get your foresight shirt
Finally after convincing spreadshirt legal department, that I'm a foresight developer,
there is foresight.spreadshirt.net. Maybe I will add a shop at spreadshirt.com for US based people later.
Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.
The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Moblin blazing fast
I updated my netbook to give it a new look. I switched the Xfce Panel against bmpanel2 and changed the background (the previous definitelly lasted very long.) Not much changes, but I topped a cold boot of about six seconds, always faster baby :-P And the window manager is OpenBox by the way.The only real useful entry missing in this panel is a battery monitor. At least I have an indicator over the keyboard that starts blinking when there is about three percents left. What I like about this panel is the cool themes that it is provided with, however the configuration is set through a hand-written configuration file which sucks but what do you want, it is extremely lightweight on the other hand.
Update: Should I mention I totally forgot about the Xfce power manager? Well I did, and it is provided with a notification icon displaying the battery status :-) However I had to fix the default ACPI script related to the lid, since HAL doesn't list it, in order to get the netbook to go into sleep.
Late April Xfce desktop
It's only been two weeks since my last awesome desktop, but already I've found a new look. Where mid-April's look was grungy, stormy, and dark-toned, my newest desktop is sleek, airy, and light. It exudes a reserved warmth; perfect for the approaching summer. Lots of light wood, airy spaces, pale blue skies, and soft shadows.
icons: Simplistica
gtk+: Simplistica
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Shards
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
The downside to such a beautifully bright environment is that it's too bright when using the computer in dim light. 'Specially late at night or early in the morning. Dark themes with lower contrast are a bit easier on the eyes in those cases.
The Simplistica icon set is comprehensive and well-designed: It's intuitive and it has more icons than even Tango, at least on my machine. Every icon looks good, though I wish there were a few more mimetype icons, for example .txt and .xml. Something like the appearance of the .zip and .tar icons.
Applications
Thunar is the filemanager open in the background. Check out those icons.
The weather plugin is running, displaying the local forecast.
That image editor is Fotoxx. When you need to make quick touchups or corrections to pictures, give Fotoxx a shot. It's way faster than The Gimp, and easier to use. There's an ebuild available in my overlay, though I need to update the ebuild for the 10.x releases.
Also visible is xfrun4, a popup application launcher that remembers your most recent commands. It's pretty nifty; I like its autocomplete feature.
April Xfce desktop
Behold this month's Xfce desktop.
icons: Smokikon
gtk+: Shiki-Colors
xfwm4: Shiki-Colors
background: paleis by Steven Schreurs
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
It's nice and grungy, though the gtk theme's blue highlights aren't quite dark enough. A simple color mod would fix that. I do like Shiki's unified titlebar; it lends an elegant touch. Someone needs to port Shiki to the Rezlooks engine, since Clearlooks is just too smooth, too nice for the grungy wallpapers I favor. Also, there aren't nearly enough decent grunge icon sets. Everything's too bright, too shiny, too smooth, too 3D, etc.
Applications
As usual: Decibel for playing music, and Thunar as the filemanager.
Highlighted in the panel menu is PyRoom. An ebuild for it is available in overnight.
The album featured in Decibel is Rain on Mars by Koalips. It's freely available at archive.org.
VLC with GTK+ look-n-feel
To get Qt applications to look like GTK+ applications run qtconfig and in Select GUI Style choose GTK+. Next click in the menu bar File > Save.Something is still puzzling me, why does GNOME run VLC automatically with native GTK+ look-n-feel and not Xfce?
Update: Thanks to the power of tig and grep, I figured the Qt library (qt_init function) defines the desktop environment as GNOME for Xfce (this results in GTK+ theming, GNOME like Open dialogues, etc) by retrieving an X11 atom on the root window and compares it to “xfce4”
Update2: The latest version Qt 4.6.2 doesn't include the code for checking the X11 atom (it's in git), which explains why it doesn't work.
VLC with GTK+ look-n-feel
To get Qt applications to look like GTK+ applications run qtconfig and in Select GUI Style choose GTK+. Next click in the menu bar File > Save.Something is still puzzling me, why does GNOME run VLC automatically with native GTK+ look-n-feel and not Xfce?
Update: Thanks to the power of tig and grep, I figured the Qt library (qt_init function) defines the desktop environment as GNOME for Xfce (this results in GTK+ theming, GNOME like Open dialogues, etc) by retrieving an X11 atom on the root window and compares it to “xfce4”
Update2: The latest version Qt 4.6.2 doesn't include the code for checking the X11 atom (it's in git), which explains why it doesn't work.
New notes plugin release 1.7.3
Three months since the last release, and three months since it is available as a separate standalone application running in the notification area. This has made it a lot easier to test and debug, as before I had to build the plugin, install the plugin, restart the panel or remove/readd the plugin in the panel, now I just have to run ./xfce4-notes from the source directory.This new release has seen some structural tree changes to save time during compilation. Now everything is in src/ and lib/, where lib/ contains code to build an XnpHypertextView, an XnpNote (a composite-widget that embeds a GtkScrolledWindow with an XnpHypertextView and sends “save” signals on changes), an XnpWindow with the custom made navigation and title bars and the right click menu on the title bar, and finally an XnpApplication class that is the heart of everything, it handles creations/deletions of notes, loads/saves the data, etc. The src/ directory contains the main files for the panel plugin, the status icon, the popup command and the settings dialogue.
