Desktop notification
Really, I don't get this. The GNOME guys started the libnotify integration (once again?), which lead to controversial discussion.
Continue readingIcon theme cache
Edscott, how about using the icon-theme.cache generated by gtk-update-icon-cache instead? There are several advantages: First - and foremost - the cache is shared by all Gtk+ apps and therefore it's likely that most parts of the cache are already loaded. Second, both the image data and meta-data is contained within the icon cache, and thereby safes you a lot of disk I/O in the common case. And last but not least, there's already an implementation of the icon cache, namely GtkIconTheme.
Thunar Firefox-like location bar
I decided to upgrade the currently available libexo debian package to revision 85, so Ubuntu/Debian users do not need to compile libexo themselves in order to run the Thunar mockups or the currently available snapshots. The API shouldn't break during the next weeks, so you're mostly safe to upgrade.
Continue readingQt4
So Trolltech finally released Qt4 today, and their servers are nearly unreachable all day. We'll most probably stay with Qt3 for a long time tho, as it would be too costly to upgrade to Qt4. Even trivial programs take a lot of time to migrate, and we have way too much non-trivial, partly plattform-dependent code. Nevertheless we checked the new Qt4 today. What makes me wonder is that in all the announcements and relnotes, there's not much mention of the new accessibility support of Qt4, which is IMHO the most important addition to Qt (besides the model/view separation).
Continue readingTerminal day
Finally came around to fix some long standing issues for Terminal. While profiling stuff I found out that VTE uses around 24M data memory to manage 13 VteTerminal widgets, which is really a lot of memory.
Continue readingAnd then there was trash...
The ThunarFile and ThunarFolder interfaces are now completely independent of the specific implementation. This makes it possible to support various different file systems with Thunar. As a first candidate, I implemented a first draft for the Trash vfolder today, which means Thunar is now able to display the contents of the trash cans currently connected to your system - well, in theory it is, but the trash manager doesn't handle foreign trash cans currently, but it will soon. :-)
Hierarchical Spatial
According to murrac, patches have been applied to Nautilus CVS to implement a tree view on a spatial view similar to what is possible with Aqua/Classic Finder. Judging from the screenshot this looks very similar to what xffm (and xftree in the Xfce3 days) did and still does if started with xffm. Sure the UI looks cleaner than the default xffm UI, but at the core its the same concept. So, if that's what is needed to stop people complaining about the spatial Nautilus, why didn't they use xffm instead (probably even sending some patches to edscott to polish the default UI)?
Signals
One thing missing from GObject and esp. the signal system is that there's no way to control the order in which signal handlers will be fired except the after flag, which isn't very powerful either. Sure, 99.99% of all applications will never need to be able to have fine-grained control about the signal invocation order, but then there's always atleast one application, that needs this feature in order to avoid other weird work-arounds.