What Ever Happened To?
There are a number of lively discussions currently going on in desktop-devel with regard to new module proposals [1]. This reminded me of a few projects I used to follow that I have not heard from in a while. Hoping not to offend any of the developers I therefore ask,
What ever happened to?
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Gnome Formatter A HAL pretty formatting utility, so I may finally easily format my USB keys. Description here, and here
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GSmartMix + PulseAudio + LibSydney A dream bunch of projects providing policy for sound devices. GMartMix lives between gstreamer and pulseaudio (i hope...) to allow applications to mute, pause, and have per application volume control, although the latter may be the domain of Pulseaudio. LibSydney said to replace esd in GNOME (finally, down with cruft).
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Mathusalem: Long running task manager This SOC2006 project built sufficient buzz that KDE has now acquired an equivalent in KDE4. With Nautilus currently being broken to integrate the great new gvfs work, perhaps this would be a good time to play
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New gnome-panel bling Ohhh shiny. Im happy to see this come up on ddl, users like shiny things. Some more gnome-panel ideas here.
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Libslab, Tiles and the New UI Metaphor, including Gnome Main Menu.
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Gnome-control-center single window mode. I know it met with resistance when it was introduced but I quite liked it!
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GtkApplication and GtkUnique Perhaps GtkApplication is a smart place to put the window DND stuff (now that nautilus supports XDS)
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New GNOME Session Code TOPAZ type infrastructure which may allow saving tasks to a file, or even a project or task oriented desktop.
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Metacity Compositor Kwin is shipping with a compositor, as is the xfce window manager. It would be a shame to have nothing comparable (yes I am aware of Compiz, and sometimes it hurts to use)
Anyway, its great to see the action on ddl, and the excitement surrounding GNOME again. I look forward to the next release. I will be releasing a Conduit 0.3.9 (the RC before 0.4.0) this weekend, and here is a hint about my next blog post: Conduit as a blessed GNOME dependancy, how can we integrate Sync into the desktop?
[1] I am also hoping that tracker and/or xesam gets proposed this cycle.