jeromeg glob

A special interest group was recently started to improve the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. It is defined on the Xfce wiki as follows:

The Xfce Design SIG aims at improving the usability and visual appearance of the Xfce desktop environment. Our goal is to bring interested users, designers and hackers together to ensure neither of them is working in a vacuum. By establishing a context in which they can collaborate on smaller and larger design-related projects we try to increase the chance of the proposed changes to be merged into the official Xfce repositories.

Everyone is of course welcome to join this group which has already started working on several points and producing very interesting elements! I'll introduce here two of the main projects we are currently working on for Xfce 4.10. But more will follow soon!

I would like to thank Simon Steinbeiß and Pasi Lallinaho from the Shimmer Project who played a crucial role in starting this SIG.

Thunar shortcuts pane rework

You can see what is being proposed on this page. The main goals are to reduce the visual clutter in the shortcuts pane by sorting items in different categories and to integrate nicely remote file systems (Samba, FTP...) which are supported since Thunar 1.2.0. The current demo we have looks like this:

I encourage you to have a look at the Wiki page linked above, which contains a very accurate description of what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it.

Merge of xfrun and xfce4-appfinder

You can see what is being proposed on this page. The goal is to produce a single interface allowing to quickly launch applications and to perform actions. We plan add an extension system similar to the Thunar Custom Actions to allow the creation of a tailor-made interface.

This is of course still work in progress, but this is how the two main view currently look. Clicking on the arrow on the right hand-side of the entry switches from one view to the other.

I encourage you to have a look at the Wiki page linked above, which contains a very accurate description of what we want to achieve and how we are going to achieve it.

Don't worry!

We already received some mails and comments asking whether it meant that we would move towards a Gnome 3 interface. The goal is not (yet :D) to bring a revolution but rather to streamline what we currently have by improving the numerous rough edges. Of course, we might take some inspiration in other desktop environment but we will not copy what is done in Gnome 3 or KDE4, Xfce has its own philosophy which is serving its users well at the moment.

Useful links

• Xfce design SIG Wiki page
• Mailing Announcement
• Git repository containing the work in progress

A few distributions are already starting to provide Xfce 4.8pre2 packages whether it be in the official repositories or in testing unofficial ones. I'm going to list them here, use this at your own risk.

• Archlinux
• Fedora: work in progress
• Frugalware
• Gentoo: can be emerged
• Mandriva
• Ubuntu: available in Natty, work in progress
• Zenwalk: available in snapshot

If your favorite distribution has packages for testing, please let me know and I will add them to the list. Happy testing and report all the bugs you may find!

PS: I don't do support for those packages here. If you have any problem related to the packages, contact the person who provides them.

Xfce 4.8pre2 is now available for download.

It includes the following releases of Xfce core components:

• exo 0.5.5
• gtk-xfce-engine 2.6.0
• libxfce4ui 4.7.5
• libxfce4util 4.7.4
• libxfcegui4 4.7.0
• thunar 1.1.5
• thunar-vfs 1.1.1
• xfce-utils 4.7.3
• xfce4-appfinder 4.7.1
• xfce4-dev-tools 4.7.3
• xfce4-panel 4.7.6
• xfce4-session 4.7.2
• xfce4-settings 4.7.6
• xfconf 4.7.4
• xfdesktop 4.7.4
• xfwm4 4.7.3

Release tarballs can be retrieved from the following mirrors (please note that it may take a few hours for the mirrors to catch up):

• http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/src
• http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src
• http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/src
• http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/src

A tarball including all individual releases can be downloaded here:

• http://archive.xfce.org/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
• http://www.tx-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
• http://www.p0llux.be/xfce/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs
• http://www.ca-us.xfce.org/archive/xfce/4.8pre2/fat_tarballs

Release notes for 4.8pre2

We are pleased to announce the second preview release of Xfce 4.8. This release marks the beginning of the string freeze. From today on until the final release, strings may no longer be changed in the master branch of Xfce core components. This will help translators to prepare their translations for the final release scheduled on January 16th, 2011.

For this release we focused on fixing bugs in all Xfce components. We managed to close a great number of them thanks to all the persons who reported them and tested proposed fixes quickly.

A few minor panel features were added despite feature freeze. We also managed to work on two long time requests: proper support for editing the application menu with menu editors (Alacarte being the one that we tested) and integration with the Compiz viewport. Of course, this release also features a lot of new and improved translations thanks to the amazing work of our translation teams.

A list of all changes is available here.

We hope you will enjoy this release. Please give us feedback by sharing your thoughts, blogging, tweeting, denting or by filing bug reports. With your help, 4.8 will be the best release ever (at least until 4.10)!

