A Quick Note about Planet Awn

Weirdness which I can now attribute to "PHP Library Hell" (similar to DLL hell) had caused the full text of posts for most of the feeds to not be syndicated in the planet feed for several weeks. This is now fixed. (I had to upgrade to Wordpress 2.8 for the actual error to appear and a solution to be presented, it seems.) I apologize for the inconvenience.

Avant Window Navigator (Awn) 0.4 Progress Report: June 2009

I've been a bit quiet about Awn in my blog. This is partially because I've been working on two major areas: libdesktop-agnostic and Vala/GObject Introspection (as explained in my previous post, On Bindings).

Since my work on libdesktop-agnostic is directly related to Awn, I'll address it here (even though it may be boring to most of you). I currently have abstractions for configuration, desktop entries, and virtual file systems (e.g., GIO). The area that needs the most work currently is the configuration support. What will ultimately happen is that there will be a class which lets you have per-instance configuration for a given app(let), regardless of the backend that is being used. What this means is that Awn users won't be shackled to using GConf if they want a stable dock. Plus, if a user wants to switch backends for some bizarre reason, they don't have to recompile Awn to do so. Obviously, they'd have to migrate the settings themselves, but that's the price one pays.

Anyway, on to Awn. Here's a screencast I took (CC-BY-SA 3.0 licenced!) of a development version of Awn in an Ubuntu Jaunty virtual machine (hooray for VirtualBox!):

(Direct link to YouTube video)

The bar colors are kind of ugly, mostly because I was testing some of the color-related code on that VM.

Obviously, the features shown in the video (orientation, panel style, and applet loading indicator) aren't the only new features in 0.4. I'll be showing off more shininess in successive videos.

Moonbeam has covered most of the current status of Awn 0.4, which I will repeat here, briefly, for those of you who are scared of clicking on links:

• Moonbeam is working on an API that allows applets to have text and graphics overlay the applet icon. Think Awn plugin support for applets.
• He is also rewriting Awn System Monitor so that one can monitor multiple things from the dock, among other things.
• Certain panel/task animations still need to be implemented.
• Plugin (not applet) support still needs to be implemented.

I'd like to take a moment to talk about the Awn plugin system, particularly to those who actually write the plugins. The D-Bus plugin API that was in 0.2.x and 0.3.x will be deprecated in the 0.4 series, and removed in the 0.6 series. There will be a new API in the 0.4 series.

With regards to what I'm working on - in addition to libdesktop-agnostic integration, I will most likely be working on implementing the D-Bus plugin API, once Moonbeam is done with the API mentioned above.

On the Awn Extras front, I have the Garbage applet waiting to be added. This is waiting on Vala support being re-activated (which is dependant upon adding GObject Introspection support to Awn), and porting the applet to the 0.4 API. There is also an rTorrent frontend and a social aggregator applet that I have on the backburner (both written in Vala), which may or may not make it into 0.4.0.

And finally, a note for Ubuntu users: we are not making available PPA builds of 0.4 until there are no feature regressions in the rewrite. This release is targeted for the official Karmic Koala repositories, just as 0.3.2 was targeted for the Jaunty Jackalope repositories. We anticipate building packages for Hardy and above.

Remember, the best way to keep track of new developments in Awn/Awn Extras is to subscribe to Planet Awn. Be with us next time for "Autohide and Seek", or "The Incredible Shrinking Dock"!

On Bindings

One of the more interesting areas in software development, to me at least, is language bindings. Being able to interface with a library written in one language in another language is kind of satisfying, as it allows me to develop without having to reinvent the wheel. There are two specific projects that I use and work on so that I can enhance the software that I develop: GObject Introspection (G-I) and python-spidermonkey.

