Catfish 1.4.4 Released
I’ve got some great news for fans of Catfish, the fast and powerful graphical search utility for Linux. The latest version, 1.4.4, has arrived with performance improvements and tons of localization updates!
What’s New
This update covers both versions 1.4.3 and 1.4.4.
General
- Improved theming support
- Improved error handling with thumbnails
- Improved search performance by excluding .cache and .gvfs when not explicitly requested
- Improved locate method performance with the addition of the –basename flag
- Added keywords to the launcher for improved discoverability and Debian packaging improvements
- Updated included AppData to latest standards
Bug Fixes
- All search methods are stopped when the search activity is canceled. This results in a much faster response time when switching search terms.
- Debian #798074: New upstream release available
- Debian #794544: po/en_AU.po has Sinhalese (not English) translations for catfish.desktop
Translation Updates
Afrikaans, Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, Greek, Italian, Kurdish, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian
Downloads
Debian Unstable and Ubuntu Bionic users can install Catfish 1.4.4 from the repositories.
sudo apt update && sudo apt install catfish
The latest version of Catfish can always be downloaded from the Launchpad archives. Grab version 1.4.4 from the below link.
https://launchpad.net/catfish-search/1.4/1.4.4/+download/catfish-1.4.4.tar.gz
- SHA-256: a2d452780bf51f80afe7621e040fe77725021c24a0fe4a9744c89ba88dbf87d7
- SHA-1: b149b454fba75de6e6f9029cee8eec4adfb4be0e
- MD5: 8fd7e8bb241f2396ebc3d9630b47a635
Unlimited Vacation
I usually don’t spend much time on LinkedIn, but I signed in to check on something, and noticed a post near the top of my feed that illustrated a misconception that bothered me. The CEO of a startup posted saying that he didn’t like the concept of “unlimited vacation”1 because (he believes) what ends up happening is that high performers suffer because they don’t take enough vacation, and under-performers get away with taking a ton of vacation.
Another poster commented that they didn’t like these types of policies because they’re just a way of allowing companies to get around state requirements to carry unused vacation days as a liability, and pay out those days when an employee leaves. (This is true, at least in California.)
I reject all of these problems and submit that an unlimited vacation policy – assuming employees actually do have the latitude to make use of it generously – is a net good for employees. As long as you create a healthy culture around it.
First up, the financial argument: frankly, I don’t care if it makes it easier for the companies financials or not. If an unlimited vacation policy does make it easier, that’s great for the company, but whether or not the policy (and its implementation) is actually good for employees is unrelated to that.
Under-performers: if they’re taking a lot of vacation and are not performing well, this is a failure of management. Why is the employee’s manager approving so much vacation when there is a performance problem? Why is this employee not on a PIP, or, failing that, why has the employee not been fired?
High performers: this is a bit more tricky, because you don’t want to demoralize or send mixed or confusing messages to high performers. One option is to enforce a minimum vacation policy on top of the unlimited maximum. Enforcement can range from simply deactivating an employee’s work accounts for a period of time to get them to take time off, all the way up to penalizing them at review time (lower raise or equity grant, delayed promotion, etc.). Better would be to simply promote a culture of healthy time-off practices. Employees will implicitly look to their managers for cues on what they should be doing in these instances, and if they see their manager taking a generous (but not abusive!) amount of time off, they’ll tend to do the same. This needs to be done at every level: the CEO needs to take sufficient vacations just as much as the rest of management and the individual contributors do.
At this point in my life, I would think of an accrued/fixed vacation plan as a big negative if I were considering an offer from a new company.
vacation refers to a policy where employees do not accrue vacation days based on time worked, or have any other kind of fixed number of vacation days (though the company often will close down for some number of public holidays). Employees are expected to take as much vacation as they’d like, with their manager’s approval.
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For those of you perhaps not familiar with the concept, unlimited ↩
New releases for xfce4-panel and xfce4-power-manager
xfce4-power-manager 1.6.1
After almost two years I finally managed to get around to release a new version of the power manager, including many bugfixes that have accumulated over this time over the original Gtk+3/GDBus port that is 1.6.0.
Users will mostly notice the improved support for Desktop systems (they used to have the “battery-missing” icon displayed in the panel plugin – a regression over 1.4.x, which handled desktops more gracefully). Those who also use xfce4-notifyd’s recent logging mechanism will notice that now not every power manager event (e.g. changing the brightness) ends up in the log, as many notifications are marked as transient.
xfce4-panel 4.12.2 and 4.13.2
Both the stable 4.12 series and the 4.13 development series saw releases of late.
