Xfce News Late
So, I’m already up to 8 day weeks, but this next edition of the news will have to wait till next week.
I’ll cover both weeks – sorry about the delay.
Xfce News – September 10th through September 18th, 2005
Sunday, instead of Friday.
Ah well.
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Icons!
I disagree fundamentally with the assumption that icons exist to highlight the “important” bits of the UI.
First off, nine times out of ten, if you have unimportant UI bits you’ve screwed up. Second, if an important bit of UI needs “highlighting” you’ve almost certainly screwed up.
Icons are not workarounds, they are the key to the whole visual metaphor. Several papers have discussed the power of pairing a visual and a lexical stimuli for increasing accuracy and response time in a number of tasks.
Give someone a set of words, and ask them to select the one of them according to a criteria (Like picking the menu item which will save the file from the list of menu options), and it will take them several milliseconds to find it.
Give them a set of images with the same criteria (“Find the toolbar button that saves the document”) and they will take several milliseconds.
Pair the two together (image plus text) and it will take less time to select the menu item.
This makes it pretty clear that eliminating icons throughout the system is a net loss. What is still ambiguous, from a scientific perspective, is what happens in the mixed case – in other words, what is the performance change for the case where “important” bits of the UI have icons and “unimportant” bits do not.
I strongly suspect that performance of selecting a specific “important” item will go up marginally at best (and I could make a strong argument that would theorize performance would plummet, in most cases) and that performance will be so much worse for selecting “unimportant” elements of the UI, that the effect would be a net loss.
I’d be happy to test this out, however, using Gtk+ specifically, if one of you happens to have a grant?
Icons Overload
Lots of people already commenting:
Original by Tigert
Tigert’s blog
Replies:
Garrett LeSage
Benny
I think I agree.
Xfce News, September 2nd through September 9th
Last week’s update seems to have generated a little attention. I’m flattered. The devs aren’t flattered, but that’s because they’re too busy writing 4.4.
I also generated some anonymous criticism of my writing on OSNews. Which was probably warranted. Ah, well. I’ll never get that Linux Weekly News job now.
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xffm package separation
Starting with xffm-4.3.4, individual packages which are currently part of xffm will split into individual packages (fgr, xfdiff, xfsamba, xffm-libs, etc.). SVN for these packages will still be nexted in the xffm tree. Today the first of these packages, called libtubo, is released. Libtubo is a small library that only depends on glib>=2.0. Libtubo is the engineblock behind xffm. With the library xffm communicates with other applications to do stuff like samba browsing, finding files, mounting volumes, copying and scp, and just about everything. As from today, this library can be used by any other package and does not require xffm to be installed. Source tarball is available at http://xffm.sf.net/libtubo.html where you will find complete API Reference Manual. The source is also available from svn tree under xffm/libtubo.
Xfce News – From Then Till About Now
Let’s pretend the last several months haven’t happened, and I’ll pretend that more than three of you read this.
That said, it seems like the best thing to do is to lay out where we are going, where we are, and what’s happening to get us there. If you care what’s been going on in Xfce, but haven’t been following the various blogs and lists, this is your chance to get caught up.
Mousepad! Finally!
Okay.
So, I finally just crawled through my email till I found the right URL to do a checkout from the Xfce repository.
I felt very very stupid.
Having done so, I pulled a fresh checkout of Mousepad (since the one I had was corrupted), and made a branch for 0.3. Since I was without internet for so long, I was working on Mousepad a few minutes a day in a local repo. I commited those files to the new branch with surprisingly little difficulty.
It’s amazing how easy that was, once I remembered to not be a douche.
You can pull it from the anonymouse repository this way
svn co http://svn.foo-projects.org/svn/xfce/mousepad/branches/mousepad-0.3.x mousepad
And you can build it with a simple ‘make’
Currently, it does very little that’s interesting, just a window with a GtkTextView in it. The Makefile is even handwritten. The goals of this rewrite are:
- Eliminate deprecated stuff where possible
- Organize the code into a maintainable structure
- Take advantage of the Xfce platform more fully
- Make it faster
- Make it smaller
- Add some small features
- More fully learn C, Gtk+, and autotools
We’ll see how much of this I manage to acheive. However, so far, all looks good.
If you see a bug in Mousepad, please let me know. It is highly likely that there are memory management bugs inside. It’s also likely that I do things in ways which are not cross platform, or reinvent the wheel.
As an anecdote, the reason to fork leafpad was I needed printing support. Since I could read C poorly, and write it hardly at all, a good chunk of the printing code was copy and paste from the inside of the “Save” routine. Turns out the old save routine reimplemented a GtkTextView method, and poorly, so the printing code did the same.
Had I realized I didn’t need to fight with it to add printing support, I might not have bothered with the fork, really.
Tales From The Xfweiner
So, everything that has possibly gone wrong has gone wrong. Basically, life sucks.
But I’m not going to go into that. Things will get sorted out. Until then, however, my Xfce participation is a mess.
However, I’m hoping to pick up a few hours a week on Mousepad, and get the damn thing finished.
In other news, Robert Moog, the father of electronic music (Leonard Theremin being the grandfather), died from a brain tumor. I got the chance to meet Bob several years ago, he settled down in the smallish town in the mountains where I live. He was one of my heros, and I will miss him.
Also: This is what God intended. I’m tired of apps like Abiword having no Gnome dependecies mean “Just libgnomeprintui”. And Totem depending on gnome-vfs. But that’s really another story, since gnome-vfs isn’t going to go into GTK+. But the principle remains.