awn on SWiK

Bug #130480 in Awn: "Windows cannot be focused in xfwm4 while running awn"

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 13:14:41 -0700

Compiz Fusion " Welcome

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:50:48 -0700

Avant Window Navigator in Launchpad

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 11:01:58 -0700

Bits & Pieces

Fri, 09 May 2008 16:16:08 -0700

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!

Main Page - AWN Wiki

Sun, 24 Feb 2008 03:38:25 -0800

code.google.com - avant-window-navigator

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:59:10 -0800

Operation has moved to launchpad.net

Avant Window Navigator - Launchpad

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:59:10 -0800

Avant Window Navigator in Launchpad

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 02:59:17 -0800

AWN

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 21:58:18 -0800

the dude abides

Tue, 30 Oct 2007 03:32:14 -0700

Avant Window Navigator in Launchpad

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 11:03:48 -0700

0.1 + 0.1 = ?

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 11:12:19 -0700

Well there you have it, Awn 0.2 has been released!

With over six months since the last release, you'd think we were working on something as complicated as Gnome, but I think there are enough new features to show where the time has gone ;-).

I'd like to highlight a few of the main features that have landed into trunk over the recent weeks, and others that I maybe haven't mentioned before.

Icon Effects

You can have user-selectable colours and a 3d-look bar, but the ability to choose whether your icons bounce like cartoon characters, spin like a coin, or have a spotlight cast on them has to be the best blingy feature :-D!

(you may need to click the blog title to see the video)

Awn Manager

After having to endure my simple preferences dialog (and my lack of updating it to reflect new features), a few brave souls from the forums decided to create a proper configuration dialog for Awn:

Together with wrapping all the gconf options, the ability to load/save and share your Awn theme was also included, which is a very cool feature. Themes have already started popping up in gnome-look.org!

Applets

I've been over applets before, but we've been working very hard to make sure there is a continuous look and feel across applets and the main launcher/task bar. As of now, 99% of the applets behave the same on the bar (including animations & reflections).

I'll be making a stable release of applets in the next few days, but you can get to them via launchpad if you can't wait!

Stability

In addition to new features, Awn has grown more and more stable. Many 'hacks' that were put in place in January have either been swapped for newly available APIs, or have been replaced with standard Gtk widgets (although you can't tell ;-).

Future

From now on, I hope to make more regular releases of Awn, especially as there are many more people involved now, and a lot of code is being written. Also, I may take some time off from writing code for Awn myself, as I'd really like to spend some time on Affinity and Arena, plus help out on some other projects.

Thanks

I'd just like to say a huge thanks to everyone who has been on the forums, wiki and launchpad trawling through questions/bugs etc, and all the tranlsators (43 languauges!). I'd also like to say special thanks to Jeff Fortin, Mike Jones, haytjes, Miika-Petteri Matikainen, Anthony Arobone, Ryan Rushton, Michal Hruby, Julien Lavergne, who have all picked up the slack when I couldn't work on Awn as much as I wanted to.

SVN Version Installation - Avant Window Navigator

Tue, 25 Sep 2007 09:13:07 -0700

HOWTO: functional eye-candy with Avant-Window-Navigator and Affinity - Ubuntu Forums

Sat, 15 Sep 2007 22:48:30 -0700

How'd you like me now!

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 02:13:18 -0700

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.

HOWTO: functional eye-candy with Avant-Window-Navigator and Affinity - Ubuntu Forums

Tue, 04 Sep 2007 07:31:02 -0700

Avant Window Navigator Forum - Fedora 7

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 10:20:53 -0700

Avant Window Navigator in Launchpad

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:26:15 -0700

We are sailing...

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 14:32:36 -0700

...across the shore from code.google.com to launchpad.net!

Why?

Don't get me wrong, Google Code is great, and I still use it for Affinity and other projects, but Awn is getting larger and larger, in community and developers, and this needs some proper structure. Launchpad provides that structure incredibly well, with excellent road-mapping/bug reporting/feature requests/translation infrastructure, and we hope to make the most of it!

Show me the source!

http://www.launchpad.net/awn is the new home of Awn. Over the past few days, those belonging to the awn-core team have helped me move everything over to launchpad.

