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XWN for April 8th through April 26th, 2005

  • April 27, 2005
  • Erik

Here it is, a day and a half short of being two weeks late, the weekly news, as promised. Now perhaps Brian will leave me alone.

A small request before we begin. If anyone out there in blogland is willing to take a short stint as my replacement in early June, drop me a line at erikharrison AT gmail DOT com. I get married May 28th, and I’m gonna be honeymoonin’ hard core after. So, if your a masochist like me, let me know and we’ll work something out.

Major Headlines

Xfce in the news, interesting IRC antics, juicy mailing list threads, or pretty much anything else that deserves more than two sentenses,

Mad Pirate Scientist Crosses Mouse With Snake

Bloody Davy Kidd (also known as Danny) got shocked looks from all the Xfce IRC junkies when he offered an unnamed tarball to Olivier, and told him that it was relatively untested. Olivier asked the obvious question.

(15:19:29) ofourdan: dannym: what is it?
(15:19:52) dannym: xfce bindings for python :)

Needless to say I’m excited. And barring threats of nad kicking from sofar, there will even be a SVN module for the bindings soon.

Danny’s blog post

Eduard is the Name. Widgetizing is the Game

Eduard laid a cool update on the Appfinder. While widgetizing the Appfinder had been mentioned in vague terms before, Eduard announced that the feat was well on it’s way to completion, though not yet stable enough to hit SVN.

The Appfinder is a small application that searches known locations for .desktop files and composes a list of desktop applications discovered, in the categories they claim to be in. It also provides features for searching said list, and dragging and dropping to any suitable target. It is already included in Xfce stable.

The Appfinder widget would allow applications to embedd this functionality where necessary. A good example would be a file manager dialog for determining which application should open a document. With the Appfinder widget, Xffm or Thunar could present a list of desktop apps available that supported that document’s MIME type, bypassing the need to sort through /usr/local/bin manually. Another posibility is drag and drop to the panel to create launchers.

All in all a cool development.

Eduard’s blog post

Joe Crawford – Design Ninja

Joe Crawford, a new user, is a user interface designer who has done some work with other free software projects in the past, namely K-3D. Joe said hello to the developers list, and offered his services. Once accepted he made some varied comments on the state of affairs.

Note that Joe had some trouble getting his mailer to behave initially, so some messages are not properly threaded in the archives. Feel free to root around to get the whole story.

Joe’s intro
The menu icon
Joe’s Thunar suggestions
Joe versus Thunar’s location dialog

Dev List Tidbits

Developers! Developers! Developers!

Xfcalendar – Testers Wanted

Mickaël Graf sent out a message asking for testers of the much improved calendar (see previous XWN commits list news).

So, if you’re adventurous, give it a shot.

Get it while it’s hot!

We R Gud Programmers

Olivier told everyone that the current SVN trunk rocked the hizouse. It was asked that if it rocked so hard, where was 4.3.0?

Compliments from the Dictator

New Stable

Olivier also propsed a new stable release, hopefully better than 4.2.1, for the end of April. No objections were raised.

Okay, I totally can’t think of a gag for this one

Lightweight Display Manager

Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues asked about the possibility for a lightweight Xfce oriented display manager.
This generated a lot of discussion. Unfortunately it did not generate a lightweight display manager.

A good idea, in search of the man who can tame it

The 4.4 Panel – Slowly but Asskickingly

Jasper sent us a nice little update on the SVN panel. It looks cool. Everyone else thought so too.

Panel update

Users List Tidbits

Threads worth looking over from the users list. Cause you know. It’s about the users.

Sort by MIME type

Jasper popped the Thunar list a cool little png of a potential Nautilus feature. The reponse was minimal, but positive.

One of two non-Joe threads on Thunar-dev in the last three weeks

Joe Schmoe Upgrades

Joe Schmoe (seriously, Joe Schmoe) wanted to upgrade to Xfce 4.2. from 4.0. He wanted some reassurance that all of his customizations would keep. And like the overly protective parents we are, the assurance was given. With some caveats.

“My panel! Oh God, my launchers! – Whew!”

Month Names in the Data and Time Plugin

Peter Humphry wanted to know how to customize how month names appeared in the panel. We learned him good.

man strftime

Open Source *nix 101

A question about a segfault turned into a discussion of packaging formats, debugging symbols, and, of course, Gentoo.

Why call it a thread if it’s full of tangents?

Cholestorol Free Eye Candy

Nikola Pizurica pointed us all at Xfce-Look.org. And it was good.

Xfce Look
Don’t shoot the messenger. Cause that’d be bad.

Xfce [hearts] Firefox

Amichai Teumim was gently reminded that Xfce loves Firefox, and wouldn’t do anything to hurt it. Remember kids, if installing Xfce seems to make other packages crash, it is either a) a coincidence, b) a stupid packaging issue, c) a coincidence.

Learning the hard way