Parole Media Player 0.9.0 Released
Development for the Xfce media player is back on! Well over a year since the last release, Parole 0.9.0 brings a fresh set of features and fixes. What’s New? New “mini mode”, activated from the right-click menu. New play and replay icons in the player content area. Clicking on these will play or replay your … Continue reading Parole Media Player 0.9.0 ReleasedPidgin elementary style
Status icon theme
A while ago I started working on making Xubuntu’s default messenger app Pidgin look a little more integrated by creating a status-icon theme for it. As Xubuntu relies on the wonderful elementary set for iconography (in a variant maintained by me which is while being distro agnostic slightly misleadingly labeled “elementary-xfce”) the Pidgin theme was obviously done in that vein.
Smiley theme
Last week I extended this effort to emoticons and created an initial smiley theme for Pidgin. While it may not support all protocol standards yet it should be pretty usable already. I’m hoping for people to submit some bug-reports on github if they encounter a lack of support for a protocol standard for emoticons.
It makes use of all meaningful emotes provided by upstream elementary.
Download and install
You can get both themes from the same github repository. To my knowledge, neither of them have been packaged in any distribution, so you will have to run the Makefile I included to install both themes.
https://github.com/shimmerproject/pidgin-elementary
Caveat: As Pidgin does not support system-wide status-icon themes, you will have to install that theme locally and it will only be available on a per-user basis. Hopefully this will be fixed/implemented in Pidgin upstream in the future.
Install the status-icon theme
make install-status
Install the smiley theme
sudo make install-emotes
Clipman 1.4.1 released
While I haven’t been very active in terms of clipman lately I decided to push out a maintenance release in the 1.4 series nevertheless, as some useful patches had piled up in the master branch.
The probably single most important patch was contributed by Rinat and fixes the menu of clipman when used in a bottom-aligned panel. As I myself am using a panel at the top of my screen I didn’t notice this at all when releasing 1.4.0.
Other than that I improved the icon sizing for the panel plugin, which was another common – and understandable complaint – with 1.4.0. So the icon doesn’t remain at 16px, but scales in (meaningful) steps – very much like the power manager’s plugin.
Finally I decided to draw up a new application icon for clipman, as the old one was quite dusty already, low resolution and inconsistently looking at different sizes. Gaze at it in all its glory 
Download
As always, wait patiently until your favorite distribution packages up clipman 1.4.1 or grab the tarball from here:
https://git.xfce.org/panel-plugins/xfce4-clipman-plugin/snapshot/xfce4-clipman-plugin-1.4.1.tar.bz2
Greybird 3.22.0 released
Greybird has finally seen a first release supporting Gtk+3.22. To this end, I have decided to rebase on top of Adwaita 3.22.1, which also means I remain close to the original SCSS code. So far I can safely say that rebasing the whole Greybird theme on Adwaita has made my maintenance life a lot more fun again.
One slightly annoying issue in Gtk+3.22 seems to be the deprecation of the “font” shorthand, so instead of “font: Courier bold 22px;” you have to
write something like “font-family: Courier; font-weight: bold; font-size: 22px;”. This in itself would be okayish, but Gtk+ seems to treat this deprecation as an error and consequently xfce4-notifyd would no longer build on systems with Gtk+3.22.
I also fixed some minor issues, one of the more annoying ones was the tall tabs in e.g. xfce4-terminal, which now looks a lot more normal again.
Another nice fix that I borrowed from Numix is a workaround to make applications in Ubuntu that have their CSDs patched out look more normal. And apart from fixing an issue in the notification theme I also managed to sneak in a preparatory commit for the xfce4-panel in its Gtk+3 flavor, which is still in the works.
Enjoy!
Download
https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.22.0
Xfce Settings 4.13.0 Released
On the path to Xfce 4.14, many components have been ported to GTK+ 3 while many others are in progress. This is the first milestone in the Xfce Settings port. What’s New? This is a one-to-one port from GTK+ 2, no new features or fixes have been implemented at this stage. Translation Updates: Basque, Bulgarian, Chinese … Continue reading Xfce Settings 4.13.0 Releasedxfce4-notifyd 0.3.4 released – Do not disturb and per application settings
I’ve finally gotten round to doing a 0.3.4 release to get some of the features I’ve had ready for a while “out there”. On the way a lot of translation updates have trickled in and Christian Hesse supplied a patch to fix internal themes with Gtk+3.22.
Features:
As announced already a while ago, this release features a “Do not disturb” mode so you can suppress notification bubbles when in/convenient. So this should satisfy users who want to silence all notifications for a limited time-frame.
For users who want to suppress certain applications, they can now do so with a list of “known applications” – which gets populated over the life-time of xfce4-notifyd by all apps that send notifications.
If an application does not show up in this list it simply hasn’t sent a notification since you have upgraded to 0.3.4
Another – slightly hidden – feature is defining a screen for notification bubbles to appear. While by default notifications are shown on the screen where the mouse-pointer resides, you can now select the “primary monitor” – the “primary monitor” can be set globally e.g. through xfce4-display-settings – as default place for notification bubbles to end up on.
