Tuesday, October 30, 2007

No more glchess.sourceforge.net

Well I finally got around to it and have removes glchess.sourceforge.net and the glChess launchpad account. They were very neglected and no longer appropriate with the work in Gnome. The sourceforge page now points to live.gnome.

That is all; move along.

Is Gnome for the 80%?

I work with Engineers with most of us running Ubuntu for day to day work. I however seem to be the only vocal supporter of Gnome. The loudest bunch of GUI users seem to be the KDE (Kubuntu) camp with the general complaint being "it's too simple/dumbed down" (also heard outside of work). My complaint with KDE is "it's too complex". :) The question is:

Is Gnome for the 80% of users like subversion?

I think that is the direction Gnome has been going in for some time and I think this is the direction Gnome should be going. In saying that I don't think Gnome leaves a power user like me high and dry. I like how Gnome keeps my day to day problems simple and for power tasks I stay in Gnome Terminal and use the odd app like Firefox, Gedit, Gimp, Inkscape, Glade and Meld.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Moving gcalctool UI to Glade

The another night the Gnome Calculator (another "core" open-source project without a website) was annoying me in how it has a separate memory register window. I'm a big fan of reducing the number of floating dialogs (unless there is a good reason to have them) so I made a patch to move this window inside the main window (Bug 485398). I blind tested this on Henry and he agreed it was better. Unfortunately it doesn't work when the numbers in the registers are huge (can't think of a good UI workaround) so it hasn't been accepted.

However I was foolishly tempted to convert the ~3500 line gtk.c into using Glade (Bug 485919). Which has been taking up all my glChess/GGZ development time but is nearly finished. But I think it's a useful addition for the future of gcalctool.