GObject Introspection

As a quick overview, the goal of this project is to give C libraries the tools to provide enough metadata about their API so that bindings can be written with minimal effort. Given the time and effort that I have put into maintaining the Awn bindings, it is not very surprising that I would be willing to help out getting this framework working for Awn. My ultimate goal is to eliminate the bindings/python folder in the Awn source tree. It is basically a mixture of a Scheme definition file plus a very bizarrely formatted "override" file for custom definitions, all integrated into autotools to produce a C library that is ready to be dynamically loaded into python via import. To meet this goal, I am contributing to the PyBank project, which is a prototype Python module that interfaces with the GObject Introspection library to read compiled library metadata files (called "typelibs") on the fly so that classes, functions, etc. can be loaded and called at runtime. In addition to myself, a Google Summer of Code student and a Sugar Labs developer are also working on the module, with Johan Dahlin overseeing it all. So far, I've contributed a unit test suite, ported from the gjs project (JavaScript bindings for GLib-based libraries based on the Spidermonkey VM) and working type bindings for various simple types (e.g., int64 and float).

I have also put some coding effort toward G-I integration in Vala. Vala supports G-I by both reading GIR files (the XML serialization of G-I metadata) to produce VAPI files (short for Vala API files), and writing GIR files when producing a library written in Vala (e.g., libdesktop-agnostic). I have contributed mostly what amounts to workarounds in the GIR reading code, with regards to Vala/G-I behavioral inconsistencies. Didier 'Ptitjes' has done much, much more solid work than I have on both fronts, which I greatly appreciate.

python-spidermonkey

This project, as the README states, lets you [execute] arbitrary JavaScript code from Python[, and allows] you to reference arbitrary Python objects and functions in the JavaScript VM. As I've stated in an earlier blog post, I use this in my custom website build system to both validate and pack my JavaScript code, via JSLint and Packer, respectively. Since I published that post almost two years ago, that project was revived twice - once by a Mozilla employee (and co-founder of Humanized, which is quite awesome) named Atul Varma, and the latest incarnation is on github. Since it is based on the original implementation in C, and not the Python-based ctypes version, the Base2 recursion problem does not exist, and so I have happily written modules and scripts which wrap the two JavaScript utilities. Recently, I have made them available in a public project on Launchpad called python-jsutils. I haven't really announced it until now because it currently relies on a change I made to python-spidermonkey which allows one to iterate over a JavaScript array, instead of having to write "unpythonic" code like for x in range(0, len(foo)): #.... While it is in my fork, it has not been merged to the "official" repository.

The GNOME Platform, Awn, and the Cloud

Benjamin Otte recently wrote about desktop-web integration in the GNOME desktop. It's kind of interesting that he calls himself "not web enabled", given that he's the main developer of the swfdec library and associated applications. I agree with most of what he wrote, but there are a few comments I would like to make.

Benjamin asks:

Why does dconf (or GConf) not store my settings in the cloud so it uses the same settings on my university login?

As I understand it, this is one of the features of Conduit. There's a bug in Awn regarding config synchronization via Conduit. I'm probably going to look into how that works when I resume work on the config interface for libdesktop-agnostic.

There is an erroneous statement in his post:

We don't even have a http library that knows cookies.

libsoup has had (non-persistent) cookie support since 2.23.1, and persistent support will be in 2.26.0.

And then there's the main point:

[GNOME is] doing a very bad job at integrating the web into the desktop. Apart from epiphany (and the weather applet), what application does GNOME ship that speak http?

I believe there are two main reasons for this: One is GNOME developers are not "web-enabled". [...] The other, related reason is that we don't have the software to do this.

In Awn-land, we have several web-enabled applets:

• arss
• comics
• digg
• lastfm
• meebo
• pandora
• rtm
• weather
• webapplet

In particular, webapplet is a work in progress framework, which will allow what is essentially an applet version of Mozilla Prism. It currently uses WebKit as the backend, although there is also a Gecko-based backend planned. The rest of the applets listed are written in Python. In particular, the digg, meebo, pandora, and rtm applets use the gtkmozembed Python bindings to view the respective websites. Here lies one of the problems of the web-enabling the GNOME platform. This library is acknowledged to be less than ideal. If you look at the source code of the applets, you'll see that there are some ugly hacks in order to make them work properly on Ubuntu systems. Webapplet is slated to replace that ugliness.

