Mono-ifying Gnome3, one dependency at a time

2 quick announcements:

libunique now has a managed binding, Unique#. As the mapping is already feature complete and API stable, the code is tagged 1.0.0. It's simple, it's as easy and obvious to use as the native libunique, it doesn't have funky dependency (except, well, for libunique 1.0.0), it installs itself in the GAC...

The code is hosted on gitorious http://gitorious.org/unique-sharp/unique-sharp and patches are welcome. There's no tarball so far, but if you need one, ask and you might receive.

F-Spot got yet another bugfix release (0.6.1.4) I worked on during the weekend, fixing an X issue on some screens. Unfortunately, the Karmic release of Ubuntu (congrats guys) unleashed a new horde of avid testers, and they were able to find an issue in the --view mode (the same issue, for the same widget, was reported for the facebook exporter too). I'll look at it this weekend, in the meantime the workaround is to run f-spot --view with GDK_NATIVE_WINDOWS=true.

[Update 2009/10/31: bug fixed]

Fixes by pack of 12

Important things first, just know that Ruben is no longer AWOL. He's even back to hacking mode, and working, together with Tigger, at adding image metadata support for images to taglib-sharp.

Now to the futile, I just released F-Spot 0.6.1.3 a few minutes ago. The main purpose of it was to fix the slideshow mode on gtk+ 2.18 (which we did) and as I was at releasing, I applied some pending patches from bugzilla, wrote some myself, and backported translations from master.

The change in the importing code is worth noticing. It no longer imports the files first to memory before writing them to disk. It's quite helpful now that most cameras can create video files bigger enough to fill your machine memory in less than a few minutes (at high bitrate, on HD resolution). It's only available if you have libgphoto2 >= 2.4 and doesn't work with the directory driver (used for memory cards e.g.). Marcus is working on a fix in gphoto2, so stay tuned.

If you ask about the screensaver, it still doesn't work with gtk+ 2.18 but works fine with gtk+ master, and will still work just fine with gtk+ 2.18.1 when it goes out.

That's it. Download it, build it, package it, enjoy it!

News from the F-Spotters

Some news, in no particular order:

F-Spot 0.6.1.2 was released a couple of minutes ago. It fixes db upgrade for the people who went in holidays in the far future. Now F-Spot can update a db with photos taken (or reported to be) after 2038. It also fixes a crash while running on gtk+ 2.14.

The LiveWebGallery extension is now merged into the main tree, and installable, from the Manage Extension dialog, on any F-spot > 0.6. The extension crashing on gtk+2.14 is part of the past too.

Ruben is MIA. Last time we heard from him, he was "in a park near a pond near a museum".

A new extension, allowing finer control over the BlackAndWhite conversion process is coming soon. It leverages the expensive CPU you paid big bucks for via Mono.Simd. Mandatory screenshot:
That's it for today.

It's gonna be legendary

wait for it... F-Spot 0.6.1.0 is out!

This one is coming quite soon after 0.6, and contains only fixes, cleanups and translation updates.

It aims to be a packager friendly release, as it drops some bundled code, some dependencies, a few megs of code, and more than a megabyte of installed size !

So, if you were using or packaging 0.6.0.0, jump in now, enjoy the .1.

[Update: I pushed 0.6.1.1 to avoid a reported build issue]

Pit Stop

On our way to F-Spot 1.0, we slowed our well oiled machine to change the tires, fill the tank and do a complete check against the various regressions we might have added while packing tons of new features and changes since the 0.5.x releases.

The truck is now ok and ready to ride to the next milestone. Check 0.6.0 in order to make your own opinion.

Neither this short post nor the NEWS file reflects the really hard work pushed by our contributors, translators and designers, but rescanning the git log this evening reminded me how hard we all worked for this. Thanks guys.

Get it here.