Recently in Xfce
This is just a short post with what happened recently in Xfce.
- Xfce4 Power Manager 0.8.0 was released. I did not have time yet to test it, but it looks promising.
- Jannis Pohlmann and Stephan Arts drafted a release process for Xfce. It still needs to be discussed, but it already looks great. Expect some progress on this once the migration to git is done.
- Brian Tarricone worked a lot on the git migration, things are almost settled.
- Jannis Pohlmann is making some awesome progress on Thunar. He developped Tumbler, a D-Bus thumbnailing service based on the thumbnail management D-Bus specification, to replace the old thumbnailing code. A video shows how his first experimental implementation behaves.
- Nick Schermer made a lot of progress on Xfce4 Panel, fixing and lot of bugs and improving performances. His code can be found on git.xfce.org.
- Stephan Arts has improved the git version of Ristretto a lot: it works, supports basic printing and features a new improved user interface.
- It seems that Colin Leroy will be the maintainer of Xfce4 Weather Plugin from now on. Welcome!
- Mike Massonnet rewrote Xfce4 Notes Plugin in Vala, and improved and lot of things at the same time. Expect a release soon.
- Ali Abdallah, the developper of Xfce4 Power Manager, added a new Goodie to the SVN. Parole is a Gstreamer based media player. I did not test it, so I cannot say more...
What’s up in the Goodies ?
There have been a bunch of new releases in the Goodies during the last few days.
Midori 1.5.0
This new release mainly brings changes under the hood which aim at easing the future development of the application and its stability. A lot of old code which was used to provide backward compatibility for the old Webkit releases was removed, as well as the internal source viewer: Midori now uses your default text editor.
There are also some visible changes: it is now possible to download files directly, without using an external application and a new extension called 'Colorful Tabs' makes your browser shiny!
Xfce Power Manager 0.6.5 and 0.8.0 alpha
Two releases during the last few days: a stable release and an alpha release for the future 0.8.0.
The 0.6.5 version provides the standard Freedesktop.org inhibit interface which allows you to prevent power managers to suspend, shutdown, etc your computer under certain conditions.
The 0.8.0 version contains far more changes. The user interface was simplified and the inhibit and power management standard interfaces have also been added. Xfce Power Manager is now able to detect if your session is idle and to reduce the brightness in that case, it can also detect if you are watching a movie and then disables screen suspending or brightness reduction. Two new panel plugins are available: one to set the brightness of the screen and the other one to manage the inhibit stuff. Your suspend, sleep and brightness keys should also be detected correctly.
The developer of this applications would appreciate if people could test this alpha release and report any bug on the Xfce Bugzilla.
Xfmpc 0.1.0
Xfmpc now has an additional developer who will speed the development up. This release features a preferences dialog for the MPD server and the appearance of the player, and improved play list with new context menus to show information about the songs, to add and remove songs, etc. A search entry was also added to the song database browser to find songs easily.
Xfce Clipman Plugin 0.9.1
This is a minor bug fix release which fixes some little issues. The next release (1.0) should be far more exciting with the actions support: the plugin will be able to execute some actions when it detects a given pattern in your clipboard.