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Ristretto 0.1.x — Getting rid of anoyances…

  • October 10, 2011
  • Stephan Arts

Over the past few years, the top 2 complaints about ristretto have been ‘it leaks memory! and ‘it crashes in this <obscure> way when I press this button‘.
And you know… these people were right. During the past 6 months, my main focus was fixing these problems. After a lot of code-simplification and refactoring, I finally managed to fix all the reported crashes and memory-leaks. (Yes, I know this took  a while…)

In my opinion, this made ristretto 0.1.0 the most stable release so far.

But there are still quite some improvements to be made by removing nuisances in the user-experience. Some of these have already been addressed in 0.1.0, including:

  • Support for using arrow-keys to navigate through the images
  • Additional accelerator for the ‘f’ key for switching to full-screen-mode
  • Additional accelerator for the ‘q’ key for quitting ristretto
  • Modify scroll-zoom so the mouse-cursor stays above the same region of the image when zooming in or out
  • Re-introduce the file-properties dialog.

There are still some things that can be improved with regards to usability, I will work closely with the Xfce Design SIG to identify and improve problems with the ristretto UI. One of the things I will finally start on improving is the sorting-algorithm used for sorting the images on their filenames  (Bug #6866), so the images are sorted in a similar order as they are in Thunar.

The main focus during the 0.1.x release-cycles is getting existing functionality to work better, so expect a faster release-schedule featuring smaller changes for the coming months.