Kind regards and thanks to everyone who has contributed to this release,

The Xfce development team

Almost exactly two years after the first release of Xfce4 Notifyd, sorry for missing that, 0.2.0 is out.

Most of the work was done by Brian Tarricone, who allowed me to co-maintain this application due to his very limited free time.

The biggest change must be smart notification placement: when there are several notifications, they are placed in a grid-like way, instead of overlapping as they did with the previous version. This also comes with improved support for multiple monitors setups.

We also now support 'gauge' and 'icon-only' notifications as in Canonical's Notify OSD. Xfce4-volumed already uses this to provide a beautiful notification on volume change.

Finally, we are now compatible with the latest specification (0.9) which should fix a great number of issues which happened when applications expected us to be already doing so.

The little screencast I made a while ago:

La première 'Preview' de Xfce 4.8 a enfin pointé le bout de son nez ! Après des mois de développement, l'équide de Xfce est plus que fière de vous présenter son dernier bébé !

Au menu, on note principalement : - Réécriture de Thunar, il gère maintenant en option les systèmes de fichiers distants (ssh, ftp, smb...). - Réécriture de Xfce4 Panel, plusieurs centaines de nouvelles fonctionnalités et bugs corrigés. - Support amélioré de la gestion des écrans multiples. - Modification des menus possible avec Alacarte. ...

L'équipe s'est en plus attachée à améliorer l'utilisabilité et à corriger des centaines de bugs ennuyants. La liste de tous les changements est disponible ici. Je vous invite donc à télécharger et à tester tout ça !

Documentation

Nick Schermer is working on the infrastructure for the new documentation. It will be written in Mallard and translatable using Transifex. There are already a few drafts available: Nick made one for Xfce4 Panel (git branch) and Jim Campbell made one for Xfce4 Screenshooter (Bugzilla entry). Once the infrastructure is ready, contributions will be welcome! I will keep you posted.

Xfdesktop4

This is the second BIG thing currently going on: Jannis is porting Xfdesktop4 to GIO. He expects to have it done by the next weekend, the current work is available in a git branch. This is one of the last remaining by tasks for 4.8, so this is a really good news! <bisounours>Rock on!</bisounours>

Xfce Settings Helper

For those of you who care, I implemented two little features last week. First, Xfce now remembers the state of the Numlock when closing the session and restores it on startup. Gone are the days of numlockx \o/. Moreover, for people using xmodmap, the settings helper automatically processes .Xmodmap on start up and when changing the layout/variant using the Xfce settings dialog.

By the way, since my last post about the keyboard settings improvement, I also reviewed/applied a few patches by Martin Pitt and Lionel Le Folgoc which fix some crashes/bugs in the new code.

Xfce Utils

I fixed a bunch of easy bugs/enhancement requests for Xfrun. It can now handle URLs, opens files with the default handlers, folders with the default file manager... I also fixed history loading for the "Run in terminal" check box, fixed handling of command line options and added "#" as a shortcut to read man pages. I now plan to work on auto completion for path and command.

I also reworked an old patch by Mike Massonnet to improve the look of the Xfce documentation, it looks really neat now. I will try to see if we can use it with the new documentation.

Goodies

Florian Rivoal, maintainer of xfce4-cpugraph-plugin, launched a "all your unmaintained goodies are belong to me" operation. Basically he offered to maintain a huge number of unmaintained goodies for which there are a great number of patches waiting for review in the Xfce Bugzilla. You can find more details on this thread. This heroic move should not make you forget that contributors/new maintainers are welcome! Florian will not be able to implement new things (or only a limited number) given the work it represents but only to keep those apps functional which is already awesome!

Jannis Pohlmann announced two days ago on the Xfce mailing lists that he started the paperwork needed to register Xfce as a non-profit organization under the German law which would be nice because, I quote:

The benefits are obvious: Xfce would become a legal entity with an official board of directors and we could raise funds in the form of donations and via supporting members in order to organize hackfests etc.

The current draft is available on gitorious. Expect more news on this in the following days and feel free to comment on our mailing lists.

As promised, here comes the post about recent changes in Xfce4 Display Settings. For those who do not know, Xfce4 Display Settings is the dialog which allows you to set the screen resolution, refresh rate, to activate external monitors, etc.In Xfce 4.6, it only had one problem: it was totally useless and not working.

Then came mr_pouit, who decided it was time to clean that mess! He started to dig in the xrandr code to understand how the kryptic Randr API works and to bring that sweet magic to Xfce. So what do we have at the moment?