One of my side projects is a status aggregator applet. It's supposed to aggregate all of these social networking status feeds and also to sync all of your personal statuses. One of said social networking websites returns complex, site-specific HTML that obviously needs to be sanitized/canonicalized. The easiest (but not necessarily most memory-efficient) method of performing that task is to use the DOM. There is not currently a DOM library for the GNOME platform. There is a libgdom3 project (written in Vala) which I believe is being / will be used by the gnome2-globalmenu project, but it is unfinished. There is also an old, unmaintained library called gdome2 based on libxml2. I'm not even sure if anyone actually uses that library anymore (its last release was in 2003). I avoided using gtkmozembed and friends based on the experiences described above. I settled on a promising feature request for WebKit: a GObject/C DOM binding. (As an aside, the WebKit bug linked is a fascinating case study on several levels: conflicting coding standards, conflicting developer personalities, and some interesting coding/reviewing.) It's very nice - I can manipulate document fragments as if I were using JavaScript in a web page, among other things. I eagerly await that feature being committed to WebKit trunk.It is an important stepping stone when it comes to working with the web.

Another side project that I'm currently working on is a developer dashboard applet. It's kind of like the previous applet, except as applied to software projects. I was originally going to write it in Vala, which meant that I would have to write an interface to (at least) the Launchpad API, which meant implementing at least three specifications in Vala: OAuth, URI templates, and WADL. I finished the first two (I haven't yet decided whether to release my URI templates implementation as a separate library - the implementation plus the test app is 451 source lines of code), and WADL is a very complex specification. So, I decided to postpone working on the WADL library and instead am currently working on a prototype applet using Python and launchpadlib. Implementations for those three specifications and many others (including AtomPub) should be included in the GNOME platform if it wants to be web-enabled.

Awn/Awn Extras 0.3.2 Released!

The Avant Window Navigator (Awn) and Awn Extras teams would like to announce the release of version 0.3.2. This represents a year's worth of bugfixes, performance improvements, and new applets. Note that the 0.2.8 release was cancelled, due to lack of developer interest. Our next major release, 0.4.0, will be a complete rewrite of the dock and applet API.

Avant Window Navigator is a dock for the Free Desktop which shows your launchers and open applications. It also contains support for extensions, via plugins for third-party applications, which communicate with the dock with DBus, and via applets, which allows for workspace switchers, system trays, clocks, etc., to be embedded in the dock. These applets can be written in C, Vala, or Python.

Awn currently requires compositing support in order to run. Window managers which support compositing include (but are not limited to) Metacity (part of GNOME), Xfwm4 (part of Xfce), KWin (part of KDE4.x), and Compiz. There are also standalone compositing managers, for window managers without support built-in: Cairo Compositing Manager and xcompmgr.

Awn Extras is a catch-all project which houses mainly third-party applets for use with Avant Window Navigator.

Avant Window Navigator Notable Changes

User-Visible

• We have made it easier to enable Awn to run when you log into your desktop - there is an "Automatically start Awn on login" option.
• If you start Awn without a compositing manager present, a pop-up dialog will appear informing you that compositing is not currently enabled.
• Most applet icons can now be customized by dragging and dropping an icon onto the applet in question. Note that this does not apply to tasks.
• Better compatibility with Metacity.

Packager-specific

• The (optional) Vala version dependency has been bumped to 0.5.4.
• The location of the applet metadata files has changed, at the request of Debian. We have included a script (awn-applets-migration) which will migrate users' settings to point to the new location.

Applet Developers

• You can now use cairo contexts/surfaces to paint text/images to AppletSimple-based applets.
• There is now a standardized applet context menu API.
• Advanced custom icon support via AwnIcons
.

Known Issues

These will probably be fixed in 0.4.0.

• Keyfile-based config is unstable. It works for the developer who wrote it well enough, but the GConf backend is currently the most stable configuration backend.
• Autohide is still buggy.
• Awn does not handle multiple screens very well.
• You cannot move the dock to any other edge of the screen. It is currently fixed to the bottom.

