Sebastian Pölsterl's blog

Yesterday, I released Deskbar-Applet 2.21.5.
I didn't post anything new about Deskbar-Applet for quite a while. This post is intended to inform you about the most notable new features of the 2.21 series. But first of all get the latest version from http://download.gnome.org/sources/deskbar-applet/2.21/.

The GNOME 2.20.2 release is only two weeks away and still two bugs exist in Deskbar that I really want to fix before the release.

• Bug #471672: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'get_actions'
• Bug #475351: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'startswith' in history module

The first one has currently 147 duplicates and the second one 37. This makes them #1 and #2 of Deskbar-Applet's Most Frequently Reported Open Bugs. The symptom is the same for both: Somehow, I can't explain how, a NoneType is getting where usually only Match classes get. I couldn't find the problem when reading the code. Of course, I could check if the match is None or not, but I'm interested where this None comes from. In my opinion, None should not get there, but actually it does.

What's even worse, I wasn't able to reproduce one of the bugs above what makes debugging and hopefully fixing very hard. Therefore, I'm eagerly searching for people who can reproduce one of the bugs and help me with debugging. If you encountered one of the bugs please join #deskbar on irc.gimp.net and help me getting rid of this bugs. Any help is highly appreciated.

I released Deskbar-Applet 2.20.1 which contains some serious bugfixes, have a look at the ChangeLog. In addition, I updated the guide Writing new-style modules for Deskbar-Applet, as well.

I updated my module for rememberthemilk.com. It supports now the following features:

• search your incompleted tasks (name and tags)
• view a task in your browser
• mark a task as complete
• postpone a task
• move priority of a task up or down
• delete a task
• (new) move task to other list
• (new) add new task to a list

I came across a piece of news talking about KDE's Raptor. I didn't test it, but what I can tell from the screenshots and the more technical paper, Raptor looks really really promising. It's a mix of  a menu, Deskbar and Quicksilver.

Just discovered that ars technica features an extensive review of GNOME 2.20 including a review of Deskbar.

I'm proud to announce the first stable release in the GNOME 2.20 release cycle.

It's a very special release for me, because it includes all of my work done during this year's Google Summer of Code. The most notable features are:

• New GUI that replaces the old Button and Entry UI
• New modules/handlers API offering the possibility to add more than one action to a match. Matches with more than one action have a '>' on the right. Activating it will display the list of actions.
• Complete refactoring of the code
• Polished preferences dialog

Be aware that old handlers won't work with this version of Deskbar-Applet anymore. If you want to write modules for Deskbar-Applet 2.20 check out Writing new-style modules for Deskbar-Applet.

Thanks to everyone that helped during the 2.20 release cycle on constantly improving Deskbar-Applet.

I didn't stop working on new modules for Deskbar-Applet. Today, I bring you two new modules.

First, the Wikipedia Suggest module that works just like the Google Suggest module, but with Wikipedia. You type in something and the module will suggest Wikipedia articles for you. You can change the language you want to use when you go to preferences select Wikipedia Suggest and click the "More..." button.

Second, I wrote a module for rememberthemilk.com. It doesn't support all of RTM's features, but I think it's a good start. You can

• search your incompleted tasks (name and tags)
• view a task in your browser
• mark a task as complete
• postpone a task
• move priority of a task up or down
• delete a task

To use the module you have to allow the module to access your RTM account. Therefore, open Deskbar's preferences select the module and click the "More..." button. You will now see a text that explains the next steps to you. If you're finished with that you're ready to search your RTM account.

After spending the last three months on refactoring Deskbar I found some time to update my modules to the new API.

I had to remove the dict.leo.org module, because of Copyright restrictions. Sorry.

Secondly, I updated the ekiga module as well. If your query starts with 'sip:' you will see a match that, when activated, will call the address you entered with ekiga.

Finally, I wrote a new module. It makes use of Google Suggest and just like the live search feature in Firefox the module will contact Google to suggest search terms to you. It requires the simplejson Python module. To install this module you have to put google.png in /usr/share/deskbar-applet/art.

To install a module just extract the archive and put the Python file in the ~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/modules-2.20-compatible directory.

Regardless the end of GSoC 2007 I continued my work on Deskbar-Applet.

Today, version 2.19.91 has been released. It features numerous bug fixes. Including fixes that make navigation behave similar to Deskbar < 2.19. In addition, you can now click on the '>' on the right of matches with more than one action to switch to the list of actions. This replaces that you have to press Ctrl when clicking on a match to switch to the list of actions. To get back to the list of matches you can now click the new “Back to Matches” button. Also notable is that the GUI will be displayed in the center of the screen at all time.
If you want to write your own module you can make use of the new ActionFactory that returns a list of actions depending on a file's MIME-type. Check out Writing new-style modules for Deskbar-Applet.
All in all, I think this release should make using Deskbar-Applet a little bit more comfortable.

You can download it at http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/deskbar-applet/2.19/

Update:
According to bugzilla many people have problems like in #470842 or #470850. This is caused when restoring items from history. Some classes changed since the last version and can't be restored. Just delete your history file (~/.gnome2/deskbar-applet/history_new.pickle) and you should be fine again.