Development of Awn will be in Launchpad from now on, bug reports, feature requests (blueprints) and translations should be directed there too. The Awn page in launchpad has instructions on how to download the development version.

I am working on transferring the existing bugs from code.google.com to launchpad. If you have previously opened/commentated on a bug, and would like to help me out, you can create the corresponding bug in launchpad, and just leave a comment in the original bug report that you have done so :-D.

What now?

Well, there's been a burst of activity on the Awn forum, with patches coming at me left, right and center. Consequently, Awn has gained some new developers and bug-people, and we are working towards a 0.2 release, with a ton of ideas for 0.3! I'll make an other post outlining the new devels and their contributions soon.

Also, Awn currently has an universal applet menu-system, a brand new preferences application, mac-stacks applet and many more applets in development in the forum, with updates everyday! I am currently working on a way to get everyone working in the same place, so we can have a awn-applets release along side the main Awn release, but more on that later.

I think that's it for now :-).

the dude abides: So now that we have some depth...

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:38:30 -0700

the dude abides: So now that we have some depth...

Mon, 16 Jul 2007 07:40:38 -0700

So now that we have some depth...

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:42:56 -0700

Apparently, if you don't pay attention to your projects forums for more than a week, something beautiful will happen...

Yes, that's Awn svn, in all its 3D and reflective glory :-). I'd like to say a huge thanks to haytjes & nablaa from the forums, who managed to make their patches work together to create this effect. There are also a buch of other fixes in svn, so its well worth the upgrade.

As we all like videos, here's one of the reflection in action:

I've recently got a bunch of help from people for different things regarding Awn (thank you to you all), this should see development become quicker, and bug fixes faster. It'll also mean that I can make a proper roadmap, now that I have some help in achieving it!

In other news

There's a bunch of cool stuff I need to blog about, and as soon as I get some time, I will :-). I'm off to Guadec tomorrow, so there won't be much stuff happening code wise, but I do have an Awn-related surprise for you all when I get back this weekend ;-).

Update

As pointed out, it may help if I told you how to actually get Awn looking like this :-/. You need to change two gconf keys (UI coming soon). For the perspective, navigate to /apps/avant-window-navigator/bar/bar_angle, and set it to 45. For reflection, navigate to /apps/avant-window-navigator/bar/icon_offset, and set it to 18. Restart Awn and enjoy!

the dude abides

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:42:36 -0700

Avant Window Navigator

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 22:42:35 -0700

Dbus Plugins - Avant Window Navigator

Wed, 20 Jun 2007 01:43:33 -0700

And the others thought they had caught up...

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 00:54:45 -0700

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.

Look lively boy!

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 12:16:52 -0700

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.

Awn Updates

Fri, 09 Mar 2007 12:39:21 -0800

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 pgo!

Fri, 02 Mar 2007 05:21:37 -0800

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:

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:
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.
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 :).

Updates

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 18:21:16 -0800

I've been quite busy recently, but have still managed to do some hacking, so heres some updates:

Awn

Awn svn compiles on gtk+-2.10 :).
Lots of small fixes, most should be committed tomorrow.
Working on support for notifications above the task.
Working on support for adding menu items to a tasks pop-up menu.

Also, I'd just like to point you to a whole bunch of plugins using the DBus backend on our wiki. I have also just used the Gaim plugin which on the wiki, and I have to say, its amazing. Speaking to the author, I know that he is determined to get rid of the need for the gaim-systray plugin, so expect some cool stuff!

Tracker
libtracker-gtk has now committed into tracker svn :), so if you want to include tracker support in your application, be sure to let John Stowers or myself know if there is anything you'd like to see in there to make your life easier!
I have been working on polishing up the metadata-tile & tag bar, and while I was at it, I made this:

Hopefully, if I can fix the little problems that it has, it will be in libtracker-gtk before the next release + it can be the default view when you start tracker-search-tool. Speaking of tracker-search-tool, I added support for D&D-ing emails to the desktop and nautilus. They are basically desktop files which will open evolution viewer :
Anyway, that's it for now, if everything goes to plan, expect some cool stuff tomorrow ;)!