To enable this feature in xfce4-notifyd, add the (Boolean) property “/primary-monitor” to the xfce4-notifyd channel and set it to True.
In a future release this option may be moved to the settings dialog.
Bugfixes
The only real bugfix in this release makes sure that internal themes work with Gtk+3.22, which dropped support for the “font” css shorthand in favor of “font-weight”, “font-family” etc.
Outlook
Finally I’ll soon merge my “logging” branch – which brings the persistence feature to xfce4-notifyd – to master to give people a chance to test and translators some time to do their magic.
Another bugfix release for xfce4-notifyd: 0.3.3 is out!
While I had planned to make the next release about features, I ended up fixing a few issues and doing a bugfix release instead. So 0.3.3 is about getting things right.
Test-driven development
Generally speaking Xfce has very few unit tests – or tests at all – but since Jerome had laid a foundation for notification tests in xfce4-notifyd I decided to extend that to testing the icons in notifications. What inspired me to do so was that I noticed that notifyd was not in line with the fd.o notifications specification in two aspects:
- it didn’t support the “image-path” hint and
- the priorities of how to handle the icons were mixed up.
So my new “test-icons” test – which I wrote before(!) I implemented the fix for the priorities, even if I checked it into git only until later 
– checks whether the server handles all icon-related properties, hints and features and also checks whether the priority is in accordance with the specification. I also started some documentation on what parts of the freedesktop.org specification are implemented in xfce4-notifyd and which ones are not (prominent example which is not implemented: sound).
Other than that a thank-you goes to Olivier for contributing another build-fix. Finally I managed to get a few more bugs fixed, most notably a general theming issue (action buttons were sometimes mis-styled) and hiding notification buttons without label. Together with the translation updates I think this makes 0.3.3 a worthwhile release.
Final note: currently there are only 12 bugs open on the tracker, of which several are feature requests so things seem to be going quite well!
Improved media-key handling with xfce4-volumed-pulse 0.2.2
Background
So xfce4-volumed has been around a while and automagically handling your media keys – originally written by Steve around 2009 – but lingering unmaintained in Xfce’s Git repository. This version of the media-key daemon uses gstreamer 0.10’s mixer interface, which has been deprecated in gstreamer 1.0.
It’s been almost as long that Lionel forked the project into xfce4-volumed-pulse in 2012 – hosted on Launchpad ever since – notably adding support for PulseAudio.
Migration to xfce.org
Not much has happened since then, until Sean and me decided to move the project over to the official Xfce infrastructure for more distributions to enjoy. This means the code is now on git.xfce.org and bugs are tracked on bugs.xfce.org.
I also went ahead and added some small features to it (all documented in the Readme). Amongst others I merged a feature branch adding support for the Microphone Mute key (thanks goes to Christian Pointner for the feature). I also added support for symbolic icons, which means your audio volume change notifications can now be shown – presuming you have at least xfce4-notifyd 0.3.2 installed – with always correctly colored monochrome icons. This latter feature has been made optional through an “icon-style” xfconf property in the newly created xfce4-volumed-pulse channel. This same channel now also handles the “volume-step-size” property, which used to live in the xfce4-mixer channel (this really didn’t make sense to me anymore with xfce4-mixer not supporting PulseAudio). Finally we cleaned up the repository a bit and Sean was kind enough to knock out the 0.2.2 release while I was afk.
Anyway, without further ado here’s the code:
https://git.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-volumed-pulse
PS: It might be worth noting that if you’re using the xfce4-pulseaudio-plugin you already have your volume keys handled by it.
xfce4-clipman 1.4.0 (Gtk3 port) and libxfce4ui 4.13.1 released!
xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.0 released
So finally I’ve decided to release xfce4-clipman-plugin 1.4.0, which is the Gtk+3 port of the plugin. For a while I was unsure whether to do a development or a stable release – to be clear: this was not a decision based on the stability of the product itself but the fact that it relied on the development release of a Xfce core component (libxfce4ui-4.13.0). However I decided to revert the commit that introduced the dependency (I will apply it again latest when 4.14 is out).
As the port is a 1:1 port there are practically no new features. The only notable difference is that the panel plugin’s icon is now a symbolic icon.
Thanks to Eric, Steve and Florian for helping me get this off the ground!
libxfce4ui 4.13.1
This is only a smaller bugfix release that replaces a deprecated call and – more importantly – fixes the default theming of XfceHeading in all Gtk+3 settings dialogs of Xfce.
Greybird 3.20.1 released (mostly bugfixes)
So the first bugfix release for Greybird 3.20 is here and while the changelog isn’t an overly exciting read, there are some goodies in this one!
The single new feature in this – otherwise – bugfix release is a Greybirdy theme for Plank (a simple dock), contributed by Sean.
Other than that I have tweaked or fixed the following:
- less padding on some widgets, e.g. buttons (makes the whole theme feel more like the original and matches Gtk2)
- less bold input focus line on GtkEntries
- improved progressbar theming (no more tiny artifacts when the fraction is 0.00), also fixes LP #1617705
- tweak the look of OSDs
- mention librsvg build-dependency in the README
Download
https://github.com/shimmerproject/Greybird/releases/tag/v3.20.1