Thunar location bar again

I have tried to adjust the prototype to make both parties happy, the path bar guys and the location bar addicts:

The path bar user interface looks as usual:

The location bar user interface is very similar, except that it has location entry widget instead of the path buttons:

And a third possibility, as suggested by Jeff, would be to disable the bar completely. This will make ROX users happy as well.

A tarball of the prototype with the stuff mentioned above is available here.

And the laugh of the day goes to...

… my favourite Linux based operating system, Debian. The mighty and outstanding Debian people finally came to the conclusion that it might be a good idea to release their software from time to time (sarge will become stable right after the Hurd 1.0 release). Oh, really. Why did noone think of this earlier?

But seriously… we suck at releasing our stuff… but hey, we do release it. And people like it - well except the few with the broken panel config. ;-)

On a related note: I did an Ubuntu intall recently on one of our new servers (Fujitsu Siemens Primergy 200) at work; the installation went very smooth. Ubuntu just works. No need for endless googling about stupid problems. No need to compile a custom kernel, as the Ubuntu default kernels support even high-end hardware out of the box. Many people say “Xfce is Gnome done right”. I say “Ubuntu is Debian done right”.

Xfce splash screen crash course

Here’s a very brief introduction to the way splash screens work in Xfce 4.2.0 and above:

The whole splash thingy is a bit complex atm. On the first level, there are splash engines (currently mice, simple and balou); these are loadable modules. mice isn’t themable at all, everything’s hardcoded. simple is themeable from the configure dialog, and balou is themable using a theme file.

balou theming is pretty easy, its just a themerc file and a logo image file. Check the Default balou theme in the xfce4-session source to get an idea of the file format/content (it includes a few comments). To distribute a theme, create a directory layout like this:

Name
Name/balou
Name/balou/themerc
Name/balou/logo.png

where Name is the name of your theme. Then tar up the stuff like this:

$ tar czvf Name.tar.gz Name

Now users can simply install the theme by dragging the .tar.gz file from a file manager and dropping it to the balou configure screen in the settings manager.

Thunar Firefox-like location bar (the 2nd skin)

Just came up with a better idea for the location bar layout:

It’s now very similar to what Firefox does. The major difference is, that it’s not associated with the statusbar as in Firefox, instead it’s associated with the main view (icon/list view), which makes more sense.

It’s important to have a user-visible way to get rid of the location bar again, even if there’s already Escape or focus-out.

Terminal 0.2.4 released

So I finally released the next version of Terminal after nearly 3 months since 0.2.2. And since everybody likes cute new features - as long as they don’t blow up things too much - this new version finally includes support for helper applications (yes, that means clicking on URLs/email addresses is possible now):

This was about the most often requested feature. Several other changes have been made to improve Terminal. See the Release Notes for a complete list of user visible changes.

With this new release we’re close to a 1.0 release, I think there’ll be 0.2.6 and 0.2.8/0.3.0 before we jump to 1.0 though, as we’ve still some unresolved issues.