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Conduit 0.3.5: Enough Excuses

I am a terrible project maintainer. It has been a full 3 months since the last Conduit release, and I have run out of excuses. First I got distracted by online desktop shenanigans, then by Opensync and Ubuntu things. I got caught up in moving Conduit to GNOME SVN. Then I got distracted by JHBuild on windows. Finally I lost my nerve and went on holiday, not touching a computer for 3 weeks. Enough is enough!

The good news however is that there is no doubt in my mind that this is the best Conduit release ever. I'm using Conduit on a daily basis for a variety of tasks, and its looking really solid. Yes there are still some bugs, but thats life. So, no screenshots this time, just a list of shiny new features. Over the next few weeks I will be doing a series of "look what you can do with conduit" type posts, as this is probably the best way to demonstrate to folks what they can accomplish with a generic sync+conversion framework, with a focus on integration with the desktop environment and great support of online services!

• Release Notes

• Download

• Report Bugs

• Whats New

  • Move to GNOME SVN and Bugzilla

  • In memory mapping DB has been replace with sqlite based one. Should reduce memory usage during large sync's.

  • Restructure code layout to allow Conduit to be used as a library by other python programs.

  • Removed Gtk dependancy in core. Conduit command line can now be run without Gtk installed.

  • Added 'always up to date' infrastructure for automatic syncing.

  • Improved n800 support for syncing audio, video and photos to the device.

  • New AudioVideoConverter for transcoding media types (uses FFMPEG and/or mencoder)

  • Include Banshee support in configure.ac - from lool

  • Support data hashes in addition to mtimes as a means for detecting changes

  • Remove twisted dependency for network sync. Uses the built in python xmlrpc module

  • Use python logging module for better logging granularity

  • Make HAL easier to extend in dataprovider factories

  • Files that did not load correctly are shown in the preferences window to help debugging

  • Experimental maemo/hildon UI (Thomas)

  • Added iPod photos support

  • Write support in f-spot using its new dbus interface (Thomas)

  • Support tags in all datatypes (useful for images)

  • Incredible improvements in test coverage. 75% lines of core code tested (including close to 100% of the core sync engine)

  • RSS Feed source now supports video enclosures

  • Many many bug fixes as a result of test focus

As more people start to use conduit I am becoming more conservative and focusing a lot more on testing. One aspect of this is a machine I have set up that runs the test suite every time there is a commit. The other aspect is more regular releases. For the former look here, for the latter please test and give me feedback!

Team conduit is well poised for a 0.4.0 release to coincide with GNOME 2.22.

Holidays

It feels strange to be back at university after a solid 3 weeks of doing very little. I had the best summer holiday I have had in a long time. Considerable thanks must go to the weather in New Zealand, its great to finally have the good weather in December. Anyway here are some holiday snaps for those that are curious about what a summer Christmas/New Year in New Zealand looks like.

My Christmas Present

Relaxing on the Jetty

Sunset at the Bay Of Many Coves

Hunter Gatherer

Holiday Debrief

Well I have finally arrived in Canada, which signifies the end of my travels around Europe. Back in NZ in a week to start my PhD. Aside from the photos which I have been taking and irregularly uploading I have;

• Bought a Nokia n800 (watch for a conduit port soon)

• Played with an iPhone (its the little things, attention to detail of all transitions between operations)

• Watched Transformers (not bad)

• Read (1984, Fahrenheit 911, The God Delusion)

• Hacked on Conduit

• Missed GUADEC (I hope the videos and slides will go up soon)

• Updated to Gutsy (went smoothly)

Conduit Schmonduit

I released 0.3.2 last week or so. Aside from bug fixes we also added box.net support (sync evolution/files/tomboy notes/etc to/from/via box.net), and also added the ability to delete photos from the supported photo sites (Flickr, picasaweb, smugmug). This means that Conduit can now better keep your photos (in a folder, or in f-spot) in sync. This includes removing them when they are removed from the synchronized folder, or tagged/untagged in F-spot.

Most of the work is now happening in the better-mvc branch which will land soon. This is a general tidy up of the code base and a better split of the synchronization logic from the GUI. This will not only allow for improved good looks; but other improvements too.

Mock-up Credit: Karl Lattimer

Misc Updates

Conduit

For all those that are interested I just released Conduit 0.3.1, the second development release in the series. The release includes a heap of bug fixes and some interesting new features including;

• Evolution Support (memos and tasks) using evolution-python

• Ipod calendar and tasks support

• Support SmugMug and Picasaweb

Goals for the next release include

• Supporting box.net

• Google notes support

• 100% test coverage of the core sync engine

The thing that keeps me interested in conduit is the speed at which we are progressing. Each new dataprovider added has a benefit proportional to the number of already included dataproviders; for instance adding evolution support opened up the ability to do tomboy notes <--> evolution memos, as well as evolution memos <--> ipod notes, etc.

Gnome Link Drop

Here are some interesting things on the horizon that made me excited about GNOME and gtk. Delegated to people with more free time and ability than me!

• Increased activity on gtk offscreen rendering. Great for canvas implementors and bling in the future.

• OpenGl support in Gtk

• Saw this example from the folks over at KDE. Made with the help of this documentation. Perhaps someone with more ability than me can use this as the basis for window previews in libwnck.

• GtkTimeline bling, lets make organic interfaces easy.

• AFAICT Composited gtk/gdk widgets makes new panel possible?

Anyway, Im still on holiday, and loving it!

Life Updates

So I thought I should spice up my blog with a post about non nerdy stuff. Currently I am travelling around Europe and will continue doing that until about June/July at which time I fly to Canada.

I was initially planning on doing a University exchange at the University of British Columbia but have since decided to take up a PhD at the University of Canterbury. I will (hopefully) be working on UAV stuff, likely machine vision related, in the Geospatial Research Centre at the university, beginning on the 1st of August. Travelling by car across Europe by car is so far been exceptionally awesome. Have me some cool characters and have certainly become a better driver. It has allowed us the freedom to go where we want, and when split three ways, has been just as economic as train travel.