Xfce News – September 10th through September 18th, 2005
Sunday, instead of Friday.
Ah well.
Press
Linmagazine
Linmagazine, an Israeli Linux site has a translation of our update on the status of 4.4. If that’s your bag baby, check it out
It’s all just a bunch of funny squares to me.
Announcements
Xfmedia 0.9.1
Brian Tarricone released Xfmedia 0.9.0 on the 10th, with a nice bundle of additional features (like tag editing), bugfixes (like a fix for ASX playlists), and seven new/updated translations.
Not four days later, Brian followed that up with 0.9.1, which fixes a until-now elusive crash with Gtk+ 2.8.
Xfmedia has been my default player for some time now – I only need Gxine for it’s browser plugin. If you’re looking for a no nonsense player with a small footprint and few dependencies, this may be what you are looking for.
Clipman Plugin
On the 15th Nick Shermer announced that he was working on a personal update of the Clipman plugin for the panel, which can be used to keep a clipboard history.
Nick followed this up with a new version of the plugin. It is far more customizable and slick than it’s predecessor, providing the ability to exclude selection data, customize the number of items in the history, persistent clipboard across sessions, and more.
Nick’s announcement
Source download
Updates
Mailwatch
Mailwatch, the anointed successor to the mailcheck plugin was ported by Jasper to the new panel API.
Brian is reported to have said “that’s just freakin cool.” This being the first major plugin ported caused a small comment from Brian on the new panel API. Jasper has yet to answer. So pooty on you Brian.
I’d go so far as to call it “tubular”. If I was a Ninja Turtle
Panel
The new experimental panel continues to be in flux, as is to be expected from pre alpha software.
However, most of these changes are minor, or cosmetic – Jasper opening up the floor for discussion has gotten some feedback on how to make the panel cover corner cases, but nothing critical has been rethought.
Hopefully, the panel will reach a stable enough state in the near future that third party developers can plan to be ready with upgrades to their plugins for 4.4
Brian finds a convenience API confusing
Benedikt asks for valid .desktop files
Container plugins? Probably not
Default plugins
Thunar Extension Framework
Benny has begun implementing a powerful framework for extending Thunar, the new file manager for 4.4.
There are a number of niceties in the works. The first is a more than coincidental similarity between Thunar’s framework, and the one found in Nautilus. The primary differences exist to cut down on memory usage, and should be minor enough to allow a large number of Nautilus extensions to be ported to Thunar, and to permit those with experience writing Nautilus extensions get up and running with Thunar in short order.
Benny also plans on providing an embedded Python interpretor so those of a reptilian persuasion can extend Thunar as well. There is no word from the Perl or C++ binding developers on their intentions regarding adding support for Thunar, yet, but we can hope.
The announcement of Thunar extensions quickly turned into a discussion on whether or not it would be possible to extend the VFS that Thunar uses. The short answer: not yet. See the thread for the long answer.
Preliminary docs extensions
The whole darn thread
The Lists
Orage Sync
Dennis Tuchler wanted to know if Orage could sync with an external device.
It will if someone wants to donate some hardware
Orageballs
Korbinus put together a quick and dirty collection of tarballs and screenshots for Orage
The End
It seems that I have been sending with the wrong email address to the Xfce lists on occasion – as such some of my emails have been missing. I assure you that nothing I said was insightful.
Brian is in China for this week. Which is why I can get away with that pooty comment.
If you like this update, then consider dropping me a comment. I know its vain, but I like knowing that you read this. Also, the grammer police amuse me.