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xfwm4 theme reorg

  • February 27, 2004
  • Olivier

I finally took some time to reorganize the theme stuff in xfwm4 for Xfce 4.2.

Theme are now located in themes/theme name/xfwm4 instead of xfwm/themes/theme name as in xfce 4.0

This means that older themes placed in the older location won’t be seen by xfwm4.2. This breakage was necessary to be consistent with the standard.

I also moved most themes from xfwm4 package to xfwm4-themes. That should make xfwm4 archive a bit smaller (and help keeps things clean)

Screenshot new gtk / xfwm4 default themes

  • February 18, 2004
  • Jasper Huijsmans

Just wanted to say I love the new default gtk theme. Well done Olivier! The default xfwm theme of the day is very nice as well, but probably already different when I’m writing this ;-)

Take a look at the screenshot.

news about the menueditor

  • February 18, 2004
  • Jean-François

Hi all, i’m Jean-Fran�ois (also known as p0llux on IRC) , i’m the author of the menueditor. I will no more release the menueditor as an third-party package because, since last night (here in Belgium :-) ), it’s included in xfdesktop and so it will be directly released with xfce4. For the future development of the editor i will coordonate with Brian. All remarks on the menueditor are welcome, i’m often in the #xfce channel on IRC if you have questions about it.

By the way, i really need to find a photo of me for the weblog.

gtk stuff, xfdesktop plans

  • February 16, 2004
  • Brian Tarricone

i was looking through the gtk2 api docs the other day, and i noticed they added documentation for a new GtkIconTheme class in gtk 2.4. while i like my icon finding code, it will be nice to relegate it to a fallback and use a somewhat “official” method for finding icons.

the other night i wrote XfceAppMenuItem, a subclass of GtkImageMenuItem that should make handling the desktop menu a bit easier. making use of it will take a bit of code rework that i’m not ready to do right now, so i’ll shelve it for later. you can check out my preliminary api in the header. make suggestions if you want.

yesterday tuukka sent me his work on a freedesktop.org desktop menu spec-compliant menu parser. i’ve only just started looking at it, but now i understand why there still isn’t a production-quality parser/generator out yet: the spec is incredibly complicated. i think it’s a good spec, to be sure – it has to be, to both be flexible for new ideas and to support old legacy menu hierarchies, but i’m somewhat afraid that when i hook it all into the menu system it’s going to make everything terribly slow. at any rate, it’ll be at least a week before i figure out what exactly is the best to do with this…

Boo !

  • February 14, 2004
  • Danny

Just wanted to say hi to the world…

Hi!

If you are wondering who I am, you are not alone. I sometimes wonder too ;)

Anyways, xfce related I am breaking…. uh working on the mixer program&panel plugin, allowing xfce users to unintentionally increase the sound card volume to the max, risking the neighbours hit you hard for damaging their ears… (hi Jasper ;))

Seriously though, this and some minimalist freedesktop menuspec implementation is all I ever committed to this great project… I want to have more free time to be able to spend hacking on xfce ;)
(and since I also like python and delphi, and relational databases, each day should have about 40 hours for me to have enough time ;))

Risking a pureness war here, I found “gob”, a preprocessor for C which makes gobject based work so much easier (as opposed to pure C). It has a java-like syntax and almost the whole mixer is written using it, and so far I am very pleased with gob2. Give it a try.

Either way, I’m off playing ut2004 demo since it finished downloading… yay ! ;)

welcome (to me!)

  • February 13, 2004
  • Brian Tarricone

hello all-

for those of you who don’t know me, i’m brian (aka kelnos), and i’m the new maintainer of xfdesktop. i don’t really have all that much to say right now; i just wanted to check in. i threw together a little web page that i’m going to use to update the world on my progress with xfce – what i’m working on, screenshots, etc.

hmm, i need to get myself one of those disembodied floating head pictures…

that’s all for now, i suppose.

-brian

Excuses for not blogging

  • February 12, 2004
  • Jasper Huijsmans

Hey, I just started a new job, what’s your excuse for not blogging? ;-)

All I can do now, it seems, is share an opinion now and then. Hope to get back to coding when things settle down a bit.

Great things are happening for Xfce and I can hardly take part in it. Just to name a few:

  • benny started to create the basic framework for API docs for the libraries.
  • kelnos has been very busy with the menu system.
  • master^shadow has a first implementation of xfce4-appfinder, a utility to list and find programs in the system (gnome/kde/freedesktop) menu. Damnit I need to make the panel launcher dialog accept .desktop files as imput.
  • p0llux has made a menu editor, one of the most obviously missing graphical configuration utilities.

If you don’t know who these people are, you need to drop by more often in #xfce on irc.freenode.net ;-)

Ok, gotta go prepare something for work tomorrow :/

/jazman

PS
Olivier, be a sport, switch on the commenting to your blog entry.

Default 4.2 themes

  • February 5, 2004
  • Olivier

I did it again, I changed the default xfwm4 theme for 4.2… I know I said I wouldn’t, I know I said it no earlier than yesterday… But oh well, now, I’m pleased with the theme so there is a good chance it won’t change within the next 12 hrs :)

PS: This pupose of this post is mainly to try the weblog!

Planet XFce

  • February 3, 2004
  • Jasper Huijsmans

I was reading Planet GNOME, the weblog site of our big sister project ;-)) and apparently we have been noticed.

Christian Schaller mentioned the start of our weblog. He also states that XFce in his opinion is not a competitor but rather an asset to GNOME. I cannot agree more.

We use the development platform written by them and trade some features for some free memory and additional speed. In fact we owe them a lot more, including their freedesktop work and the GNOME HIG, which has made everyone much more aware of interface design issues.

GNOME rocks and so does XFce and, why not, KDE as well, although you won’t catch me spoiling my beautiful gtk2-only system with any K apps ;-)

Header file naming in XFce libs

  • February 3, 2004
  • Benedikt

While integrating the about dialog in libxfcegui4 I realized that we have three different naming schemes for public gobject header files in the base libs:

1. In libxfce4util we have a class named “XfceDesktopEntry” with a file name of xfce_desktop_entry.h

2. In libxfcegui4 we have classes whose names start with “Xfce” in files, like XfceFrameBox, in files named xfce_framebox.h (notice no ‘_’ between Frame and Box).

3. In libxfcegui4 there are also the Netk class, for example NetkClassGroup, with an interface file named netk-class-group.h

Should there be one consistent naming scheme for all public interface headers in XFce? I would prefer the third alternative, as this seems to be the standard. That way I no longer need to look into the include dirs how the header file is named, instead I can just get the header file name from looking at the class name.