 4.13 to help all testers of Xfce’s development releases and finally a fix for message dialog buttons.

I have since then been working towards supporting Thunar’s Gtk+3 port better in Greybird, which will be included in the next release.

xfce4-notifyd sees a new point release

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After only 2 months of work I was today ready to release xfce4-notifyd 0.4.1 (thanks in part to Viktor’s fix for make distcheck) with a bunch of fixes and some small features too (and of course lots of translation updates).

New panel plugin menu layout

Features

The panel plugin that was introduced in 0.4.0 received some attention, gaining a new hidden option (log-icon-size) for users to set the icon-size for the notifications that are displayed in the menu. Furthermore I added a “Clear log” button and finally decided to revamp the layout of the menu a little, inspired by some work of the elementary folks. Now the “Do not disturb” item is on top (or bottom, depending on your panel layout) of the list for easy and quick/er access and sports a GtkSwitch because the GtkCheckMenuItem was not visible enough.
To top off the changes to the plugin I added a placeholder text in case the log has been cleared or there are no notifications to display (e.g. if the “only notifications from today” filter is set but the log only contains entries from yesterday and before).

Furthermore spent some more time on the notification window layout and it should be very consistent now, so equal spacing between the icon, subject, body, buttons and the edge of the bubble.

Finally I added a configure option to use autostart instead of dbus (Bug #13989), which is a feature some distros (like Mageia) have done already via downstream patches so far and which helps if people have multiple DEs and therefore notification services installed in parallel.

Bugfixes

Regarding bugfixes there are also a few notable mentions. With the help of several contributors the following issues were tackled:

  • Ensure body and summary of notifications are correctly ellipsized (Bug #12674)
  • Fix warning about gdk_window_get_origin (Bug #13935)
  • Ensure the panel plugin icon resizes with Xfce 4.12
  • Treat icon_data only as pen-ultimate fallback option (Bug #13950)
  • Remove deprecated functions (Gtk+ 3.22)
  • Fix warnings reported by Clang (Bug #13931)

Download

So get it while it’s hot here: http://archive.xfce.org/src/apps/xfce4-notifyd/0.4/xfce4-notifyd-0.4.1.tar.bz2

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