As usual, I'm leaving far too long between each blog post, but I thought I'd make a small update until I get a chance to write up everything that's been going on:

• Canonical - The first couple of months have been awesome! Lots of cool things are happening here, everyone's very busy and there are some really exiting projects which will hopefully be in public very soon.
• UDS Prague - I'll be attending UDS this year, so ping me if your attending and would like to discuss various bling on desktop/mobile environments! Extra points if you support Manchester United, and want to go watch the Champions League final on the wednesday that week :-).
• Awn - Not much happening at the moment from my side. Hopefully this will change in a couple of weeks, at which point I hope to finish the remainder of non-composite support in trunk, and make a beta release for 0.4
• Random Hacking - Since late last year, most of my spare hacking time has been spent on Awn, which is great, but it means some of my other ideas/projects got left behind. So, I've been trying to remedy this by picking up these projects and starting to work on them once again. The two I'm concentrating on at the moment are Nautilus and Affinity. I hope to get some code out soon, so stay tuned!

today was my last day with OpenedHand. I'd just like to take this opportunity to say "thank you" to everyone at OH. I've had a great time working there, and learnt so much while working with people like Matthew/Emmanuele/Ross/Thomas on some of the coolest projects around.

Looking forward, I'm excited to say that on Monday I'll be starting at Canonical as a "User Interface and Applications Engineer for Mobile Internet Devices". I'll be doing the same type of work as before, with continuing work with creating/adapting Gtk & Clutter applications for mobile systems & touch-based UIs. The goal being to make sure that Ubuntu Mobile is as usable & pretty as any other mobile platform out there :-).

So, I've had some spare time at work today, and thought I might as well tackle an idea that has been floating around OH towers since before Guadec, which was to use the Gtk offscreen rendering patch to embed Gtk widgets within the Clutter stage.

Now, I only go this working today, and it's pretty hacky, but heres where I am so far:

Clutter + Gtk offscreen rendering patch from Neil Patel on Vimeo (if you can't see the video, click through).

Thats a GtkWindow which has been told to also draw to a GdkDrawable, which is then being pushed into a ClutterTexture (did I mention it was hacky?).

However, thanks to Emmanuele (and by proxy Alex), I have an idea of where to go with this, so hopefully we'll able to have some sort of canvas based on Clutter, where you can manipulate real widgets.

Anyway, that's it for Bling Tuesday, some more updates coming soon :-).

Update: The video doesn't seem to work with some flash players, so here is a link to the original ogg. That's what I get for trying out a new video service

So in my tradition of one post per month (which, I know, needs to change), I present you with some updates from the world of Awn:

Applets

There have been lots of cool applets popping up, especially since the python bindings were committed a week or so ago.


Stacks


last.fm


Main menu

Launchpad

The move to launchpad has also created some very cool branches of Awn by other people which focus on new ideas, or new ways to implement existing ones. Below are two examples, the first being the libawn-effects branch, which migrates a lot of effects code from Awn to libawn, wraps a nice api around them, and adds a few more fancy effects:



The second branch concentrated on providing another approach to the usual linear arrangement of icons on the dock. Awn-curves puts icons on a slight curve which increases the feeling of depth:




Both are quite stable and are in line for a merge :-)

*Update* As usual, the videos have been stripped out, so if you want to see them you'll have to click on the post title above.

So Guadec went really well, for both me and everyone at OH. I got to meet lots of people, see all the cool things people have been working on, and everyone got a chance to see all the different things we have been working on at OH towers :-).

One of the coolest things was that everyone seemed to love the work we've been doing on Clutter, a lot of people spent time at our stand playing with the apps we have written, and generally asking questions on how to start developing with Clutter. Matthews presentation also went very well, and the audience seemed to enjoy seeing all the demos on the big screen.

So, for all those who missed the presentation, and those who just like to watch pretty videos, I'll do a quick recap of some of the example apps that we have in svn (http://svn.o-hand.com/repos/clutter/trunk/toys).

These should be a great place to start to get an idea of how clutter works, and how the animation framework works. If you are comfortable with Gtk, then it should be quite easy for you to get started with Clutter.


Table

I'll start with this because it's probably the one I play around with the most :-D. It's basically a Surface-type app, written by Tomas. You point it to a directory, and it'll crawl it, putting all the pictures and videos it finds onto the screen for you to manipulate:




Woohaa

This is Matthew's really funky, stupendously cool, hotter than a hot cup of tea, movie player!It has a 'slider' menu for filtering your video collection, plus it'll do something clever with all those TV shows you've recorded (legally ;-) from the BBC, so you can easily see the episode number and season:



Hint: Press 'e' during playback for some fun during a boring video

Aaina

Yay, my turn :-). This didn't work during the presentation as there wasn't an active internet connection, but its by far the coolest :-p! Coming back down to earth, it's a slideshow program, which has two backends, a directory one (which needs some work), and a Flickr one. The Flickr one is quite cool, you just provide a bunch of tag names when you start it, and its pull all photos matching the tags from Flickr, and continuously update the slideshow. It'll also show the title of the image and the authors name:




Hint: Press left and right arrows to rotate the entire stream of photos. Press up to flip them.

Flowers

Last but not least, we have the flowers demo, which shows how you can use your cairo skills with clutter. It is a very simple app, but everyone likes it, so I thought I'd post a video anyway :-).


This really needs to be made into a screensaver...

Points To Note

These are in 'toys' for a reason :-). They are still rough around the edges, but they should provide a nice demo of what's possible, and where to start when you decide to create your 3-d masterpiece! All the demos require Clutter 0.3 (some may need clutter-trunk).

Also, please bare in mind that the performance is much better in real life. Capturing the screencast uses a lot of resources, and the conversion from the resulting video file to google video looses a lot of clarity!

Finally, the python bindings for 0.3 are coming, if you would like to help with them you can let someone know in #clutter on irc.gimp.net, or contact Rob, who is in charge of the python bindings (sorry Rob ;-).

hate to depress you again boys, but Awn just keeps getting better and better :-p.

No long time no blog, eh? Don't worry though, that's unlikely to happen again, in fact, I'm sure you'll be sick of me always taking up precious space on PGO with my transparent this and three-dimensional that!

So,
a) how has Awn got better and
b) why am I so happy about it?

Many people already know the answer to (a), latest Awn has full applets support! Yes, that means you can have a trash applet, workspace switcher, and all those other things which you missed from your bottom gnome-panel. I have included a Workspace switcher applet, a Trash applet and a Separator applet in Awn. More to come from me, plus I know of others working on some cool stuff (more on that below).

So, whats the best way to describe this 'applets' malarkey? Well, with a screenshot, of course:


Oh, the main Launcher/Window manager is also an 'applet' (albeit an internal one). So you can position other applets around it.

Okay, moving on, the reason why I am so happy about this feature (over anything else), is that I believe we will now see some really cool stuff for Awn. There have been so many ideas floating around for months, which go from simple applets, to the extravagant (which is pretty easy to do with the excellent Empathy.

I would also love to see some cross-over happening with Gimmie, especially embedding its panel-applet into Awn (blinged up, of course :-).

Anyway, before we get there, I still need to make the applets system a bit more robust, and try and move as much as I can into libawn, so other applets can use colour settings etc, but this is a great start!

P.S. Can I just say thanks to everyone on the forums, bug reporters, and those who leave comments here, they have been really patient, plus they have been invaluable in giving feedback.

Okay, so I haven't really been doing as much blogging/coding as I probably should have...sorry! The past few weeks have been crazy for me, a *lot* of personal/family stuff was going on, however, this week started very nicely, as I began working for OpenedHand!

This is a dream come true for me, so you can imagine how happy i am ATM :). I'll mostly be working on/with Clutter, which means hopefully you will able to see some cool integration work (for OH and personal projects), especially as I get better at OpenGL & Clutter.

Although I've been away, I have been doing work on Awn & Affinty, heres an account:

Awn

• Beryl window thumbnailer support.
• Support for international fonts (Varun Ratnakar)
• Better launcher to window matching code
• Heavily debugged auto-hide, which should not crash anymore.
• Better auto-hide animation
• Bar resizes if it gets larger than the screen width
• Translation works
• Some improvements in the DBus backend

I know there is some more info, but I can't remember it right now, and I really need to dedicate Awn its own entry some time over the weekend.

Affinity

Thanks for all the testers! I have been working on getting all the features in. Svn has a panel applet, so you can have super-quick searching any-time :).

I have been busy pulling out the search & app code into libaffinty, as I have been working on the following two apps (which are part of affinity):

Application Browser

This is an app browser, which is required for the panel applet. This is the main reason for libaffinity, as once you've loaded Affinity, the app-browser loads super-quick. Heres a few mockups I am working off :



As per usual, suggestions are welcome. I hope to commit this over easter.

Desktop Search Frontend

Affinity works fine when you know exactly what you are looking for, but not so well, when you either need to browse everything containing a certain search term, or when you need finer tuning. To this end, Affinity 0.2 will also ship with a search-tool which provides a unified search interface for Beagle & Tracker. Its easy to tell what app it is based on, but I think it looks unique enough not to cause me a problem :). Heres the current mockups I am working towards (about 70% done):

Yes, those fancy reflection effects are in the real one :). This is a much more complicated app, so I hope to commit by the end of next week, but can't promise.

