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2007

Innovate! Innovate!

(Said in a Dalek voice:)

Innovate! Innovate! Innovate! Innovate!

GUADEC, the annual GNOME user and developer conference, is in full swing in England right now. One of my favorite times of the year as a GNOME user, all the GNOME developers get together and blog about all the cool stuff they’re working on, or want to be working on.

I continue to be personally excited about Havoc’s vision for enabling an online desktop. This isn’t the first time he’s discussed this, or I’ve blogged about. First, go read the keynote presentation from GUADEC. I strongly agree with this vision of the future, and get excited just thinking about it.

Havoc’s blog links to a new wiki page for the Online Desktop. Right now, it’s one simple page covering the philosophy, and hosting the presentation and screencast mockups. (This is a small thing, but what I like about this wiki page is that it’s GNOME branded. This isn’t a Red Hat thing – this is a thing that all GNOME users and developers should give some thought to, tying back to the GNOME 3.0 / Project Topaz discussions).

Havoc’s expounds on the keynote in his blog. He shares his high level thoughts around the privacy issue, data hosting, and proprietary nature of some of the web services users would want to use. Well worth a read.

I’m enjoying the other GUADEC updates via Planet GNOME, and I thought the Multi-user Desktop presentation was well worth the read.

I need to continue to be more active in GNOME, and one of these years attend GUADEC.

Epiphany and me

A few months ago, I tried out Epiphany for 60 days after a particularily nasty Firefox crash caused me to lose a lot of content I was working on in a wiki page. At the end of the 60 days, I was pretty happy with Epiphany, and impressed with the developers in how they integrated Epiphany in to the GNOME desktop.

However, a few things had me coming back to Firefox:

  1. I have to use WindowsXP at work, and I use Firefox there. I love the Google Sync extension for sharing my history, cookies and bookmarks between my work computer and my two home computers.
  2. Extensions: I love the Gmail Manger and del.icio.us extensions. By far, the most useful two extensions I”ve come across.
  3. Epiphany’s default behavior for opening a new tab drives me crazy, as it opens Google, and the cursor sits in the Google search box instead of the URL field to type a new webpage address in to.
  4. And this is very minor, but Mugshot was opening in Firefox by default.
  5. Epiphany would always open in a new window, not a new tab.

After I switched back to Firefox a few weeks ago, it was just eating up too much memory and CPU cycles. Firefox then began pausing while using it when the CPU / memory use would spike, which drove me crazy, so I went back to Epiphany’s waiting arms one more time.

Since I have switched back, I have also invested some time in customizing Epiphany:

  • Changing the default home page to blank fixes the focus issue I had on the URI line, since Google is no longer the home page, it doesn’t default to the Google search box. This plugin does a similar thing as well.
  • Based on the screenshot below, you can see I’ve added an extra toolbar. Within that toolbar, I’ve added the “Post to del.icio.us” link since the Epilicious plugin is currently broken, which you can get from the del.icio.us home page. I’ve also added 3 search boxes:
  • Google: Add a new bookmark when you’re at Google.com, and then add %s to the end so it looks like this: http://www.google.com/%s Then View Bookmarks, and drag that bookmark to your toolbar.
  • JIRA: Search the Foresight issue / bug tracker from your toolbar: http://issues.foresightlinux.org/secure/Dashboard.jspa/%s (I may have a typo, I have issues with this one).

  • Search rBuilder / Foresight to see if a certain package is maintained on rBuilder: http://www.rpath.org/rbuilder/search?type=Packages;search=%s” Great for when folks stop by in IRC looking for a package, and you can tell them to use Conary to install if it’s there.

  • Make sure you go to System > Preferences > Preferred Applications and have Epiphany chosen as your default web browser, and then click on the radio button for “Open link in new tab”. If you have Epiphany, and click on a Mugshot link for example, it will open in Epiphany. Unfortunately, I haven’t found an extension yet to have links in your web browser always open in a tab, ala Tabbrowser Preferences for Firefox.

One ongoing complaint, is the dialog box to remember passwords doesn’t work if I type “R” – I can only use the mouse, even when the dialog box has focus.

The last complaint I have is that the Epilicious and Gmail Notifier plugins are currently broken. I’m a del.icio.us and Gmail junkie, and those are almost enough for me to go back to Firefox, but I’ll manage manually.

If you haven’t tried out Epipany, take the challenge. Give up your other browser for 30 days, and with a few exceptions, Epiphany as just as good any other browser out there, and it integrates with your GNOME experience that much better. I’m dedicated to using Epiphany, and here is my obligatory screenshot (click through to Flickr to see larger sizes):

epiphany

More AWN Eye Candy

Neil Patel upated his blog with news that Avant Window Navigator, everyone’s favorite dock-like menu bar for GNOME, now had reflections enabled (and some bug fixes) in the latest subversion thanks to some contributors.

Pscott was kind enough to package it within minutes of being pinged in IRC, a simple conary update avant-window-navigator and voila, new AWN. (See, don’t you wish you were running Foresight right now?)

Here is a picture of my dock taken just minutes ago with the new AWN from subversion:

awn-dock-715-3

Changing AWN to use reflections and have the icons sit on top of the bar does require two changes in Gconf, it’s not in the AWN preferences yet. This Youtube click shows you how, or just do this:

  1. Open Gconf (Applicatons > System Tools > Configuration Editor)

  2. Click on Apps > Avant-Window-Navigator > Bar

  3. Change the Bar_angle value to 30

  4. Change the Icon_offset value to 10

  5. Close Gconf

  6. Restart Avant-Window-Navigator (Right click on it (not on an icon!) and click Close. Hit ALT-F2 to run it, and type avant-window-naviagor to start it. Voila!

Thanks again to the fine developers, and to Pscott for packaging it so quickly. It’s the little things that keep me happy, like eye candy.

_Update: Thanks to Cornelius in the comments, these settings make the reflection much more apparent:

_

bar_angle: 45

icon_offset: 18

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