State of the Intersection
(Yeah, that's a lame play on "State of the Union". Sorry, I'm retarded.)
A few people have asked me what's up with xfmedia, since I haven't done any work on it in months. So I figure I'll write a little about the various projects I'm working on.
xfdesktop
Clearly I've been putting most of my effort on xfdesktop lately. The icon view refactoring and file icons stuff was a lot of work, and we've been trying to get 4.4.0 out for a while now. Now that we're in beta and thus feature-frozen, I should only be doing bug fixes on xfdesktop for the next couple months or so.
xfmedia
Due to all the work on xfdesktop, I haven't touched xfmedia in many months. No, I haven't abandoned it. I intend to get back to it soon after Xfce 4.4.0 is out. Don't hold your breath for any new great features, though. The focus of my next release is going to be mostly user-invisible: I'm refactoring the codebase to make it more maintainable and extensible, which will save me a lot of headaches and fix some long-standing issues I have. It'll also hopefully lead to a sane, reasonably-useful plugin interface, unlike what we have now. I've decided that one I'm happy with the plugin interface, that's when I'll release xfmedia 1.0, with probably a couple RCs before that.
mailwatch
For the most part, I consider mailwatch finished. It does basically everything I wanted it to do, and supports all the protocols I thought would be useful. It's remarkably stable, and I don't think there's much to do with it. (I'm sure someone will go and prove me wrong now.)
transd
I intended transd as a kind of throwaway thing just to see if I could get it to work. But apparently a fair number of people have found it useful, and I'm glad. There's one small thing I'd like to do with transd, and that's to integrate another mode of operation that sets all inactive windows semi-transparent, and the active window opaque. I already wrote a quick-n-dirty standalone app to do this, but it couldn't hurt to consolidate it into transd.
xfce4-perl
I haven't touched the Xfce perl bindings in a while, but I'd like to have these polished and ready for 4.4.0. It shouldn't be too much work, I don't think. I need to finalise the bindings for libxfce4panel, and check over the libxfce4util and libxfcegui4 bindings, but otherwise it's in good shape, I think. I'd also like to write a bunch of test cases for all the parts of it, but I'm not sure of the best way to do GUI test cases that fit into perl's testing framework.
garxfce4
I worked on GarXfce4 before we had Benny's awesome graphical installer, so predictably my interest in maintaining GarXfce4 has waned. It might not be a bad idea to update it for the 4.4 betas and RCs, however, since they probably won't be packaged by many distros, and we need all the testing help we can get. We'll see if I have time. It's not really all that difficult to update; it's just a little tedious.
So that's more or less everything I'm working on. There's another project that I don't really want to talk about quite yet, but I've been devoting a good amount of energy to it in the past couple weeks, so likely that will take up some of my time as well.
Google SoC
We've been discussing submitting Xfce for participation in Google's Summer of Code program, and even came up with some good project ideas. Unfortunately, we got rejected. Boo on Google.
MySpace for the Dead
Incredibly disturbing and morbid site of the day: MyDeathSpace.