Anyway, I hope that stops the 'are you alive' emails ;). I will back in #awn & forums from tonight.

I've been spending all of my free time on Awn recently, cleaning up the code, adding some missing features, and merging some excellant patches, here's a breakdown:

• Merged a patch by Chirstian Kirbach which cleans up a lot of warning during compilation
• Fixed a mem leak caused by applications which change their icon many times (ie. Gimp). Also, on my system, g-s-m reports Awn using only 2.6Mb after several hours usage :).
• Separator will position itself correctly when adding new launchers
• Fixed bug when closing lots of windows at once, and Awn getting 'stuck'
• Merged a patch from James Willcox which makes the icons actually 'bounce' on hover, rather than go up & down. I blame him for wasting the next 30 mins of mine as I sat there watching the icons bouncing ;)!
• When in auto-hide mode, the bar will pop-up when you are dragging a file
• Launcher icons will change when you change your theme (GNOME/Gtk)

Last week I was talking about having the ability to add menu items to the popup menu of a task through D-Bus, well, now its here!

I have added another Rhythmbox plugin under the plugins/Rhythmbox directory. It's called awn-menus, and you have to move the awn-menus.rb-plugin & awn-menus folder to your ~/.gnome2/rhythmbox/plugins. Heres a preview:



AddTaskMenuItemByName ("rhythmbox", "gtk-media-previous", " "):
where arg1 is the name of the task, arg2 is optionally a gtk-stock-id, and arg3 is a normal name (if you can't use a stock id).

AddTaskCheckItemByName("rhythmbox", "P_lay", False):
where arg1 is the name of the task, arg2 is a mnemonic name for the item, and arg3 is a bool, as to whether it is 'checked' or not.

Both return an ID integer. You then listen for "MenuItemClicked" & "CheckItemClicked" signals on com.google.code.Awn. The "MenuItemClicked" will come with one arg, which is the ID, so if it matches your ID, you should do something. "CheckItemClicked" will come with two args, the ID, and a bool telling you whether the check is active or not.

You can also use AddTaskCheckItemByName ( name, ID, bool) to set the check from your plugin after you've created it. The rhythmbox plugin is the best example, so have a look at it ;). At the moment, I have put a limit of 5 extra items per task, as I think more than that looks a bit over-the-top. I still need to add the code for removing an item, and disabling an item.

Okay, thats it for now, expect lots more bug fixes over the weekend, and some brand new auto-hide code!

Hi Planet GNOME'ers!

Firstly, let me say thanks to Jeff for adding me so fast :)! My name is Neil J. Patel, I am 23 years old, and am a Pharmacologist (yes, you read correctly) who lives in London, England. I love GNOME and spend my spare time working on a few projects:

Avant Window Navigator
Avant window navigator (Awn) was my first project, it is a Gnome-based dock which, as taken from the website, "sits on the bottom of your desktop in all its composited glory" and handles the launching of applications & active windows. It also has a D-Bus backend which allows applications to control their icons. Some examples are Rhythmbox setting the album art ask its icon, Evolution displaying the number of unread emails on its icon, Firefox showing its progress on its icons, and Gaim showing your status as your icon. A picture says a thousand words, so :


Awn also has a wiki & forum, and you can also catch me on #awn on irc.gnome.org.

Metadata & Desktop Search
Tracker is where the rest of my free time goes! I work on several projects surrounding GNOME regarding metadata & search:

1. Nautilus & Metadata Integration : I am working with John Stowers on a proposal for including metadata & tagging/emblem support in Nautilus, where by Nautilus can use Beagle/Tracker to pull info regarding a file + display it in a metadata tile, and it can use the FreeDesktop emblem spec for emblems, so you have a uniform experience across the desktop:
2. libtracker-gtk : This is another effort by John and myself to have a more integrated experience across the desktop, by having a set of reusable widgets which can be easily added to any application. Therefore, you now have a library which will consist of many cool and useful widgets such as a model-view-controller based list of results, a metadata-tile, a GtkEntry with automatic keyword-completion, a tag cloud etc.
3. A new blingy search tool/media browser/viewer: based somewhat on these mockups, and using a Tracker backend, but more on that later :).

Er, what else? I think that's it for now, I have lots of mockups for different UI ideas which can be found here, I can't bring all of them into reality, but if you want to, let me know if you need help with some of the more extravagant looking Gtk stuff :).

