Quote of the day
Hey,
its wednesday morning, 3 AM, I’m supposed to get up at 9 but hell ..
I gotta give you Gentoo folks out there this quote:
[longlongint64] I just emerged xfce4
[mrwolfe] wrong
[mrwolfe] you don’t emerge it
[mrwolfe] it emerges you!
I couldn’t say it better (Note: No, I’m not a Gentoo user. No, I don’t even appreciate it. And no, I didn’t ask those particular two for the right to post this quote. If they’re against it I might kindly request them to eat my shorts. Thanks.)
By the way .. quote number one still is:
[evildrew] xfce is, without a doubt, the most ass kicking thing since ass kicking began
yeah .. take THAT Slownome! *kick*
g’day
Moe
gmodules are your friends
hi all-
i noticed moe commenting about xfdesktop, so i thought i’d give a little status update. the menu code was in a state that i was relatively happy with, so i went and broke it utterly. i’ve noticed people clamoring for keeping things simple and configurable so we can keep the bloat out and the memory footprint low. so, to this end, i’m moving the menu code into a loadable gmodule. this isn’t a plugin system (at least not yet), as each module is going to need to be loaded individually and will proabably have different initialisation and use requirements inside xfdesktop. i think a more generic plugin interface would be nice, but i really don’t see the overwhelming need for one since xfdesktop shouldn’t be doing all that much in my opinion.
currently i have a prototype of the menu code in a gmodule (it only parses menu files and doesn’t do the autogenerated menu yet). it seems to work well so far, with a few bugs i need to work out (that’s what i get for coding at 5am). i’m planning on putting the forthcoming desktop icon code into another gmodule, and if anyone can think of any other cool features that would be candidates as pseudo-plugins, i’d be interested in hearing ideas.
oh, and my new menu code uses XfceAppMenuItem, finally. it seems to work well so far, though porting the menu dentry code to use it will be a challenge since i have to sort the hard way. i’m also planning on adding drag-n-drop support to the menu so you can drag items out onto the panel or onto the desktop. after i finish the menu gmodule i’ll write a panel plugin that can display the desktop menu. ah, modularisation…
i’m really pleased with how xfdesktop is shaping up; in a month or so, hopefully we’ll have a very featureful – but still lean, configurable, fast, and lightweight – desktop manager.
Its late .. I should be in bed .. whatever
Hello fellow Xfce supporters ..
after a rather smooth saturday some movement on the cvs commits lists suddenly caught my attention. Turns out Danny was about to brake a few translations and xfdesktop ;-)
Nah .. obviously he was only fixing compiler warnings and thought he’d give the translations a try .. read that as _try_. I put everything back in place so xfdesktop’s German translation should be pretty much up to date now (for those among you who actually care about translations).
As for the progress on Xfce* .. xfdesktop is improving daily. We now have a configurable desktop menu including a shiny menu editor and icons everywhere (‘cept on the desktop). The panel developement got a bit stuck due to Jasper teaching at the university IIRC .. ah, and Olivier is doing his daily theme changes as usual. I really like the current default theme .. it even made me drop ‘preacher’ which I’ve used since about 2 month.
So .. what else is in the news .. ah, some minor backend tweaks by Brian and Benny including the integration of the menu editor backend. Nice stuff.
Did I mention that the taskbar from cvs has a right click menu? Its showing the usual xfwm right click popup for the selected task :)
So .. enough for this lousy “I write down my thoughts at 1:42 AM in the morning” poem, good night everyone …
Moe
nag nag nag
I’ve just had a beer and wish to provide my usefull input and inspiration to all the xfce devs out there, but I seem to get stuck at whining about desktop icons lately. I apologise for that, I really like desktop icons, and I wish xfcedesktop4 (or is it xfce4-desktop?) would support them (hic). Anyway, keep up the good work!
xfwm4 theme reorg
I finally took some time to reorganize the theme stuff in xfwm4 for Xfce 4.2.
Theme are now located in themes/theme name/xfwm4 instead of xfwm/themes/theme name as in xfce 4.0
This means that older themes placed in the older location won’t be seen by xfwm4.2. This breakage was necessary to be consistent with the standard.
I also moved most themes from xfwm4 package to xfwm4-themes. That should make xfwm4 archive a bit smaller (and help keeps things clean)
Screenshot new gtk / xfwm4 default themes
Just wanted to say I love the new default gtk theme. Well done Olivier! The default xfwm theme of the day is very nice as well, but probably already different when I’m writing this ;-)
news about the menueditor
Hi all, i’m Jean-Fran�ois (also known as p0llux on IRC) , i’m the author of the menueditor. I will no more release the menueditor as an third-party package because, since last night (here in Belgium :-) ), it’s included in xfdesktop and so it will be directly released with xfce4. For the future development of the editor i will coordonate with Brian. All remarks on the menueditor are welcome, i’m often in the #xfce channel on IRC if you have questions about it.
By the way, i really need to find a photo of me for the weblog.
gtk stuff, xfdesktop plans
i was looking through the gtk2 api docs the other day, and i noticed they added documentation for a new GtkIconTheme class in gtk 2.4. while i like my icon finding code, it will be nice to relegate it to a fallback and use a somewhat “official” method for finding icons.
the other night i wrote XfceAppMenuItem, a subclass of GtkImageMenuItem that should make handling the desktop menu a bit easier. making use of it will take a bit of code rework that i’m not ready to do right now, so i’ll shelve it for later. you can check out my preliminary api in the header. make suggestions if you want.
yesterday tuukka sent me his work on a freedesktop.org desktop menu spec-compliant menu parser. i’ve only just started looking at it, but now i understand why there still isn’t a production-quality parser/generator out yet: the spec is incredibly complicated. i think it’s a good spec, to be sure – it has to be, to both be flexible for new ideas and to support old legacy menu hierarchies, but i’m somewhat afraid that when i hook it all into the menu system it’s going to make everything terribly slow. at any rate, it’ll be at least a week before i figure out what exactly is the best to do with this…
Boo !
Just wanted to say hi to the world…
Hi!
If you are wondering who I am, you are not alone. I sometimes wonder too ;)
Anyways, xfce related I am breaking…. uh working on the mixer program&panel plugin, allowing xfce users to unintentionally increase the sound card volume to the max, risking the neighbours hit you hard for damaging their ears… (hi Jasper ;))
Seriously though, this and some minimalist freedesktop menuspec implementation is all I ever committed to this great project… I want to have more free time to be able to spend hacking on xfce ;)
(and since I also like python and delphi, and relational databases, each day should have about 40 hours for me to have enough time ;))
Risking a pureness war here, I found “gob”, a preprocessor for C which makes gobject based work so much easier (as opposed to pure C). It has a java-like syntax and almost the whole mixer is written using it, and so far I am very pleased with gob2. Give it a try.
Either way, I’m off playing ut2004 demo since it finished downloading… yay ! ;)
welcome (to me!)
hello all-
for those of you who don’t know me, i’m brian (aka kelnos), and i’m the new maintainer of xfdesktop. i don’t really have all that much to say right now; i just wanted to check in. i threw together a little web page that i’m going to use to update the world on my progress with xfce – what i’m working on, screenshots, etc.
hmm, i need to get myself one of those disembodied floating head pictures…
that’s all for now, i suppose.
-brian