Category Archives: Software

A quick one: Guadec, Vagalume and Moblin

I’ve got a thousand things to do these days so this is going to be a very schematic post πŸ™‚

See you in Istanbul !!

Vagalume 0.6 released

Vagalume 0.6 is here!

Among the new features introduced in Vagalume 0.6, the coolest one is probably the brand new tray icon for desktop users written by Mario, similar to the one already available for Maemo:

Vagalume tray icon

Other highlights from this version include:

  • Update the status message of your IM client. Tell everyone what you’re listening to. Currently supported: Pidgin, Gajim, Gossip and Telepathy
  • Gettext support: Vagalume has been translated into Portuguese, German, Finnish, Spanish, Galician and Italian
  • New setting to disable the love/ban confirmation dialogs
  • New D-BUS methods and a script to control Vagalume from the command line (currently only for Maemo, more news soon)
  • Osso-backup support

I would like to thank all the contributors, in particular Tim Wegener for his work in the IM status support. And of course all the translators too!

Last but not least, I’d like to remind you again that, as I said in my previous post, I’ll be at LinuxTag 2008 in Berlin with other Maemo hackers. Hope to see you there!

And now, enjoy!

P.S.: I’m moving Vagalume to Maemo extras, so one of these days it should be available there. Stay tuned!

Update: Vagalume 0.6 is now available in Maemo Extras

Vagalume in your language

We’re about to release a new version of Vagalume and this one will be the first with gettext support. So if you want to help to see Vagalume in your language feel free to send me an e-mail, download the latest vagalume.pot file and send me the translation (you can also join the vagalume-devel mailing list).

Note that there are people already working on translations, so if you want to help please have a look at the translations that we already have and ask me before starting.

I’m also glad to announce that I’ll be talking about Vagalume in a couple of conferences:

Hope to see you there! πŸ™‚

Back from Mobile Rules

Mario and me have just arrived from our trip to San Jose (California) for the Mobile Rules! awards ceremony. Unfortunately we had no luck this time and we didn’t get the award.

We had a great time nonetheless and I’d like to congratulate Nokia for having organized the event and all the other participants (namely the winners, specially the people from MyStrands who beat our Vagalume in the Multimedia category). The trip was great, we enjoyed it a lot and we met some cool people.

A thing I’m more sure about now is that Vagalume still needs lots of improvements. I’ll continue working on it very soon (but it’ll take me some days because I’m starting teaching this weekend in our Master of Free Software). So it is time to get back to work!

Oh, no, we didn't get the award!
Oh, no, we didn’t get the award!

Alea jacta est

Greetings from California!

The Mobile Rules award ceremony will begin in a few hours. Me and Mario from the Vagalume team are already here in San Jose ready to talk about our program and tell everyone how cool Maemo and Gnome are for developing software for mobile devices.

Let’s cross our fingers and see what happens!

San Jose City Hall

FOSDEM 2008 is here

FOSDEM 2008 is around the corner. Of course I’ll be there along with other igalians so I hope to see you there πŸ™‚

If you’re a Maemo user/hacker then you’ll probably be interested in this wiki page where we’re trying to coordinate a meeting.

By the way, some people have suggested me to use GTK themeable icons in Vagalume instead of the custom ones that come with v0.5. Here’s a couple of screenshots comparing both (click on the images to view them full size).

Vagalume 0.5 using GTK icons
Vagalume 0.5 using custom icons

I’ve just created a survey so you can vote which one you prefer πŸ™‚ If you don’t have a user at garage.maemo.org, just leave a comment in this post.

See you at FOSDEM !

Vagalume 0.5: back from the dead!

The last version of Vagalume was released more than a month ago. And although it was dead for some weeks because I had many other things to do, here comes Vagalume 0.5, back from the dead!

Vagalume is back from the dead

As I said before, I’ve been busy lately so the list of changes is not as big as it might be, but thanks to the help of my colleagues Mario and Felipe we have some new things. The list of changes include:

  • New buttons and other minor UI improvements
  • New plugin for the Maemo status bar (IT OS2008 only) (*)
  • Fixed a bug that made scrobbling fail under certain conditions
  • A window to see the progress of downloads (and cancel them)
  • A new setting to select the download directory

Here’s the new look of Vagalume under IT OS2008:

Vagalume 0.5

And for those interested, now we have a new vagalume-users mailing list.

(*) Mario has written a detailed post about the status bar plugin, including a screenshot. Check it out!

Go here to download Vagalume.

And that’s all. Enjoy!

It’s been a hard day’s night

It’s almost a month since I last posted something here, but it’s because these last weeks I have been really busy.

However it was definitely worth it. Last Wednesday the first beta of Modest, the new e-mail client for the Maemo platform was released.

Modest

I’ve been working on Modest with some colleagues at Igalia for some time now and we have been doing our best to create a good e-mail client. Modest is still in beta, but I think that it’s reasonably usable now and we’re looking forward to improving it. The reviews we’ve seen so far have been positive and that encourages us to keep on working! Thank you all!

I’d also like to thank Philip, the author of Tinymail, for all his help and contributions and for being such a nice guy.

And, of course, the great Dirk-Jan from Nokia, the best possible leader and an amazing guy who had the good taste to announce Modest quoting one of the greatest records ever made. And he even uses Vagalume! πŸ˜‰

Well, and what happened to Vagalume then? Of course I haven’t forgotten about it, it’s just that I haven’t had much time to work on it. However I managed to introduce some new features and bugfixes, so Vagalume 0.4 is here. As usual, details in my webpage but for the impatient here are the highlights:

  • New dialogs for tagging and recommending tracks
  • Ability to edit existing tags for a track, and to see the list of the most popular tags set by other people
  • HTTP proxy support so you can use Vagalume at work πŸ˜‰
  • ConIc support: Vagalume will connect your N8x0 to the Internet if it’s offline (thanks Calvaris!)
  • New Vagalume icon (thanks Felipe!)
  • …and some other optimizations and minor fixes

Here’s how Vagalume looks on a PC:

Vagalume 0.4

By the way, this time I compiled Vagalume packages for Ubuntu too. I haven’t tested them but they should work.

And that’s all! I hope you enjoy both programs!