Awn Extras Notable Changes

New Applets

• Animal Farm: Various animals tell your fortune.
• Cairo Clock: a replacement for pyclock (due to license issues). It provides three themes, and (if python-dateutil and libgweather are installed) allows you to add additional clocks for different locations.
• Comics!: A flexible comic strip viewer.
• CPU Frequency Monitor: controls and monitors the CPU frequency (useful for laptops)
• Desktop Manager: manages the desktop wallpaper for GNOME and Xfce.
• Media Player: plays anything you drop on the applet.
• ThinkHDAPS: monitors the accelerometer for IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad hard drives.
• PyNot: a configurable notification area AKA system tray.
• Remember The Milk: A simple interface to the web service.
• To-do: A todo list.
• Tomboy: A simple interface to the Tomboy application.

Changes to Applets

• Battery Applet: rewritten, now requires HAL.
• Cairo Menu: various fixes
• Digital Clock: various fixes
• Media Control: various fixes
• Notification area: looks fancier now
• Quit Applet: rewritten; supports the GNOME 2.24 quit behavioral changes
• Shiny Switcher: various fixes
• Terminal: various fixes
• Volume Control: rewritten

Removed Applets

• cairo-menu-classic (use Cairo Menu)
• PyClock (license issues, use Cairo Clock)
• tsclient (license issues)
• Workspace Switcher (use Shiny Switcher)

Packager-specific

• Animal Farm: new runtime dependency on the fortune binary.
• Battery Applet: new runtime dependency on HAL via DBus.
• Cairo Clock: optional runtime dependencies on libgweather (for the Locations.xml(.gz) file) and the python dateutil module.
• CPU Frequency Monitor: optional runtime dependency on gnome-applets, for the cpufreq-selector binary.
• PyNot: runtime dependency on python-xlib.

Applet Developers

• AWNLib has been overhauled. It is now PEP8-compliant.

Known Issues

• Cairo Menu: Intermittent issue of submenus overlapping parents may still be present.
• Cairo Menu and Places applets: Certain fonts/locales are broken.
• Media Player: errors are not currently displayed.
• Shiny Switcher: Switching window managers tends to result in inconsistent behavior.

Download

Semi-official Ubuntu packages for various Ubuntu versions will be available at the Awn Core PPA. We are working with various distributions (Mandriva, Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu) to update their packages. You can download the source code at Launchpad (Awn Extras) - instructions on how to install from source are at our wiki (Awn Extras).

About the Images

1. My dock, on an Ubuntu Hardy machine. I have running Cairo Menu, Show Desktop, Taskmanager/Launcher, Awn System Monitor, Animal Farm (with unfortunately a non-free image - this has been rectified for the release), and Digital Clock. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0-BY-SA (Unported).
2. mhr3's dock screenshot contains the Shiny Switcher, Weather, Taskmanager/Launcher, Battery, Media Player, and Notification Area applets. The image is licensed under the WTFPL.
3. h4writer's dock has Taskmanager/Launcher, Shiny Switcher, and Quit applets. The image is licensed under the WTFPL.
4. onox's dock screenshot contains the CPU Frequency Monitor, ThinkHDAPS, Taskmanager/Launcher, Cairo Clock, Volume Control, Battery, Weather, and Notification Area applets. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0-BY-SA (Unported).
5. mrooney's animal dock. This showcases the new, public domain images for Animal Farm, retrieved from the excellent Open Clip Art Library. Also in the dock are the Weather and Terminal applets. The image is licensed under the WTFPL.
6. triggerhapp's dock is running on Ubuntu Jaunty. He is running the Cairo Menu, Taskmanager/Launcher, Separator, Volume Control, To-Do, Quit, and PyNot applets. Note the transparency in PyNot - this was achieved because support was finally added to GTK+ in version 2.15.0, available in Jaunty. To use it yourself, you need to run the RGBA version of PyNot and Jaunty (or equivalent distro version). The image is licensed under the WTFPL.
7. h4writer's second screenshot contains the Cairo Menu, Separator, Taskmanager/Launcher, Separator, Media Player, Media Icon (Play), Media Icon (Previous), Media Icon (Next), Separator, and Cairo Clock applets. The image is licensed under the WTFPL.
8. moonbeam's dock screenshot contains the Cairo Menu, Places, Taskmanager/Launcher, Shiny Switcher, Awn System Monitor, Comics, To-Do, CPU Frequency Monitor, Volume Control, Weather, and Calendar applets. The image is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0-BY-SA (Unported).

