News
Étoilé: What's going on? (August/September/October 2006)
Posted on 27 November 2006 by
Well... I didn't write anything about the ongoing development in a long time, so I guess I should summarize a bit :-) I will first talk about what happened in august to october, and leave november for another post.
August 2006
August was a fairly calm month, mostly working on existing software. Quentin and Günther worked on UnitTests (a graphical tool to run .. unit tests, yes !), fixing some bugs, reimporting the gorm (ui) file, etc. Quentin also worked on setup.sh, a script that automatically setup properly your environment to run étoilé, and he also worked on various makefiles tricks (better dependencies support, etc). WorkspaceSwitcher (a plugin for the menu system, to change workspaces) and Grr (the RSS reader) are now included in the build process by default. Günther continued to work on DictionaryReader, adding local dictionary support (jargon file included). Finally, Yen-Ju updated the Io bridge and Azalea to their last versions.
September 2006
September was much more active...
System
Quentin worked on the MenuServer, integrating it more tightly with other parts of étoilé by adding hardware and LookAndBehavior entries. It's also more Azalea friendly, by using XWindowServerKit by default and thus eliminating window positions issues. He also improved the build process, reworking internal dependencies, makefiles system, etc.
Yen-Ju created AZDock (see this post below for some screenshots), a simple dock application for Étoilé.
Frameworks
Yen-Ju added some new functions to XWindowServerKit to get properties and commands. He also updated Oniguruma (the regular expressions library) to version 4.4.2. OgreKit was also updated (OgreKit is a regular expressions library for Objective-C which uses Oniguruma), and he added an example on how to use it. Talking about examples, he also added a LuceneKit example. Finishing with the frameworks, he imported into Étoilé PopplerKit, an Objective-C framework written by Stefan Kleine Stegemann interfacing with Poppler, the pdf library, and AddressesKit, a framework implementing the Cocoa AddressBook framework written by Björn Giesler. Both aren't really updated anymore, so having them in étoilé simplify getting them and working on them.
Applications
Yen-Ju updated Azalea to the 3-3-release version of openbox. He also imported on the repository Vindaloo, a pdf viewer using PopplerKit (also written by Stefan Kleine Stegemann), and AddressesManager, an addressbook manager written by Björn Giesler. Finally, he wrote and imported TypeWriter, a basic rtf editor (using OgreKit for the find panel though).
Quentin imported Calc in the repository, a simple calculator written using the Io bridge by Baptiste Heyman (see this post below).
October 2006
October was an even more active month :-)
System
Quentin worked on the build process -- including Io by default, as well as various frameworks (the EtoileExtensionsKit framework beeing splitted into EtoileFoundation, EtoileUI and DistributedView). He also worked on System (etoile_system), bringing a major update introducing basic session management and better process handling (based on code written by Saso Kiselkov). MenuServer was thus updated to enable the log out feature :-) (finally!)
Frameworks
Yen-Ju worked on many, many things this month.. First, on frameworks: he improved XWindowServerKit (a framework encapsulating x window commands), RSSKit (the RSS framework used by Grr), with fetching content in background. He also wrote CollectionKit, a framework providing common storage facility for records with properties, such as contact information, playlist, bookmark.. and used it to provide an implementation of BookmarkKit (whose job is.. yes, you guessed it!). He also added a BookmarkKitExample. Armed with these toolkits, he started working on a new version of Grr, using BookmarkKit and CollectionKit, with searching implemented, etc.
Not satisfied with such low amount of work, he then updated the Io bridge to the current version, as well as Calc. He then worked on a couple Azalea bug fixes and on AZDock (keeping track of recent applications, etc).
Günther worked on RSSKit, adding code to store and load articles as property lists, and a beginning of podcasting support. He also relicensed it to LGPL.
Applications
Günther fixed some bug in DictionaryReader and also improved the speed.
Finally, as Yen-Ju had a few minutes left, he started writing Babbler, a media player based on GStreamer, and finally wrote Mantella, an experimental browser based on GtkMozEmbed -- yes, a GNUstep web browser using mozilla ! (see the post below from yen-ju).
That's all for today, I will post the summary for november in the next following days... (this time with screenshots if I can)