4.12.2
4.12 saw a small feature release adding support for the much and often requested “primary monitor” feature of RandR. So when you now define a panel’s location as “Output: Primary” it will dynamically move to the monitor marked as “primary” through the xfce4-display-settings dialog.
The default value “Automatic” for the Output option remains, so users will not notice any invasive changes here. Also the behavior of this default option remains unchanged (usually pushing the panel to the left-most monitor – aka x=0/y=0 – by default).
4.13.2
4.13 also saw a release, introducing GObject Introspection support, which should enable people to write Panel plugins in different languages (e.g. Python). We still need a template for that (volunteers forward!) so people can get their hands dirty more easily, but I think this is a very nice addition.
Apart from this I fixed a lot of smaller and bigger issues in the panel’s core plugins (actions, clock, launcher, tasklist and systray) and the settings dialog can now again be plugged into the xfce4-settings-manager dialog.
xfce4-notifyd sees a new point release
After only 2 months of work I was today ready to release xfce4-notifyd 0.4.1 (thanks in part to Viktor’s fix for make distcheck) with a bunch of fixes and some small features too (and of course lots of translation updates).
Features
The panel plugin that was introduced in 0.4.0 received some attention, gaining a new hidden option (log-icon-size) for users to set the icon-size for the notifications that are displayed in the menu. Furthermore I added a “Clear log” button and finally decided to revamp the layout of the menu a little, inspired by some work of the elementary folks. Now the “Do not disturb” item is on top (or bottom, depending on your panel layout) of the list for easy and quick/er access and sports a GtkSwitch because the GtkCheckMenuItem was not visible enough.
To top off the changes to the plugin I added a placeholder text in case the log has been cleared or there are no notifications to display (e.g. if the “only notifications from today” filter is set but the log only contains entries from yesterday and before).
Furthermore spent some more time on the notification window layout and it should be very consistent now, so equal spacing between the icon, subject, body, buttons and the edge of the bubble.
Finally I added a configure option to use autostart instead of dbus (Bug #13989), which is a feature some distros (like Mageia) have done already via downstream patches so far and which helps if people have multiple DEs and therefore notification services installed in parallel.
Bugfixes
Regarding bugfixes there are also a few notable mentions. With the help of several contributors the following issues were tackled:
- Ensure body and summary of notifications are correctly ellipsized (Bug #12674)
- Fix warning about gdk_window_get_origin (Bug #13935)
- Ensure the panel plugin icon resizes with Xfce 4.12
- Treat icon_data only as pen-ultimate fallback option (Bug #13950)
- Remove deprecated functions (Gtk+ 3.22)
- Fix warnings reported by Clang (Bug #13931)
Download
So get it while it’s hot here: http://archive.xfce.org/src/apps/xfce4-notifyd/0.4/xfce4-notifyd-0.4.1.tar.bz2
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.4
With each new release, the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin becomes more refined and better suited for Xfce users. The latest release adds support for the MPRIS Playlists specification and improves support for Spotify and other media players.
What’s New?
New Feature: MPRIS Playlists Support
- This is a basic implementation of the MediaPlayer2.Playlists specification.
- The 5 most recently played playlists are displayed (if supported by the player). Admittedly, I have not found a player that seems to implement the ordering portion of this specification.
New Feature: Experimental libwnck Support
- libwnck is a window management library. This feature adds the “Raise” method for media players that do not support it, allowing the user to display the application window after clicking the menu item in the plugin.
- Spotify for Linux is the only media player that I have found which does not implement this method. Since this is the media player I use most of the time, this was an important issue for me to resolve.
General
- Unexpected error messages sent via DBUS are now handled gracefully. The previous release of Pithos (1.1.2) displayed a Python error when doing DBUS queries before, crashing the plugin.
- Numerous memory leaks were patched.
Translation Updates
Chinese (Taiwan), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Thai
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.4 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 43fa39400eccab1f3980064f42dde76f5cf4546a6ea0a5dc5c4c5b9ed2a01220
- SHA-1: 171f49ef0ffd1e4a65ba0a08f656c265a3d19108
- MD5: 05633b8776dd3dcd4cda8580613644c3
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3
Development on the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin has been moving along at a steady pace, and the latest release marks the completion of another great feature for the Sound Indicator replacement applet.
What’s New?
