News
Étoilé: What's going on? (May 2006)
Posted on 28 May 2006 by
While we do not seem to write a lot of news on the blog, étoilé is far from dead: there is a lot of activity going on on the repository and the mailing list. Let's see what happened during last month...
First: the existing stuff...
Yen-Ju did a lot of work on Azalea, our X11 window manager, doing its share of fixes and improvement (like working nicely with borderless windows or compiling on OSX), and he is on top of that working on a branch using directly appkit for drawing...
Günther fixed some issues with DictionaryReader and applied a patch from Chris Vetter to add a service -- so you can now select some text in any application, go in the service menu, click on "look up in dictionary" and voila! a window will open containing the definition of what you selected. Very convenient isn't it ?
Saso improved quite a bit the MenuServer, also applying various patches from Chris Vetter and David Chisnall. The info panel now displays properly informations about the machine/os, and a nice animation was even added in the about panel.
To give you an idea of where we are, here is a screenshot showing Azalea plus the MenuServer and an application (TalkSoup, an irc client), with the Nesedah theme:
On the frameworks front, Quentin is working on the ServicesBarKit to integrate it with the MenuServer; Yen-Ju updated LuceneKit to the 391895 java version, and Günther added unit tests in RSSKit.
In addition to improving what is on the repository, new code also appeared :-)
Yen-Ju imported the first version of XWindowServerKit -- a simple framework that applications can use to "talk" with X11 in order to set things like the available space, the current desktop for a window, etc. He also imported a patched version of the io bridge and added StepTalk support -- so you can now use io to develop apps and/or as a StepTalk language... nice !
Finally... I imported the Nesedah theme on the repository, and fixed a couple of things. Quentin worked on the Documentation, specifically a technical overview of étoilé, an user experience overview, and a core object overview.
So as you see, things are moving fast (special mention to Yen-Ju !) and I will try to regularly post some news about what's going on the repository...