More Information

• Awn on Launchpad
• Awn Extras on Launchpad
• Awn Wiki
• Planet Awn

Regarding the Awn rewrite (0.4) status

Yes, there is an Awn rewrite in progress. Here are the important parts (to me, anyway):

• I hear that autohide works better than before (thanks to mhr3).
• If I have my way, the desktop-agnostic parts of Awn will work much better, via libdesktop-agnostic (not integrated yet). Yes, code does exist!
• Taskmanager is now a separate applet. Launchers are still bundled with it.
• Drag/drop of tasks/launchers is in the works (thanks to h4writer). I still have my doubts about the usability aspect of it, though.
• For the most part, applets don't work, other than the taskmanager applet. Moonbeam informs me that the following applets work:
  • Cairo Menu (not classic)
  • Shiny Switcher (currently has issues with side orientations)
  • Awn System Monitor
  • Awn Notification Daemon (which, I must point out, is not a notification area or system tray)
• You can put the dock at different orientations.

I am not going to list the wishlist items, because nothing is certain to make it into the rewrite unless someone actually codes it in.

The priority at the moment is to get the taskmanager in working shape. That's not really my line of expertise, so my priority is to get libdesktop-agnostic ready to replace my second attempt at a non-GNOME-specific dock. Of course, all of this is contingent upon the amount of time the developers have available. It seems at this point in time, we are either consumed with (paid) workloads, schoolwork/exams, or both. (I currently fall in the first category.) So, as I say over and over, there's no timeline for when this will all be done. It will probably be ready for release when Neil says it is.

Given that this is pretty much a complete rewrite, we (the developers) are not yet comfortable building binary packages for it. If you want to test it, you're going to have to build it from source. Please pay attention to the entire build process (the "development" track) if you have not done this before. The branch information is on Launchpad.

Update: mhr3 has kindly supplied a screenshot (licensed under the WTFPL). This showcases the right-oriented dock, plus the action that happens when an applet crashes. No more white lines!

Awn PSA

This is in response to something that I read on an Ubuntu Brainstorm page.

Attention people who think that you need an expensive video card in order to run Avant Window Navigator, AKA Awn: I have a computer that I maintain with a Diamond Monster Fusion video card (tdfx Xorg driver) that runs Metacity + Awn 0.3.1 (on Ubuntu Hardy) just fine, with applets, on an everyday basis.

This has been a public service announcement by your somewhat friendly Awn/Awn Extras developer. You may now continue to go about your Interneting.

Awn News & Commentary (ANC), 2008/03/21

Obviously, I haven't done one of these in a while. There are a few reasons for this. For one, my workload has gotten a bit larger. Additionally, Super Smash Bros. Brawl came out recently...it's ridiculous how much time that game eats up, and I'm only halfway through "adventure mode".

But seriously...both the forums and the bug tracker have been relatively quiet. It's difficult to figure out exactly why that is. However, there have been a few things that have happened in the past month or so.

Moonbeam has a summary of what happened in the week following my last post. Additionally, he has been working on the framework for an applet that can use either the Gecko engine (used, most notably, in Firefox) or the WebKit engine (used in Safari) to render HTML. Hopefully, this will alleviate some of the problems that people have had trying to get some of the HTML-based applets to run properly. Unfortunately for us, moonbeam has become rather busy in real life lately, and so there may or may not be very much progress on the features/applets that he's been working on.