New Feature: Multimedia Key Support
Multimedia keyboard support has been hit and miss in the Linux space for as long as there’s been multimedia keyboards. Support for these keys has been entirely dependent on support baked into each individual application. The best current example of this is the Spotify Linux client. Users can control the media player with various panel plugins, but not with their keyboards.
With the new multimedia key support in Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.3, the recently added MPRIS2 integration has been complemented with key bindings for the Play/Pause, Previous, Next, and Stop keys. When these keys are pressed, any actively running player known to the plugin will be notified, enabling keyboard playback control.
You can check out the new feature in the video below, where I very excitedly inundate my media players with playback commands.
General Improvements
- Simplified device menus: The bold section headers have been replaced in favor of a single menu per input and output device. If there’s only one option available, the menu is no longer displayed.
- Improved volume scale increments: The old defaults were steps of 6% and a max of 153%. These seemed a bit unusual, and have been replaced with a more sensible 5% and 150%.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed builds with clang (Xfce #13889) (0.3.2)
- Fixed panel icon size with high DPI (Xfce #13894) (0.3.2)
- Show volume change notifications when changed with another application (Xfce #13677)
- Change default device when changed with another application (Xfce #13908)
- Fixed flag in g_bus_watch_name_on_connection() method (Xfce #13961)
- Fix plugin size calculation with multiple rows (Xfce #13998)
Translation Updates
Chinese (China), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Indonesian, Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian Bokmål, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Swedish, Ukrainian
Demo
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.3 from the below link.
- SHA-256: d6aae9409714c5ddea975c350b4d517e078a5550190165b17ca062d0eb69f9a6
- SHA-1: 5921f7c17b96dda09f035e546e06945f40398dc9
- MD5: d3d3e012369af6d2302d4b70a7720a17
Second xfce4-panel devel release, clipman and Greybird releases
Most of this post is fairly old news, but still worth to be mentioned.
Also as a small gimmick (and because it was requested in my previous post), here is a gif of the new slide-out animation of xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0
I have read your comments and bugreports and have already been working towards some further improvements of notifyd, so I guess 0.4.1 is around the corner.
Finally, here goes the “historic news”.
xfce4-panel 4.13.1
After a longer waiting time I pushed out another development release of the panel. This one includes among as major change the port to GDBus, which was done by Ali. This means the panel now depends on xfconf 4.13 – recommended is at least 4.13.3 – and is not compatible anymore with xfconf 4.12.
A lot of bugfixes and translation updates accumulated over the last months since 4.13.0, the most prominent one is the fix of drag and drop (one of the bigger known regressions of the Gtk+3 port) thanks to Peter. A nice new improvement is the re-ordering of systray items, which was implemented by Viktor.
xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.2
We’ve had a lot of problems with keyboard shortcuts not working reliably with the panel plugin and systray version of clipman so Mike rolled up his sleeves and ported both to GtkApplication. I haven’t had a problem with my keyboard shortcuts since!
Greybird 3.22.5
This release features some small improvements including slimmer CSD/headerbars to save some vertical pixels, initial support for Xfdesktop 4.13 to help all testers of Xfce’s development releases and finally a fix for message dialog buttons.
I have since then been working towards supporting Thunar’s Gtk+3 port better in Greybird, which will be included in the next release.
Xubuntu 17.10 “Artful Aardvark” Released
It’s another great Ubuntu release day, with fresh versions of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Kylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and my personal favorite: Xubuntu.
This has been a comparatively quiet development cycle for Xubuntu. With increased development on Xfce as we prepare for Xfce 4.14, less Xubuntu-specific changes took place this cycle. Thankfully, there are still plenty of goodies to get excited about.
- Appearance Updates: Greybird‘s client side decorations (CSD) have been refreshed and now consume much less space. elementary-xfce, our preferred icon theme, has been updated and includes new device, mimetype, and panel icons. And we have a fancy new wallpaper.
- Application Updates: This is the first release of Xubuntu to feature GNOME Font Viewer, a handy tool for font management. LibreOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird have been updated to their latest versions (5.4, 56, and 52.4 respectively). On the Xfce side, Dictionary, Genmon Plugin, Mount Plugin, Exo, and Tumbler have been updated to take advantage of the latest GTK+ version and continue the march toward Xfce 4.14.
- Technical Updates: GTK+ 3.26, Python 3.6, and Linux 4.13 are all included. Thanks to the Ubuntu Desktop team, hardware accelerated video, improved bluetooth audio, and driverless printing round out a solid development cycle.
