The Liferea trunk has got another update. Jeff Fortin created a nice set of application icons based on existing Tango icons. The old icon was a bit fuzzy and the SVG was lost.
This update also includes that the application icons are now installed into the correct place (hicolor) to allow icon themes to include a custom Liferea icon.

Liferea start dialog
Liferea window in compiz windowlist

Christmas this year meant productivity time for me.

• Digged into WebKit. WebKit is indeed a really nice toolkit to render HTML. I’ve used webkit-gtk, the GTK bindings for webkit. The result is a patch for Liferea, which allows to render Newsfeeds using WebKit. This patch is still not finished but most features are working. I’m still undecided weither I should allow inline browsing for WebKit. It is provided by the GtkHtml plugin of Liferea, but I would basically create yet another browser embeded into Liferea. It would be just a few buttons and a few signals to connect but I still prefer to open newsfeed links in a standalone browser.

Also I’ve played around with Epiphany’s WebKit backend.

• Finished the proposal for Zend_Service_SecondLife, which is based on internal code I’ve created for Neu.de. But not just the proposal, even a fully working prototype done with good code coverage which is ready for you to play with. Thanks to Darby Felton for being my nurse at Zend.
• Installed Firefox 3.0 beta2, got a lot of extensions to work and now use it now as my everyday browser.
• Did a lot of work for the Next Best Thing. More to come.

Update: The patch for Liferea is now included in the subversion tree. I’m still working on WebKit for Liferea to complete the missing features.

Jakub Steiner proposed to use a darkish theme as the GNOME default. This is a really intersting idea and from a QA point of view it sound pretty sensible. The major problem with GTK is, that only known widgets are styled by themes. So hacky custom widgets are not easily themeable. Aside from that I have some concerns, wheither a dark theme would be associated with hacker desktop, the exact opposite of GNOME’s target.
Nevertheless I will try Darkilouche and gm-looks for a while now. I always disliked dark themes, don’t know exactly why but it is time to try again.

GNOME desktop with gm-looks theme
GNOME desktop with Darkilouche theme

From my perspective, Zimbra integration for Evolution is pretty interesting. We decided months ago to use Zimbra as our internal groupware solution at Neu.de/Media Ventures but I could not get used to Zimbra. Now this time is over. The only problem remains: where can I find the Subversion tree?

It is short after 6’o clock and it is time to provide you a first impression of my latest work. Since a few months I’ve been using Banshee to play my music. Due to some annoying glitches in Banshee (no proper gamin-integration, scrobbling is unreliable) I switched back to Rhythmbox. But I’ve missed one feature very badly: the recommendations plugin of Banshee provides you neat extra informations related to the artist you are currently listening to. But there was a way out: Rhythmbox provides simple Python bindings and so I’ve wrote my own plugin, which does the recommendations-thing for Rhythmbox. It is currently in a very early stage but works for me™. It is not time to create the 0.0.1-tarball, but it would be really cool if a few of you can test it. Just check out https://svn.usrportage.de/lastrhythm/trunk/ and copy the complete trunk-folder to /usr/lib/rhythmbox/plugins/ and restart your Rhythmbox. It would be really helpful if you start Rhythmbox with rhythmbox -D lastrhythm to provide me a sensible output in case of crashes.

My plugin utilizes the fantastic PyScrobbler-code to access to Audiscrobbler-API. It uses the named arguments feature in Python pretty well to fire audioscrobbler-queries and is really handy to use.

Thanks to Sven Herzberg for helping me with some weird GTK-widget issues.

Hint:
If you are using Debian or Ubuntu please install python-elementtree to make things work.

A few days ago, SpreadGNOME has been launched. While it is a good idea to split developer-pages and marketing-pages, as like Mozilla does it with mozilla.org and SpreadFirefox, pages like SpreadGNOME should have the appeal of a marketing-page. There should be funky screenshots, big headings, concise texts – the page should give the visitor the impression of cool people, writing sexy software which is much better than the thing he currently uses. Just ask yourself: is this the impression you get when you visit SpreadGNOME?