..."Get on the bus", which, as of revision 125, Awn is on :).

Awn now has a DBus backend! Which brings to life one of my main features for Awn, which was the ability for applications to control their Icons on Awn!

It is *very* new, and I haven't added all of my ideas, but Imy top 3 are now working:

Ability To Change Task Icon
This is especially important for media applications, so they can set the icon to whatever cover-art they have:

Yes, its FutureSex/LoveSounds, and that says alot for my music taste, but leaving that aside for the minute, you'll be happy to know that Mr. Timberlakes cover art is actually the Rhythmbox launcher :).

I basically have hacked the standard artdisplay plugin for Rhythmbox and added support for the cover to be shown on Awn. If there is no cover, it reverts back to the standard icon. I have included it in svn, under the new 'plugins' folder. Installation instructions are also included.

Little Information Bubbles
These would be important for applications such as Evolution, which could show how many unread emails you have:This is not a real-life plugin, its just a demo of what can be done. If I have time, I will make this into a proper plugin.

Progress Information
This is probably my favourite! In-built progress reports into the task icon:

*Update* An example video showing Firefox downloading a file:



This, again, is not a real plugin for Firefox, but demonstrates whats possible.

There is still a lot of work to do, regarding drawing, alignment, etc etc. However, now the basic boilerplate stuff is in, this should be easy to do.

Here are some things that I am going to add over the weekend:

• Ability to have a small icon composited on the main task icon. Think Epiphany settinging the current favicon onto its task icon.
• Ability to add menu items over dbus, and listen to their signals if clicked by the user. For instance, menu item for evolution to add a contact, Totem to pause a movie etc.
• Predefined 'types' of apps, with special buttons, i.e. a MEDIA_TYPE that shows buttons for reverse, play/pause, and forward.
• Some more styles to display the progress 'bar'.
• Option to attach a larger pixbuf to the 'tile' which shows on hover. So, Rhythmbox can attach a 400x400px sized album art, which would show with the window title.

Making Your Own
If you want to write a plugin for your favourite app, heres some info that you'll need, the code is in Python, but should be easy to adopt for other languages.

bus = dbus.SessionBus()
obj = bus.get_object("com.google.code.Awn", "/com/google/code/Awn")
awn = dbus.Interface(obj, "com.google.code.Awn")

Gets you the basic awn object.

There are two main ways to get at your task,

1. By the name of the application (string). This works best for single-instance applications.
2. By the xid (long), which is best for multi-instance apps , as it will only effect the icon for that window. One way to get the xid is by calling GDK_WINDOW_XID(window->window).
3. I am adding support for using the pid to reference your application.
   

Setting Icons
To set the icon for a task, you need to call either SetTaskIconByName or SetTaskIconByXid. In python, it would be :

awn.SetTaskIconByName ("rhythmbox", "/tmp/rhythmbox-album-art.png")

or

awn.SetTaskIconByXid (long(xid), "/tmp/rhythmbox-album-art.png")

Yes, the second argument has to be a /local/path/to/the/image/file. Using /tmp is the best idea, as it will get wiped when you restart.
You have to call awn.SetTaskIconByName/Xid every time you want to update, even you are using the same file name (recommended as to avoid unneccessary junk in /tmp).
If you need to unset the icon, use :

awn.UnsetTaskIconByName ("rhythmbox")

or

awn.UnsetTaskIconByXid (xid)

The name may not always match, I am working on this, so be patient if your fav app does not work :).

Setting Information
Setting information is easy:
awn.SetInfoByName ("evolution", "23")

or

awn.SetInfoByXid (xid, "23")

Unset using:
awn.UnsetInfoByName ("evolution")

or

awn.UnsetInfoByXid (xid)

Setting Progress
This is very easy:
awn.SetProgressByName ("firefox", 60)

or

awn.SetProgressByXid (xid, 60)

There is no 'unset' function, just set the progress to 100 to clear the icon of the progress meter.


If you need any help, or need better API, just drop me a line. Also, we have a forum, thanks to Mike Jones (searayman), so if you do make anything based on the DBus backend, post it there so we can all have a look! I'll probably include some plugins with the main tarball, so let me know if you make something.

*Update* The forum seems to be down at the moment, so I recommend using the wiki to upload your creations. Just add a page under the 'DBus Plugins' page, you can also attach files to the pages you create. I have added the Rhythmbox plugin as an example.

*Update 2* Just to annoy me, the forum is actually back up again. So its up to you where you want to post your plugins, forum or wiki, whichever suits you best.

And Finally
I am going to do mass amounts of bug fixing over the next few days, and therefore expect svn to be in a bit of a flux as I sort some things out.