Screenshots
Download
Download Xubuntu 17.10 from Xubuntu.org. It’s available in both 32-bit and 64-bit varieties.
What’s Next?
After the release festivities calm down, work will begin on Xubuntu 18.04, our next LTS release. These are always our most active cycles as we polish the work that we’ve been doing the past 18 months and prepare for a 3-year support window. A few things we already have planned…
- Replacing the Sound Indicator with the Xfce PulseAudio Plugin, a very capable replacement with more features landing soon.
- Replacing the Xfce Indicator Plugin with the Xfce StatusNotifier Plugin, a fully compatible and better maintained plugin with a few new tricks.
- Another wallpaper contest to showcase the community’s artful taste.
- And plenty more as we begin the blueprint process!
In Case You Missed It
- I had a nice chat with Igor at Dedoimedo about Xfce and Xubuntu.
- Simon just published a significant xfce4-notifyd release.
- Pasi refreshed the Xfce Bugzilla, and it’s so much better.
New hotness: xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0
After quite some development time I have decided to push out xfce4-notifyd 0.4.0 today. This is not just a bugfix, but a feature-packed release.
Panel plugin
Among the biggest changes there is a panel plugin which displays the most recent notifications as well as allowing for quick access to the do-not-disturb mode. It also serves as a status indicator for the do-not-disturb mode, so you can easily see whether notifications are shown or hidden overall.
Improved logging
I’ve also spent some time on improving the notification image handling in the log. While handling icon-names is easy (just save them as string) handling the pixbufs was a little more challenging. I decided to do it the Git way and deduplicate these pixbufs based on their (unique) hashes, so that each picture would only be saved once. All of those pictures end up in a sub-directory of the log (which by default is ~/.cache/xfce4/notifyd/icons). Currently there is no monitoring of how much space these images consume and no button to clear them away, maybe I’ll add that later if people feel it would be useful/necessary. After using this feature for several months I have accumulated less than 7MB.
The log also received some more love in terms of markup support and character escaping. Multi-line notifications should now be correctly logged.
New animation: slide-out
Just for the fun of it I also worked out a new animation optional addon to the standard fade-out. I called it slide-out and it’s a fairly wide-spread animation mix of fade-out and sliding the bubble (depending on its location on the screen of course) off-screen.
New logo
As this turned out to be a bigger release I went for a bigger version jump and also included the new logo I had been working on for a while. I evaluated several “notification” metaphors and went for the ‘ol bell (notification bubbles felt a little odd and not easy to depict, as they look usually very diverse).
Bugfixes
Some people may be happy to know that I dropped the feature that let xfce4-notifyd exit after 10 minutes of inactivity. I can only guess but I presume this was implemented to save resources. Nowadays it feels more annoying if a daemon has to be restarted and the first notification that’s that split-second longer to appear.
A few more tweaks have been done to the geometry of the notification bubble windows to not take more space than needed and distribute things evenly (no more strange margins) and the configuration dialog now shows a warning if xfce4-notifyd is not detected as running.
Download
As always, you can download and build/install the tarball or wait for your favorite distribution to package and ship it to you.
https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-notifyd/snapshot/xfce4-notifyd-0.4.0.tar.bz2
Development Release: Xfce PulseAudio Plugin 0.3.1
A new release, some handy new features! But, I’ve never posted about this plugin before, so we’ll start with a proper introduction.
Xfce PulseAudio Panel Plugin
This is a plugin for the Xfce panel that allows the user to easily adjust the audio volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As of the 0.3.0 release, this plugin was extended with support for controlling multimedia players via the MPRIS DBUS interface. And with this latest release, users can now easily toggle the default audio input and output devices.
Features
- Control device volume, from 0% to 100% and beyond
- Instantly mute volumes by middle-clicking the plugin or clicking the mute toggle
- Launch the configured audio mixer
- Open, raise, or control playback from known media players (since 0.3.0)
- Select default input and output devices (since 0.3.1)
Screenshots
Downloads
The latest version of Xfce PulseAudio Plugin can always be downloaded from the Xfce archives. Grab version 0.3.1 from the below link.
- SHA-256: 61a39f892e5e06723a08f919682362ebaf54792ed1076f5be828d0209a52f482
- SHA-1: 6db0e12f5f171bd57b1330c7996d503aca7a4883
- MD5: ab2a12283555db063db3abea26b3237e