There are a number of lively discussions currently going on in desktop-devel with regard to new module proposals [1]. This reminded me of a few projects I used to follow that I have not heard from in a while. Hoping not to offend any of the developers I therefore ask,
What ever happened to?
- Gnome Formatter
A HAL pretty formatting utility, so I may finally easily format my USB keys. Description here, and here
- GSmartMix + PulseAudio + LibSydney
A dream bunch of projects providing policy for sound devices. GMartMix lives between gstreamer and pulseaudio (i hope…) to allow applications to mute, pause, and have per application volume control, although the latter may be the domain of Pulseaudio. LibSydney said to replace esd in GNOME (finally, down with cruft).
- Mathusalem: Long running task manager
This SOC2006 project built sufficient buzz that KDE has now acquired an equivalent in KDE4. With Nautilus currently being broken to integrate the great new gvfs work, perhaps this would be a good time to play - New gnome-panel bling
Ohhh shiny. Im happy to see this come up on ddl, users like shiny things. Some more gnome-panel ideas here. - Libslab, Tiles and the New UI Metaphor, including Gnome Main Menu.
- Gnome-control-center single window mode.
I know it met with resistance when it was introduced but I quite liked it!
- GtkApplication and GtkUnique
Perhaps GtkApplication is a smart place to put the window DND stuff (now that nautilus supports XDS) - New GNOME Session Code
TOPAZ type infrastructure which may allow saving tasks to a file, or even a project or task oriented desktop. - Metacity Compositor
Kwin is shipping with a compositor, as is the xfce window manager. It would be a shame to have nothing comparable (yes I am aware of Compiz, and sometimes it hurts to use)
Anyway, its great to see the action on ddl, and the excitement surrounding GNOME again. I look forward to the next release. I will be releasing a Conduit 0.3.9 (the RC before 0.4.0) this weekend, and here is a hint about my next blog post: Conduit as a blessed GNOME dependancy, how can we integrate Sync into the desktop?
[1] I am also hoping that tracker and/or xesam gets proposed this cycle.
… or libnotify, which is featured in “almost” every freaking screenshot of release notes of GNOME and used by a huge amount of applications but still is not a part of GNOME …
Indeed I was developing GNOME Media Formatter, but stopped as soon as Gnome Formatter was proposed. I really hope that Gnome Formatter will be resumed and included in 2.22.
PulseAudio has recently been pushed into Fedora 8. Ubuntu and OpenSUSE will very likely do the same move shortly.
As for the tiles, I’ve been working on them as part of gtkmm-utils (http://live.gnome.org/gtkmm_utils). If you’re perhaps interested to see them, check out the current tree from git://git.sv.gnu.org/gtkmm-utils.git .
“how can we integrate Sync into the desktop?”
I hope answers include:
“use it to keep a copy of your key chain on your thumb drive”
“sync the contents of my thumb-drive automatically when I connect it.”
I’m the author of Gnome Formatter - I handed it off to ebassi after completing the major part of it (albeit in very shaky beta-ish form). All that was/is left to do is legacy floppy support, encryption (not so hard, just call out LUKS), and fixing up some UI update things.
Unfortunately, I never heard anything after I gave it to ebassi, and I recently started a new job and moved across the country (and in the interim my computer was destroyed), so I lost some time there.
If anyone is interested, the latest source code is at
svn co svn://paulbetts.org/gformat
You can (I do) use PulseAudio to replace esd without help from anything else. It has its own esd compatibility layer and binary, and can do per-application volume control on its own too.
@Rob: USBSink ( http://usbsink.sourceforge.net ) has been covering the second use case that you mentioned for quite a while.
[john: Conduit has been able to do this for a while also]
Just run gnome-control-center for the gnome control center
It’s just not the default in the menu.
the gnome formatter will be integrated into gnome-utils 2.21 - it’s a matter of importing it into gnome-utils SVN repository. it was too late to get it into 2.19/2.20, so it had to be postponed.
I need to resume working on GtkApplication, but it has been preempted by a lot of stuff, aside from ${DAY_JOB}. libunique is working fine, and some applications are already using it; it needs a couple more features and a 1.0 release. its future, though, it’s bound to the toolkit and how to integrate it into GTK - that is a whole new beast.
as for the session management code: it’s already in libegg and just needs to be merged inside GTK .
\
I am a very bad person!! A recruiter trying to use your site to find a contractor to update Nautilus for a bank in Cleveland, OH.
Alan Cuthbert
440-614-5150 x14