Awn Indicator Applet Now Available

In Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid Lynx) the GNOME-Panel Indicator Applet became a major part of the User Interface. There have been many requests for a similar applet in Awn, and today I am happy to report that one is now available in the Awn-Testing PPA for Lucid and Maverick! For many users, including me, this was the only thing preventing them from removing their (relatively ugly) GNOME-Panels.

Screenshots:

Adding (or updating) the Awn-Testing PPA and installaing avant-window-navigator-trunk will include the Indicator Applet. Go to the Applets page of Awn Settings to add the applet. For full effect, also remove the applet from your GNOME-Panel (if any).

If you are building awn-extras from source, pass --with-indicator to autogen.sh after updating your branch.

Icons

The icons I'm using in the screenshots have been very popular among Awn users; they are from the Token icon set. I have organized collections of these icons for all the Awn applets and as many apps as I could find. To use them, download the archive and extract the files to ~/.icons/awn-theme/scalable - the icons should appear immediately. Download: Dark set, Light set

Lucido

In case you haven't heard already, there is a new Awn style available, as seen in my screenshots, called Lucido. It is very stylish and it's available in the Awn-Testing PPA. Add Expander applets to define where the curves should be and change the "Curviness" variable to change how curved the curves are.

Awn Rewrite Update

It's been a while since I've posted anything about Awn. Development of Awn/Awn Extras shifted to a mostly rewrite of both projects. There are tons of changes; many are summed up in malept's blog post and several posts of moonbeam's blog. I'm going to talk about four (really three) applets.

File Browser Launcher now has GIO support. If Python bindings for GIO are available (since GNOME 2.26/Ubuntu 9.04 I believe), File Browser Launcher is able to manage mountable drives like Nautilus' Places side pane does. If a drive (e.g. flash drive or mounted network place, etc.) is mounted, an eject icon will appear for that drive (as seen in the screenshot) and clicking it will eject the drive. If the place is not mounted but is mountable, clicking it will mount it and (upon success) open it in the file browser.

The applet also has drag-and-drop support, as seen in the recursive screenshot. Dragging a file (or folder) over the applet icon for (currently) 600ms makes the dialog open. (During this time a progress pie chart will appear.) The file can be dropped on any mounted place or bookmark, and it will be moved there. Upon success, the folder will open.

To-Do List received no significant changes, other than working with the rewrite and in the way progress buttons are drawn. Detach support has been removed.

SlickSwitcher is now in Awn Extras. Thanks to work in Awn core, the background and border colors of the applet's dialog can be customized properly. This theming helps with backgrounds that don't quite match the normal dialog background color. The version in Awn Extras is also slightly more RAM-efficient than previous versions. Detach support has also been removed from Slickswitcher.

Feeds Applet is a new applet to monitor Web Feeds. Enter the URLs of RSS or Atom feeds to add them to the applet. Their items are visible from the dialog, and clicking the item opens it in a web browser. You can also log in to your Google Reader account to add it as a feed. Whenever any of your Google Reader feeds is updated, it'll show in the dialog. If Google Reader is the only feed, the icon will turn blue instead of orange. Like with virtually every other applet, you can still drag and drop an icon onto the applet to use that icon instead.

There is an option (enabled by default) to automatically update every five minutes (adjustable). Feeds Applet also has an option (enabled by default) to display standard notifications when a feed is updated. With these two features, you don't need to constantly check your sites or Google Reader for updates.

Like File Browser Launcher, Feeds Applet also has drag and drop support. If you drag and drop a link to an RSS or Atom feed onto the applet icon, it will add that feed. When the dialog is open, you can drag and drop the toggle buttons of the feeds to reorder them. If you drag a feed out of the dialog, you can drop a link to its main page into another app. This may or may not work with your web browser's bookmarks or tab bar, depending on a) which browser it is, and b) how it's feeling that day. (It's sometimes inconsistent.)

Lastly, if logged in to Google Reader, when adding a feed you can search for feeds using the same system as the main Google Reader web interface. This way, you can just type in cnn instead of http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss. It also helps if you want to find multiple feeds about a specific topic, such as Linux or NASA.

There's still a lot more to be done. To-do needs a backend for all its items that's better than awn.Config. Feeds needs OPML import/export. To-do also needs import/export of its list. SlickSwitcher has several little quirks, needs to use the standard text overlay, and needs better background acquiring. To-do also needs to use the standard text overlay. SlickSwitcher and To-do might add drag-and-drop support.

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Awn-Extras Translations

There hasn't been much in Awn-Extras translations: Only 32 strings, all from mail, that weren't imported into awn-extras and wouldn't work even if they were. I uploaded a new template to Launchpad that includes 273 strings from all the applets that at least use the gettext functions. It's been approved, but (as of writing) it hasn't yet been imported. There's also a new file in libawn-extras, 'defs', that tells the prefix and the gettext directory:

>>> from awn.extras import defs
>>> defs.PREFIX
'/usr/local/'
>>> defs.GETTEXTDIR
'/usr/local/share/locale'

This way all the translations are/will be in a single place, and translating will be much easier. To-do now supports translations, and mail will be able to when the new template is imported. The template is created by using 'xgettext'. This is what I ran to get the template:

xgettext src/*/*.py src/*/*.c --keyword=_ -o po/messages.pot --from-code=utf-8

This is the necessary Python code for making an applet translatable:

import gettext
import locale
from awn.extras import defs

APP = "awn-extras-applets"
gettext.bindtextdomain(APP, defs.GETTEXTDIR)
gettext.textdomain(APP)
_ = gettext.gettext

Pass every translatable string to the '_' function. Make sure to put all the text in one long line, as in don't use multiple strings combined by '+'. If you need to use variables, use '%s', etc. This is necessary for xgettext to recognize the string.

I imagine it's mostly the same in C. Some of the applets already have the translation code. When the translations are downloaded from Launchpad, the .po files go in the po folder, the ISO codes are added to the LINGUAS file in po and the ALL_LINGUAS variable in configure.ac. I did some testing with To-do in Spanish, and it works.

Awn Extras Translations

P.S.: If you haven't tried out 0.3.2, what are you waiting for?

Update: The template has been imported!

It's Been a While

Almost two months. Very much has happened: new year, new presidency, new semester.

Awn Rewrite
The Awn rewrite has been progressing rapidly, with bugfixes and new features. Malept has written up a blog entry about it. The rewrite magic happens here.

Awn Trunk
More work has been done on mostly bugfixes and translations. Even the ages-old bug of Awn crashing when the taskmanager applet is removed was fixed. Check this branch for the changes.

Awn Extras
Awn Extras has had considerable development: Comics, Cairo Clock, Awn Terminal, PyNot, and the build system all had significant work. [Branch]

Affinity
Affinity development hasn't been very active over this time, though there's been a bit more development recently. Affinity now correctly detects Beagle if it's installed and now installs an Awn applet if Awn's installed. [Forum thread]