Andrewsomething, a longtime bug/answer triager for both Awn and Awn Extras, has finally taken the plunge (so to speak) and joined the Awn Extras developer team. His first contribution is the "Remember the Milk" applet, and for his next undertaking, he is seeing if there's any interest in a simple note applet.

It is interesting to note that two new, experimental branches have appeared for Awn recently. One, created by moonbeam, focuses on refactoring the launcher/task/applet effects framework so that it's easier to add new effects, and uses cairo's surfaces instead of Gtk+'s "pixel buffers" to manipulate the images. This allows for more complex effects to be used, while keeping the overall effect smooth (and potentially hardware-accelerated).

The other branch was created by longtime Awn contributor haytjes. He's working on fixing the "custom icon" feature. Currently, there are several bugs which prevent that feature from being very usable.

And finally, I'd like to give a quick Planet Awn roundup. Moonbeam has a very good post on the architecture of Awn and why it's not possible (currently) to have features such as parabolic zoom. Our fearless leader, Neil, has (finally) written a post about the recent Awn/Awn Extras release, and our upcoming plans for the projects. Hopefully, his presence on Planet Gnome will continue to give Awn more publicity :).

Awn News & Commentary (ANC), 2008/02/15

I'm taking a break from both trying to make a <tbody/> scroll vertically without a horizontal scrollbar present and playing "Link's Crossbow Training" to write up what's transpired in the past several days in Awn-land.

The Awn Curves branch was partially merged into awn-core-testing. I say "partially merged" because meek is merging it in parts, due to the complexity.

The big event was when Neil finished reviewing the awn-core-testing and awn-extras-testing branches and merged them into their respective trunks. Among the benefits is that users of reacocard's Ubuntu Gutsy repository can now use the shiny new features that those of us on the (very) bleeding edge have been using for a while now.

I should also point out that Neil has added both moonbeam and myself to awn-core, in recognition of our work on both the testing branches and our respective personal branches. This means we have commit access to Awn's trunk branch and more bug/blueprint triaging privileges.

As a result of the big merge, we now have a new roadmap. What used to be Neil's big rewrite for 0.3 (code-named fandabbydosy) has been spread out over several releases. See the roadmap link for details. One important item to mention is that we plan to release version 0.2.4 of both Awn and Awn Extras on Monday (02/18).

In Awn Extras, most of the changes have been bugfixes. A patch was added to the media-control applet for Quod Libet support.

Finally, I'm holding a contest for Awn users/enthusiasts. In the near future, I'd like to have a post with screenshots and videos showing off all of the new features and applets in Awn/Awn Extras. Unfortunately, I suck at doing that sort of thing myself. :) So, I'm giving the Awn community the chance to show off their customized docks.

The only restriction on the screenshots and videos is that you license them under a Creative Commons license. I will, of course, attribute all media to their proper creators :) Ideally, the screenshots should be as hi-res as possible, but any resolution is welcome. The same goes for videos.

The deadline is Feb. 21, because I'd like to write the post by the end of next week. I'll choose a set of media that looks the nicest (with the help of the people in #awn) and use that as the basis of my next Awn post.

So if you wish to participate, please post the URL to the media, the attribution information you wish to use (your name or nick), and which feature/applet you're highlighting on the forum thread or as a comment here.

Avant Window Navigator News and Commentary, 2008/02/09

Given the lack of releases of Awn, I figure that there needs to be some record of what's happening in Awn-land ever since we got version 0.2.1 of Awn and awn-extras out the door, other than the mish-mash of posts on the forums.