Update

There is a new design but this does not look like a »The most important thing you miss in your life is using GNOME«-page, sorry. Putting links to a tech-orientated news-portal, a wiki-page for developers and gnome.org is not that imaginative.

As they are calling for suggestions, they could have them:

• Create some really good-looking images for example similar to central ones, which are displayed on gnome.org
• Make nice screenshots of good-looking GNOME-applications. Focus on usability (yes, show how smart the configuration dialog for epiphany is), localization (GNOME in Arabian, RTL, LTR), features (show integration of Evolution and the calendar-applet for example), helpful applications (tomboy, deskbar-applet)
• Transport the spirit of GNOME
• Make sure, you are achieving your visitors. It is not a page for techies, it is a page for users. They should have the feeling of »the most important thing I miss in my life is using GNOME«
Don’t launch until this points are fixed and hurry up to make your blamage forgotten

With GNOME 2.14 Avahi, the implementation of the Zeroconf-specification from Freedesktop, is shipped with. It brings the convenient feature to autodetect services. As you can see on the screenshot, it detects a lot of services and provides the possibility to use them on »one-click«. This Zeroconf-technology is looking back to a confusing history: there are two implementations before avahi: howl and mDNS, which both have licensing issues. So the Freedesktop-project brings us a good step forward and it works as easy as you can’t imagine. Licensing issues prevents Ubuntu from integrating howl or mDNS, but let us hope, they will integrate it now.

Gentoo-magic:

Build required packages:
Set the USE-flags »avahi«, »bookmarks«, »dbus« and »python« and emerge net-dns/avahi. Now emerge x11-misc/service-discovery-applet. After all, rebuild affected packages to reflect the USE-flag change (emerge -DuN world) and to guarantee full support for avahi.

Start required services on boot
Add avahi:

# rc-update add avahi-daemon default
	

		
rc-update add avahi-dnsconfd default

Start required services

# /etc/init.d/avahi-daemon start
# /etc/init.d/avahi-dnsconfd start

To be complete, just add the new panel-applet to your panel and employ the new possibilities.

Peter Johanson received CVS commit access for the Muine Music Player, the famous »no I’m not just another iTunes clone«-player. I hope Peter will bring some new dynamic to the Muine-project and please remember my interface ideas I’d suggested via the list.

Just now found in my inbox: the BBC R&D and Fluendo are working on a new high-quality video codec called Dirac.

To win the verbal pissing contest (german alias: »Schwanzvergleich«), just a nice screenshot with the cairo-based »Clearlooks 2«–Theme and Tango-Icons

As you can read on gaim.sf.net, Gaim 2.0 beta 1 has been released. I’ve compiled it under Ubuntu Dapper, which is not as magic as you may think.

# apt-get build-dep gaim

After that, remove the NSS-library, because otherwise compiling may fail.

# ./configure

# make

# make install

… will do the rest of the show.
One sad detail: including gaim-vv, which brings VoIP-functionality into Gaim, didn’t make it into this release.

Heute ist »Tag der Lars’schen Wahrheiten«. Sätze die mit »was ich schon immer sage …« beginnen und in diesem Falle enden mit »Linus Torvalds hat einen unübersehbaren Schatten«.
Mehr dazu gibt‘s bei Bernd, der sich gerne in den selbigen stellt und die entsprechenden Hintergrundinformationen bei Golem.

Ich sag’s doch schon immer, beides wird sich durchsetzen. Was zuerst passiert kann ich nicht sagen aber das dem nu2m-Designer GIMP gefällt ist ja schonmal ein Anfang …

As mentioned before, from now on, I’m using Skype. Skype is just a fallback-solution, because there isn’t a real open solution with an open protocoll and free software. But this won’t take too long, ‘cause on friday the Gaim-project is going to release version 2.0. It ships support for Google Talk and – not important for myself – support for MSN video and such stuff. So, if all is working fine, at the end of the week I will be able to use a better solution.