Today I took some time to think about better values / names for the profiles provided in Simple-CCSM.  And that is what I could come up with: Five profiles, one using default setting, two using Wall and two using Cube.

Here is a table which shows the exact settings in each profile:

Any suggestions on these?

BTW. I’m on vacation next week, so I won’t be available.

First of all, the interface. Well thanks to Mirco “MacSlow” Müller, who pointed me into the right direction, the UI now looks much more Gnome like.

The zoom page (aka accessibility page) was a little bit extended. You are now also able to configure ‘mag’ (aka area zoom).

There is now also an option for enabling ‘expo’ on the effects page.

Probably one of the most wanted change should be the global screen edge widget. At least I enjoy it not needing to start CCSM and searching my way through the settings for changing a few edge key bindings. Sadly this widget might have slowed the Simple-CCSM startup a bit down.

In order to clean my TO DO list up even further, I would like to get some suggestions for the profiles Simple-CCSM should provide. What profiles would you like to have? What should be activated, what disabled? Any suggestions for their names?

You can comment here or just send me an email to marex a_t opencompositing d_o_t org.

But recently Kiba Dock has improved a lot. It’s mostly stable and looks very nice. It has all that little neat animations that makes it look more complete than AWN. It just feels and behaves a lot better. It just works smoothly.

But talk is cheap, so I’ll show you some of it’s features:

Stacks

Yes, this one is nothing new. I know. But I really like the implementation in Kiba Dock. Really handy to keep your presentation files ready, or do some kind of “files to process” folder. Try it out, I’m sure you can find various usages for it.

Starters

Yeah, standard. But still, it is implemented pretty good.

Configuration

Kiba is configurable. I mean really configurable and not like ‘tweaking 5 basic options’. That’s something I really like.

I wish I could show of some animations, but I feat screen capturing won’t work you that good here.

Many thanks to Daniel “danielb” Beßler for developing this great dock. Keep up the good work!

You can grab it via svn here:

svn co https://kibadock.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/kibadock kibadock

Since school started again, I didn’t have too much time recently. Most of that little time went into CCSM.

The first thing I put a little work in was the advanced search, which is one of the rather messy code parts of CCSM. Let me first point out the obvious visual improvements. As you can see in the screenshot below, icons were added to the plugin list and it is now more obvious which plugin are enabled and which aren’t.

It is now also possible to display all plugin settings at once, especially useful if there are only a few settings found.

Under the hood I *tried* to clean up the code and make it faster, which was only partly successful. Maybe a treeview, as Christopher Williams suggested, would be the answer.

Speaking of messy code, I also worked a bit on the MultiList settings, which now also support colors. For that purpose I had to code CellRenderer for RGBA colors first. Actually that was easier then I thought, thanks to the pyGTK reference, google and koders. The result can be seen below. Feel free to c’n'p it out of Widgets.py when you need something like this in your own application.

Anyway. Looking back, 2007 was one of the most intense years in my life. Many changes and many new experiences. But I’m confident 2008 can catch up with that.

I had some time working on Simple-CCSM during my holidays and I actually used it.

First of all the CCSM code has gone through a review and was cleaned up a lot. The code corresponding to each page is now put into its own class. The signal system is moved to the glade file, which really saves a lot of unneeded code. Some nasty bugs were also squashed such as the wrong size of desktop preview widget.

I finished my work on the Zoom page: well, ok still looking a bit empty.

There is also new an effects page. It allows you to select your favorite switcher and enable some nice plugins like scale, wobbly and blur.

You might have noticed the “Advanced” button. It launches CCSM depending on your currently selected page in the notebook. For example, clicking on it while your are configuring animations it will launch CCSM with the animation plugin settings. Quite handy if you want to give your settings a little bit extra tweaking.

Now, that I have some time, I can work on simple-ccsm again. It’s really so relaxing drinking a cup of coffee and hack a bit on simple-ccsm.

Because I don’t want to bore you too much with my personal stuff, here is what I’ve been working on lately.

First of all, the UI got some redesign. Looks a little bit more like other GNOME dialogs. Profiles are now selected with a ComboBox, the slider was just unusable with slower machines. As you can see, there is also a description field now. That should give the user a better idea of what the profile really is about.

I’m currently also working on an own page for Zoom, to configure basic settings.

The only annoying thing at the moment is the profile switching. It just acts weird. I have to take a closer look into the CCS internals to find out what causes that “weirdness”.

Alex (a friend of mine) and I arrived in Krefeld around 10:20, after searching our way through the city to the “Hochschule Niederrhein” (where Ubucon took place) we arrived at 10:40 to the keynote, followed by a talk about the Ubuntu Community at 11:00. At 13:00 I went to Sven Guckes’ talk about thin clients and terminal systems, he finsihed early so there was time to take a small lunch at the cafeteria.

I skipped the next talk and went to a talk by Christopher Denter and Mathias Baran about Ubuntu in IRC at 14:00. Thanks to the really good WLAN connection we had a little bit fun in IRC during the talk.

That talk was followed by Michael Vogt’s presentation about Ubuntu development, which was one of really interesting (and informative) talks during the convention.

And finally one of the highlights of convention: The talk about Compiz (Fusion) by Nick Bauermeister (aka forlong) at 16:00. Sometimes improvisation is just the best way to go. I really enjoyed that talk, Nick really tried to explain things to the not always technical skilled audience. I think he also did the longest talk during the submit, at least he was still talking when I left the convention at 18:00 to catch my train.

One of the other highlights might also have been the flying roboter (aka. UFO) , I could not join that presentation since it overlapped with Nick’s talk.

I will add some photos to this post, when I get them.

Here are some photo streams if you are interested.

Photos from Sven Guckes

Photos from  Richard Verwayen

First there is i18n support for Simple-CCSM. So translaters get ready and prepare your translations.

I also added a match editor to CCSM, so it’s easier to generate window matches. As always there is a screen shot for those who can’t run the latest and greatest, also called git, version.

As you might also notice, I added an accessibility tab to configure the accessibility plugins (ezoom/zoom and colorfilter). To configure colorfilter you should install the really nice filter manager from Guillaume Seguin.

It’s also now possible to completely disable animations.

As always a few screenshots: