multihead goodness
jasper rightly pointed out that i haven’t posted here in over a month, so i suppose i’m overdue.
my latest big improvement to xfdesktop is multihead support (not xinerama yet, unfortunately). xfdesktop can now handle multiple screens grouped under a single X display. you can set the backdrop, color, etc. independently for all screens. i’ll probably add an option to use the screen 0 settings on all screens if you’re too lazy to set different stuff for each. anyway, doing the multihead stuff was fun – i learned a lot about how X handles that sorta stuff. thanks to danny for a lot of testing and bug-hunting help.
another cool new feature is that you can set the backdrop to a color gradient. françois put up one of my screenshots displaying the feature, with a semi-transparent image sitting on top. mmmm, i love gradients…
the new multi-screen required a bit of a redesign to the backdrop settings dialog. soon i’ll be adding some global menu preferences to the dialog as well.
from a request on the mailing list, i just added the ability to add directories of image files to image lists. you can either do multi-select in the file chooser, or drag and drop a directory from xffm (and probably other filemanager; i haven’t tested).
in other news, i did some libxfcegui4 work as well. olivier wasn’t too happy about the backported gtk 2.4 code i stuffed in there, since it was causing a bunch of binary compatibility problems. i ripped all that stuff out, and created some less-functional wrappers for gtk 2.2 users. in the process, i also created XfceFileChooser, which is a thin wrapper over gtk 2.4’s GtkFileChooserDialog and gtk 2.2’s old GtkFileSelection. this enables xfce apps to use either the newer or older dialog, depending upon which version of gtk was used to compile libxfcegui4.
unfortunately, xfdesktop is still making some apps crash when launched from the desktop menu. olivier and i have done a lot of bug-hunting in the past couple days, but we can’t figure out what’s causing it. olivier can reproduce the problem using panel launchers as well, which leads him to believe the problem isn’t restricted to xfdesktop. i’m not so sure (as i can’t reproduce it that way), but i can say that so far we’re pretty stumped as to how to fix it or what the root cause could be.
whew, i guess that’s it for now.