Awn

Here's a (most likely incomplete) list of the new features in awn-core-testing, mostly taken from the branch whiteboards:

• A simple mouse wheel task scrolling implementation
• Sort applets in alphabetical order in awn-manager
• Xfce support (build flag: --with-desktop=xfce4)
• desktop-environment-agnostic support (build flag: --with-desktop=agnostic): this requires GLib 2.15.x and above, because it uses the new GIO library to replace the GnomeVFS code.
• GKeyFile configuration backend support (build flag: --without-gconf): this adds a compile-time option to build a .ini-style configuration backend, instead of GConf.
• Freedesktop.org Desktop Entry wrapper API: Desktop entry files are used all over the place in both Awn and awn-extras, so I wrote an API that wraps both the GnomeDesktopItem and EggDesktopFile APIs, depending on your desktop preference. Note that the Xfce backend also uses EggDesktopFile, because I found out that libxfce4util's desktop entry implementation was read-only, and read-write-support was needed.
• File/directory monitoring wrapper API: The Gnome implementation uses GnomeVFS, the Xfce implementation uses ThunarVFS, and the agnostic implementation uses GIO.
• Python bindings for all of the new APIs
• Vala bindings (auto-detected at build time)
• remove the gnome-panel dependency by writing a launcher/desktop entry editor in Python (including custom/stock icon chooser)
• changed awn-manager applet interface

Note that everything except the first two items are also in my desktop-agnostic branch.

awn-extras

Since the 0.2.1 release, a number of new applets and other changes have occurred in the awn-extras tree.

New applets

• Affinity (yes, that Affinity)
• Arss (Applet to view feeds)
• Awn Terminal
• Cairo Menu
• Clock/Calendar
• Comic
• Digg
• Digital Clock
• File Browser Launcher
• Last.FM
• MiMenu
• Mount
• Pandora
• Places
• PyClock
• Shiny Switcher
• Standalone Launcher, Taskmand, Taskmand-applet: an alternative to the built-in launchers and task manager.
• Terminal Services

Other changes

• Rewritten build system
• Shared libraries for applets to use: libawn-extras (with python bindings) and AWNLib (for Python only)
• The GMail applet has been renamed to the Mail applet and has been completely rewritten. As a consequence, it no longer uses libgmail.
• Stacks: experimental GUI
• BlingSwitcher: Due to the lack of both a maintainer and a license, this applet will most likely be removed from the tree. However, an archived copy will be linked on the forum and the wiki.

Distribution support

Our resident Debian/Ubuntu packager, gilir, successfully got Awn (the dock) into the official Hardy repositories, specifically universe/gnome, as avant-window-navigator. Unfortunately, there are some QA problems with the awn-extras applets package, awn-core-applets, but gilir is working very hard to get that resolved before the package freeze. He is also working on getting said packages into Debian sid.

Meanwhile, in Gentoo-land, there are official ebuilds for both Awn and awn-extras, named gnome-extra/avant-window-navigator and gnome-extra/avant-window-navigator-extras, respectively. Since the xeffects overlay is defunct, I'm working with the team behind the desktop-effects overlay to get the awn-core-testing and awn-extras-testing branches in as working "live" ebuilds. Of course, this comes after I was alerted via an awn-extras bug that one of the desktop-effects developers described the build system as piss-poor. Being the author of the new build system, I was a bit offended. Luckily, the lead developer for that overlay was more level-headed than the stereotypical Gentoo developer whose comment started it all. I'm still waiting for an apology from said developer, but I'm not holding my breath.

Wiki

A community member has contributed a wiki for our project. We've been using it for both end-user documentation (Installation, FAQ) and internal processes. In particular, the applet developers have been collaborating on some applet development guidelines which should be followed if a person would like their applet to be included in the awn-extras tree.

Other

In non-Awn/Awn Extras news, there have been reports that the Gimmie project has added Awn applet support, in addition to its current support for the gnome-panel.

---

The changes I've listed for Awn and AWN Extras are currently being reviewed so that they'll be merged into trunk in the near future. In the meantime, you can grab the test packages from the Awn Testing Team's PPA (for Ubuntu users), install Awn and Awn Extras from the desktop-effects overlay (for Gentoo users), or simply install from source (making sure that you uninstall any previous version of Awn/Awn Extras first!).

Avant Window Navigator 0.2.1 Released

After about a month of bug reports, segmentation faults, patches, and prodding of the core developers, we finally have a new release of everyone's favorite composited dock, AWN.

