No GSoC
Sadly, we didn't get accepted into Google's Summer of Code this year. It's a shame, but I'm glad I went through the effort to apply. If nothing else, we got some potentially-useful ideas and possibly some developer interest. Obviously we can't fund any of these people, but it would be great if they still want to contribute.
Update: The coordinator got back to me, and said our ideas page wasn't very fleshed out, and that we should look at other accepted applicants and the program guidelines for help on how to do this right... never mind that I actually did look at some older accepted projects, and their ideas lists were at times even more sparse than ours (though many were much more formally written up as well). Also she gave the usual "we can't accept every great project" excuse, which at least gives some hope for next year. I'm not particularly sure I want to go through the work to apply again, but maybe someone else will.
No GSoC
Sadly, we didn’t get accepted into Google’s Summer of Code this year. It’s a shame, but I’m glad I went through the effort to apply. If nothing else, we got some potentially-useful ideas and possibly some developer interest. Obviously we can’t fund any of these people, but it would be great if they still want to contribute.
Update: The coordinator got back to me, and said our ideas page wasn’t very fleshed out, and that we should look at other accepted applicants and the program guidelines for help on how to do this right… never mind that I actually *did* look at some older accepted projects, and their ideas lists were at times even more sparse than ours (though many were much more formally written up as well). Also she gave the usual “we can’t accept every great project” excuse, which at least gives some hope for next year. I’m not particularly sure I want to go through the work to apply again, but maybe someone else will.
whaawmp 0.2.8
Today Jeff, released whaawmp 0.2.8.Check it out here.
There is a release for Python 2.4 too.
On to Xfce Edition. I still hope to get an iso out this week.
I'm thinking about replacing OO.o with abiword/gnumeric on default installation, if it reduces the iso size enough to fit on one CD.
But there are still things missing, so I will probably end up with a bigger image anyway.
Let's get it out for testing...
Xfce and Google’s Summer of Code
While we haven't been accepted into the program yet, we (Xfce) are applying to participate in the 2008 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. Please see our wiki page for more information, and add your name to the students list if you'd like to work on one of the projects. Feel free to add to the project ideas list as well.
If you'd like to act as a mentor, you still have a few more days before I submit the application. Add your name to the mentors list and email me to let me know.
Xfce and Google’s Summer of Code
While we haven’t been accepted into the program yet, we (Xfce) are applying to participate in the 2008 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring organisation. Please see our wiki page for more information, and add your name to the students list if you’d like to work on one of the projects. Feel free to add to the project ideas list as well.
If you’d like to act as a mentor, you still have a few more days before I submit the application. Add your name to the mentors list and email me to let me know.
Ristretto, a ‘lightweight’ image viewer
From the moment I started developing ristretto, I mentioned that it was a simple lightweight image viewer. This is a statement which is bound to be disputed by some, and here is the reason why: ‘There is no such thing as a lightweight image viewer‘. And they are right, decompressing an image requires a lot of CPU-power, and a fully decompressed image requires the presence of enough RAM memory in order to do anything usefull with it at any acceptable speed. No image viewer has been able to surpass this limitation, ristretto is no exception to that rule.
So, why do I say ristretto is lightweight? — Because there is more to an image viewer then the two constants I mentioned before, a basic image viewer should:
- Navigate between images in an entire folder
- Display image thumbnails
- Run a slideshow
- Flip / Rotate images
- Read (and interpret) EXIF meta-data, for jpeg images taken by digital camera’s.
- Have well-documented comprehensible code
At this moment, a rudimentary implementation of these features have found their way inside ristretto. Rudimentary, because each component is being looked after if it needs refactoring. The goal is to improve these features until ristretto is a stable and fast image viewer using as little memory as possible (making it relatively lightweight), considering it’s purpose.
I’ve just summed up the first priority of ristretto development; to write a simple and fast image viewer, which does just that: show images.
Any additional features, like importing images from a digital camera (using libgphoto2) or printing images to paper could probably be added through a plugin interface or something. Keeping the basic application simple while allowing individual users to add features they like. If, when and how this is going to be implemented is still a question though ;).