Looking Forward to 2013
Tomorrow marks the beginning of a new year and refreshed expectations of what’s to come from the free software world. What can we look forward to, and what will I work on?
Ubuntu: Games, TVs, Smartphones, and Surprises
By 14.04 LTS Ubuntu will power tablets, phones, TVs and smart screens from the car to the office kitchen, and it will connect those devices cleanly and seamlessly to the desktop, the server and the cloud.
2012 has been a whirlwind year for Ubuntu. With the announcement of (and even progress towards) Ubuntu for Android, Ubuntu TV, and Ubuntu across multiple platforms, 2013 will set the stage for a unified platform across all devices. And with the latest countdown, time will only tell what else Ubuntu has in store for 2013.
The other huge news that came out of 2012 was the Value and Ubuntu partnership to bring Steam and many popular games to the Linux platform. This was something often alluded to, leaked, and denied, and then it happened. Now Steam for Linux is available as an open beta for anybody to try out. As this becomes more stable and more games come to Ubuntu, more gamers may as well.
Finally, 2013 also means two more Ubuntu-family releases ( Raring Ringtail, anyone) featuring the latest and greatest of Linux and open-source software. Now that’s quite a bit to look forward to, and I’m only getting started!
Xfce 4.12
Xfce 4.12 will be released this year, bringing all sorts of new goodies. The developers have been working hard to fix bugs and introduce new features to the Xfce family of applications. Development releases of Thunar, Mousepad, Xfce Settings, Terminal, and more offer great new features while maintaining minimalism in appearance and memory usage.
The development branch of Thunar, the Xfce file manager, introduces tabbed browsing (a long-requested feature), gphoto integration (offering better support for Android devices and digital cameras), and additional improvements all around. The latest versions of Exo and Tumbler further improve Thunar and Xfdesktop.
There’s plenty more to write about, but I can imagine that most people aren’t as excited about this stuff as I am… moving on!
My Current Projects
Finally, I’m caught up on my own projects. I’ve been increasingly busy as of late, further refining Parole Media Player, Catfish, and MenuLibre. Each application is becoming increasingly more stable and feature-full. And with each commit, I get fired up to add, tweak, or fix something else.
Parole Media Player is (probably) lines of code away from a new release. We’ve fixed all long-standing bugs, further refined the interface, and added some awesome new features. Screensaver support is finally fixed, so you can enjoy a full-length movie without wiggling your mouse. Missing codecs can now be easily found and installed from Parole. We’ve added an excellent new audio widget that shows album art and track details. CDs and DVDs can now be quickly and easily navigated by the playlist as well. If you’re interested, please check out the latest code from the git repository and test it out! Report any bugs you find here.
I’ve been hard at work rewriting Catfish from the ground up to be leaner, faster, and more easily extended and maintained. The experimental code is still private, but here’s a sneak peek!
Finally, MenuLibre is being reworked to add classic menu editing capabilities (useful for Xfce, LXDE, and other desktop environments). Hopefully we’ll see this new feature sometime soon in the coming days. As always, if you’re interested in helping out with any of these projects, let me know.
Happy New Year!
So yeah, 2013. It’s going to be huge. You should do all you can to start it off on the right foot and have a good time with friends, family, or strangers. There’s a lot coming up, and it will get here when it gets here, right? Though, if you’re impatient, most of this upcoming software is available online, even in its early development stage. So, why wait?
Do you have any big plans for 2013? Are you looking forward to the next year and everything that’s to come? Let me know in the comments!
Cheers!
Featured image, available under a Creative Commons license from http://www.flickr.com/photos/bayasaa/2693171833/
Keyboard shortcut work landed
After a few user interface improvements and some last bug fixes, the work I described in my last post was merged in the master branches. It is thus available for testing to all users of the Xfce development version.
Feedback on this is welcome, file any bug you find on the Xfce Bugzilla. This will of course be available in the next development release of those components.
Work in progress to improve keyboard shortcuts in Xfce
Long time no blog! I started to hack again last week with the goal of improving keyboard shortcuts handling in Xfce. I touched that during the Xfce 4.10 cycle and this unfortunately seem to have introduced a bunch of bugs that I'm now trying to resolve. I also took this opportunity to try to overhaul the UI and make it more understandable.
This code is available in the jeromeg/keyboard-shortcuts branches of xfwm4, libxfce4ui and xfce4-settings on the Xfce Git server. Some improvements are still planned but most of what I was planning is already implemented.
Here is a list of reported bugs which should be fixed once I merge this:
- Keyboard shortcuts on numeric keypad are ineffective
- Usability issue : the dialog for adding keyboard shortcuts isn't clear
- Unable create keyboard shortcut <Alt>+Print
- Add a button to edit/modify a keybinding
- Control modifier appears as Primary when setting shortcuts
- Keyboard shortcuts of the same shortcut
- Default shortcuts not working
- Keyboard mapping for XF86PowerButton and Ctrl+Insert ineffective
- <Shift> modifier not recognized correctly
- Keyboard shortcuts shipped by Xfce are wrong since the Gtk switch from Control to Primary
A brief summary: shortcuts now work when Caps Lock is on, shortcuts using Shift or the numeric keypad are handled correctly, a bunch of regressions are fixed, conflict handling is now more reliable and the UI should be better.
Regarding keyboard shortcuts bugs, keyboard shortcuts not working correctly after a reboot or not work working in some other cases seem to occur because of a "wrong" shortcut database often caused by a problem in the migration script in Xfce 4.6. In that case, the easier way to fix this seems to be to revert all keyboard shortcuts to default (in xfwm4-settings and xfce4-keyboard-settings) and to rebind them using the dialogs.
Screenshots
Readable shortcut labels in the UI
Improved dialogs to add and edit shortcuts
Improved conflict handling
Testing is welcome!
If you know what you are doing, it would be useful if you could test those changes and report me by mail any remaining issues. Suggestions for improvements are also welcome.
Apache restart with Vim autocmd
In order to execute a command right after saving a file in Vim, you can use the :autocmd command. Here is a quick example how it can be useful with Apache files.NB: on my system, Debian in this case, an Apache file is automatically recognized as filetype=apache.
augroup apache
autocmd BufWritePost */sites-enabled/* !/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
augroup END
Apache restart with Vim autocmd
In order to execute a command right after saving a file in Vim, you can use the :autocmd command. Here is a quick example how it can be useful with Apache files.NB: on my system, Debian in this case, an Apache file is automatically recognized as filetype=apache.
augroup apache
autocmd BufWritePost */sites-enabled/* !/etc/init.d/apache2 restart
augroup END