F-Spot 0.4.4 & First GSoC work

Great news from F-Spot land!

F-Spot 0.4.4 released
First of all, the new F-Spot 0.4.4 is just released (credits go out to Stephane Delcroix, who should really start blogging more).

From the release notes:

About a month after 0.4.3.1, we’ve released F-Spot 0.4.4. It features
some new blinky features, a better gnome and gnome2.22 integration,
updated translations and tons of bugfixes.

Major changes since 0.4.3.1:
- theme switcher
- reduced startup time
- migration to gio started
- sort tag by popularity
- rating with hotkeys
…and more

And, as this release is a pre-Soc one, more fun stuffs are coming.

More info here, downloads also on the website. This immediately marks the point where I can start pushing my GSoC code into trunk. So without further ado:

Google Summer of Code work started
One of the major problems F-Spot currently has is the space-wasting sidebar:

Old sidebar (1)

As you can see, it shows some information and a tag tree to search images. Not all that bad actually. Now when you switch to an image, you get the following:

Old sidebar (2)

The tag tree is quite useless in this view (except for tagging, if you don’t use the awesome tag-to-type ‘t’ key). On the bottom of the screen, there’s a tiny row of editing tools. My Summer of Code work aims to improve the F-Spot experience, in part by moving these hard to find tools to the sidebar, where they will be much easier to use (and take up less space).

I have just landed the first bits of code, based on an old bitrotten patch, which makes the sidebar switchable. Currently there are three panes, looking like this:

New sidebar

This code still has a lot of issues though. For instance, the information box on the bottom left is gone. It’ll be back, soon. Slowly the summer has begun, with plenty of cool stuff coming up. Stay Tuned!

May 28, 2008 23:42 #summerofcode #gnome #f-spot

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