The new stuff is mostly eye-candy as stated in the previous blog entry. The GTK+ RC style has been pimped up with custom made scrollbars and the source code contains a self-drawn close button. The stuff about GTK+ scrollbars theming is grossly explained on live.gnome.org but I opened the GTK+ Dust theme files which was, to me, more understandable :-) Also it was because of this particular theme I took a look at customizing the scrollbars, see below the before/after screenshots. The older article about writing a Widget with Cairo helped me getting started from scratch with an empty “close button” widget to replace the simple GtkButton with label. As I liked very much the time passed on these changes I contributed a tutorial “Monochrome icon” available only in PDF as of today which I hope to be useful for Vala beginners but also a nice update of the article about Cairo but with Vala language.
The fixes included in this release are the following: correctly restore sticky-window and keep-above states after some race conditions, and restore tab label orientation after renaming a note. And last but definitely not least the undo feature was not working because an internal timeout wasn't reset to zero which made the code think a snapshot was needed and thus the undo/redo buffers ended with the same content after the timeout elapsed. Thanks to Christian (the developer behind Midori) otherwise I would still not have taken a look around this!
The forthcoming features I have in mind would be a search dialogue and per-note options for activating a stripped down “markdown” syntax, an orthographic corrector and wrapping words which is the default for the moment.
The release is available at archive.xfce.org.
Thanks for the feedbacks and reports you sent and will send back.
Update: The tutorial is now also available on the Xfce wiki.
March Xfce desktop
Shook up my Xfce desktop a bit. I've always been a fan of darker environments, especially those with blue tones. This one's mysterious and fantastic. I did keep the same icon theme as last month, as I don't have anything more suitable installed at the moment. I'm still looking for something a bit more suited to my current setup.
icons: Area o.43
gtk+: Cold Blue, my own theme based on this one. Still a work in progress; I'm trying to get the colors to match the background image. (Pixmap and Mist engines)
xfwm4: Rezlooks-gtk
background: Summerwood
The uncluttered version that shows off the wallpaper:
Applications
You can find the ebuild for The Widget Factory in my in my overlay. The audio player is Decibel in the "mini" mode. I'm using Thunar as my filemanager.
Panel
The left side of the panel has the start menu, followed by launchers for my favorite apps: Terminal, editors (submenu), Thunar, Firefox, Claws Mail, and instant message applications (submenu).
I used to just have gVim in the editor launcher, and just irssi in the IM apps launcher. However, I was tired of having to drill down through a few start menus for my frequently used applications, so I just stuck 'em in their own easy-access submenu on my panel. Using submenus is one of the most overlooked abilities of the Xfce panel. In 5 years or so I've never really tried it out, but now I'm seeing some real benefits. I get quick access to my often-used apps, but without wasting panel space on a bunch of individual launchers.
Here's the editors menu:
An ebuild for PyRoom is available in overnight.
. . . and the IM apps:
After the launchers, there's a taskbar, then a genmon (generic monitor) applet. It runs my Portage script that checks the last time I ran emerge --sync. Here it is, lastsync.sh:
#!/bin/bash
qlop -s | sed 's/\ >>>.*//' | tail -n1 | xargs -i date --date="{}" '+%b %d'
You need portage-utils to make it work.
After genmon, there are plugins for volume control, the Orage clock, and weather.
Nifty, eh?
Overnight overlay
I've added a few more ebuilds to my overlay, including a useful calendar utility called gsimplecal. It was originally written for tint2, but since it just uses gtk+, it's suitable for just about any environment. It doesn't come with the Xfce dependencies of Orage; it's just a quick, simple calendar.
If you use tint2, you can actually configure the clock to show gsimplecal just by clicking it. Clicking again quits the program. While tint2 doesn't actually have a launcher function (yet?), this is as close as it gets. You can do some pretty tricky things just by using the built-in clock click actions. Left click for gsimplecal, right click to launch a weather checker, for example.
I've bumped a few packages to the latest version, which included some build/install fixes for Fotoxx and Printoxx. Fotoxx, I'm happy to say, has finally dropped the dependency on freeimage. Freeimage was removed from Gentoo awhile ago because it has unfixed security vulnerabilities against the bundled libraries, which are really copies of things probably already installed on your system. Fotoxx relied on freeimage only to work with TIFF images. Fotoxx 9.8 and up now just use libtiff directly. Security improvements for the win.
Keep checking my overlay; I'm always adding nifty new applications and cleaning up existing ebuilds.
Include custom GTK+ RC style
I've been using a custom GTK+ RC style for the notes plugin since the version 1.4.0, right now it is at version 1.7.2. I have been playing with GTK+ theming again these last two hours, and I've get custom scrollbars, a gradient for the custom-made “title bar”, and better colours for the notebook to get the current tab stand out from the crowd.While experimenting on a test-case code I found out a better way to parse a gtkrc file in the program. The first time I was fighting with the existing gtk_rc related functions, I gave up on a solution I partially dislike that is to include a line to the custom gtkrc file within ~/.gtkrc-2.0.
Today I understood how gtk_rc_parse(filename) behaves. You have to call this function at the beginning of the program before building any widgets, it will work even if the file doesn't exist yet. Next, while the program is running, you can modify the file, create it, delete it, truncate it, whatever, and call gtk_rc_reparse_all() to get the style refreshed in the GUI. It's hard to believe that such easy things are sometimes a PITA :-)
Be prepared for a 1.7.3 notes plugin with nicer colours.