After some prodding on IRC, I created a branch of the 0.2 release branch, called 0.2-stable-testing. Here's how I described my workflow on this branch in the forums:

• I get patches from IRC/forums/launchpad. If they aren't on launchpad, I ask that they go there so I can put a reference to them in the commit message.
• When the patch is on launchpad, I add the stable branch to the bug with the status message "fix in progress".
• I install/run awn with the patch applied, and check the console. If there are no extra assert/CRITICAL/WARNING messages, and I don't crash within 10 minutes, I commit the patch (usually with whitespace fixes, etc.) to the branch, and push to launchpad.
• I change the status message on the bug to "fix available" and note the revision that the patch was applied on.

In all, there were a total of 13 recorded bugs fixed in my branch. About halfway through, I posted a call for a bugfix release:

So apparently, AWN is now on the front page of launchpad. This inevitably means more users, and more of the same questions about crashes, etc. occurring with the 0.2 release. Many of these crashes have been addressed in my 0.2-stable-testing branch, and I am pleased to report that several people are actively testing this branch and indeed finding it stable. So, I propose that the rest of the patches in my branch be reviewed (you can find them at the bottom of the branch details page), and a point release (0.2.1) be made.

Additionally, I don't think it's in our best interests to have the only available method of retrieving awn-extras be through bzr (even though I am a strong advocate of bzr). We need, at the very least, a snapshot of awn-extras to be released. Preferably, the buggy clock applet should be fixed, moved or removed before this happens.

The result is where we are today. There are only two things that concern me about this release: Two minor features crept in, and I had found a bug the night before, but was too tired to file it. I have been opposed to adding new features (however minor they are) in a point release, because it's convention to leave new stuff to version bumps of one of the more major versions (e.g., 0.2 to 0.3, or 1.0 to 2.0). There's a good reason that most projects do this, too. New features (especially those that are untested)bring new bugs, which is not ideal for a bugfix release.

Thanks are in order for moonbeam (who wrote most of the stability patches), mhr3 (who reviewed said patches), and njpatel (who released it). It sounds like 0.3 is going to be very interesting. Hopefully I can get my desktop-agnostic branch finished and merged.

TODO List, 2007/10/29

Avant Window Navigator

• Finish file monitor wrapper
• Fix python bindings for awn.DesktopItem
• Fix launcher bugs
• Add test programs for filemonitor wrapper and desktop item wrapper
• Fix inter-process config handling

Pidgin Status Updater

• Add project/source code to Launchpad
• add Jaiku support (use xmlrpc-c)
• put HTTP requests in a separate thread
• cache cookie-based user authentication

Website

• Make pages unobtrusively load dynamically
• Add section on Avant Window Navigator

AWN bzr branch, bazaar overlay

Two announcements tonight: the creation of a bazaar branch for Avant Window Navigator (Awn), and the creation of a bazaar-related gentoo overlay.

First, I really like what njpatel has done with Awn. I've always wanted a bar that looked and functioned like the OSX bar, but the closest I could find was the gDesklets starterbar, and it didn't handle currently running programs. Awn is just plain awesome. Unfortunately, I don't use Gnome on my desktop at home, I use Xfce. So I svn co'd the source and created a patch that uses libxfce4util and thunar-vfs instead of gnome-desktop and gnome-vfs. I submitted that patch to the tracker, where, as of the time of this writing, I haven't gotten a response. We'll see. Next up on my list of modifications, is to use Glib's GKeyFile (read: ini-like file parser) as an alternative to GConf. Because bzr-svn finally doesn't die when I try to checkout a remote repository (as of bzr-svn 0.3.2 and bzr 0.15rc2), I now have a bzr-svn branch that contains all of my changes to Awn.

Speaking of bzr-svn, at the request of the developer of bzr-svn, I have published my modified subversion ebuild that contains the patch listed in the parent post to that comment, in a bzr branch, of all things. This branch also contains the latest releases of paramiko, bzr (0.15rc2), bzrtools, bzr-gtk, and bzr-svn.

[Edit: forgot paramiko]

[Edit: forgot to finish a thought]

[Edit (2007/05/16): Update here]