The new dialog is at the moment almost similar to the old one, except that every thing should work correctly and that it is rocking simple to use! We also added some goodies such as timed confirmation for critical changes and a simple dialog which can be called with the media keys or with Win + P to quickly configure an external output.

But there is more to come! First, we are still working on fixing bugs, simplifying the code to make it rocking stable and awesome like Barney's suit. Then, we are planning a lot of UI improvements, the biggest one being a graphical way of setting the screens' layout : it will allow the user to set the relative positions of external monitors. We hope to have that done in the next two weeks, but it could take a little more time. And yes, that'll mean that 4.8 TODO list will have lost one item

Alexander Iliev, the current Xfce4 XKB plugin maintainer, sent a message to the goodies-dev ML telling that he is looking for a new maintainer for xfce4-xkb-plugin. Please get in touch with him if you are interested.

xfce4-xkb-plugin currently has 38 open bugs on the Xfce bugzilla, 4 of them have a patch in bugzilla. This plugin to switch between different keyboard layouts has a lot of users, so you'll make a lot of happy users if you start working on this! Xfce needs you!

I recently released Xfce4 Screenshooter 1.7.9. This is a release candidate for the 1.8 branch. It contains a great number of new improvements and bug fixes, listed below.

I recently started to contribute more to the Xfce core, particularly Xfce4 Session and Xfce4 Settings (I'll try to blog more about that later), which leaves me very little time for Xfce4 Screenshooter. I would like to find someone to take over the maintenance of this projet, if you feel motivated please contact me (jeromeg@xfce.org or jeromeg in #xfce on freenode). Obviously, some basic knowledge of English (to communicate with the rest of the Xfce team and to develop the UI) and knowing C is required. If you are not used to the gtk/glib API, I'm ready to do some mentoring during a transitional phase. Anyway, I would be happy to explain the current code organization, the main issues, the weak areas, etc. This is a good opportunity to join a nice community which needs more contributors to keep rocking!

**Edit**: Bruno Ramos kindly volunteered for this! \o/ For other people interested in contributing, I'll post in the next few days on a few Xfce goodies which need a new maintainer. Please also remember that patches for bugs opened in the bugzilla are a great way to start contributing. Do not hesitate to join #xfce on freenode if you have any questions.

Changelog

• The XMLRPC-C dependency has been replaced by libsoup.
• Gtk 2.14 is now required to compile.
• Switch to a non-recursive Makefile.am. This reduces the build time and centralizes the build information.

New features

• Scrolling the panel plugin button changes the area to be captured.
• When compositing is on, use a nice partially transparent rubber-banding, still needs some polishing.
• F1 opens the help page.
• Automatically fill the title and comment fields in the ZimageZ upload information dialog.
• Make enter validate the upload in the ZimageZ upload information dialog.
• Use the XDG image directory as the default directory for saving screenshots. If it does not exist, fall back to $HOME.
• Major interface rethinking. This new interface is based on a suggestion by Yves-Alexis Pérez. The former main dialog is split into two dialogs: one for selecting the region to be captured and the delay, while the second one displays a preview of the screenshot and lists the available actions. The main application shows the first dialog, then the second one. If one of the region CLI options is given, the screenshot is taken accordingly and the second dialog is displayed. The panel plugin uses the first dialog as a configuration dialog. When you click the plugin, the screenshot is taken and the second dialog is shown.
• Allow drag and dropping of the preview to other applications in order to paste the screenshot (Mike Massonnet).

Bugs fixed

• UTF-8 characters in user name or password caused a login failure.
• Fix all warnings triggered by running autogen.sh.
• Fix the ZimageZ upload when behind a proxy.
• Fix copying of links in the ZimageZ upload finished dialog.
• Fix 100% CPU usage when selecting a region in a non composited environment (spotted by Gauvain Pocentek).
• When capturing a window with rounded corners, don't capture the background of the window but make the screenshot transparent instead.
• Make sure the save folder in the panel plugin preferences is valid.
• Don't show the copy to clipboard option in the application if no clipboard manager is running as the screenshot won't be preserved after closing the application anyway in that case.
• Allow xfce4-screenshooter -r to be used as a command for a keybinding.
• Allow silent build.
• Fix most pre-build warnings.
• Escape screenshots path when opening them with an application.
• Plug some leaks in the application and in the panel plugin.
• Do not accept conflicting CLI options. Warn the user when he uses CLI options which are not coherent.
• Correctly save preferences, even if the rc file does not exist (Mike Massonnet).
• One second is now the minimal delay when using the interactive mode. This caused the screenshooter dialog to be partially displayed on the screenshot in some cases.

• A lot of updated translations for the application, the panel plugin and the documentation. Thanks to the Xfce translation team!

Screenshots can be found on the homepage.