If you'd like to see me ramble more about Timer Applet 2.0, you can check out my blog entry. It also contains a quick example of how to use the D-Bus API.
This is going to be the last version of Timer Applet...written in C. ;) I've been porting Timer Applet to Python on my free time, so all future work will be on the Python version. This release is just to tie up a few loose ends in the C version.
Why re-write it in Python? Mainly, I've been wanting to refactor Timer Applet for a long time, and since it would probably involve a lot of changes anyway, I decided to just re-write the whole thing in Python. It also gives me a chance to play with a new programming language. :)
Python is nice because it has such low overhead--much less typing to achieve the same results as the corresponding C code. I'm mostly happy with Python. Only thing is, I miss static typing!
If you need to contact me, please use my new email. Because of a mixture of sleepiness, changing of passwords, and my absentmindedness, I no longer have access to my previous email account. :)
Quick bug fix release to work around a bug in intltool that prevented locales from being installed.
Hi everyone,
Time for a new release! I wanted to address a couple things with this version. First, I wanted less obtrusive notification of when a timer is finished. The dialog popping up was just annoying sometimes because it would interrupt what I was currently doing. Even worse, sometimes I'd dismiss the dialog box, planning to finish what I was doing first and then go pick up my laundry later, but then I would completely forget about the laundry. So the dialog box is out. Now, the button shows a pulsing animation (based on code used for the GNOME Window List applet) when the timer is finished, so it doesn't get in the way, but is a constant reminder until you click on it. With libnotify, a notification balloon will also pop up momentarily.
Second thing I wanted to take care of was to make the code a little prettier to look at. This was my first real GTK+/GNOME application, so the code got a bit messy and didn't take advantage of any object-oriented programming with GObject. I figured out how to work with GObject classes and now things are starting to look a lot better. Not all of the code has been cleaned up yet, but I think it's off to a good start. I thought GObject would be difficult to work with, but it's actually proven to be fairly undertandable and consistent. Overall, this release was a lot of fun to work on.
I hope you enjoy the new release. As usual, let me know if there are any problems. I'll try to fix them as quickly as possible.
-Jimmy
Changes:
Minor release to fix another compiler warning from GCC 4.0.
Minor bug fix release.
New in this release:
The big 1.0 release! This release features mainly bug fixes and minor tweaks to polish up Timer Applet. Thanks to everyone who has helped with translations, packaging, bug reports, and feedback! I really do appreciate all the support, and it has made developing Timer Applet a very rewarding experience.
Now that Timer Applet has reached 1.0, releases probably won't come out as regularly as they have been because I'll be pretty busy these coming months. I will provide any needed bug fixes as promptly as I can, but actual enhancements to Timer Applet may take a while. What am I planning? Well, a feature that I've been wanting to add is to calculate a timer duration from a finishing time. This is convenient because sometimes you know when you want the timer to finish by, rather than how long you want the timer to run. Someone also requested the ability to easily tell a timer to repeat after it has finished. I'm still not sure if this is worth the trouble to implement because you can easily restart the timer manually, but if anyone has a similar need, please let me know. Anther possible feature: customizable sound. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy using Timer Applet!
New in this release:
NOTE: Due to a small change in the GConf schemas, this version of Timer Applet may forget your previous Timer Applet preferences. You'll have to re-configure your preferences for this new version. Sorry the inconvenience. This is part of some polishing for the 1.0 release.
New in this release:
The main attraction of this release is that the preferences now apply per-applet and each applet now remembers its last-used timer or preset.
NOTE: Because I renamed two files (/usr/lib/bonobo/servers/timer-applet.server to GNOME_TimerApplet.server, and /usr/share/gnome-2.0/timer-applet.xml to GNOME_TimerApplet.xml) between version 0.7 and version 0.8, the old files will still remain if you install Timer Applet 0.8 or newer without uninstalling a previous Timer Applet of version 0.7 or older. This is just a minor detail that shouldn't cause any problems, but if you want things to be a bit "neater", then you should uninstall the older version of Timer Applet before installing a new version.
New in this release:This release marks the debut of a simplified interface for the Start Timer dialog. I wanted to eliminate the extra clutter of the radio buttons and also give users the flexibility of providing a name for non-preset timers. Users can also now load a preset and then adjust the duration or name of the timer without affecting the actual preset.
In the next release, I plan to make the applet "remember" the last-used timer between sessions.
New in this release:New in this release:
Quick bug-fix release to fix a bug in which the applet would crash if the user closed the "Resume Timer" dialog by clicking on the close box.
New in this release:
This release focuses mainly on fixing bugs, filling in details, and getting translations to work correctly.
New in this release:
New in this release:
New in this release:
I'm still working on allowing multiple timer applets to run simultaneously. Although it may seem to work right now, strange things can happen in certain situations. I should have this feature ready by the next release.
This is the first release of Timer Applet!