Galago

I’ve been hacking away at various pieces of Galago lately at an attempt to improve the API and Gtk+ widgets. This is leading to some very cool applications and utilities I’m developing. Hopefully if I can get some of this set up the way I want soon, I’ll get another release put together.

A wiki has been put up containing some installation documentation, a preliminary FAQ, and other documentation. It’s also hosting the wiki for Project Soylent, which we’re starting to develop some decent plans for (they’re not on the wiki yet, just in some discussions).

My latest cool Gtk-related Galago work is the Contact Chooser. I love this thing, seriously. It’s not finished yet, but is close, and is simple and easy to work with. The screenshots are fairly self-explanatory.

If you haven’t guessed, it’s a widget and dialog that resembles the Gtk+ file chooser, but it’s designed to select contacts. The gnome-presence-applet will be using this fairly soon. I need to work on some of the speed issues, but they’re not too major.

libgalago got some major code cleanups these past couple of weeks. A lot of the communication code was abstracted, and as a result, several hundred lines of code have been removed. This will dramatically ease the porting effort to D-BUS 0.33. I plan to keep compatibility with D-BUS 0.23.x as well. I’m not sure when exactly all this will be done, but definitely before the upcoming stable release.

I’ll post some screenshots of the design we’re considering for Project Soylent once we have something I feel is worth demoing.

I felt especially motivated today and started work on an API I came up with in the shower. I spent hours hacking on libgalago and, when I was done, I had reduced the codebase by over 800 lines, all of which consisted of D-BUS 0.23.x-specific communication code. There’s now a much cleaner API abstraction over D-BUS, which could easily in the future be expanded to not be D-BUS-specific, if that ended up becoming important (say, a Windows port of MacOS X port without D-BUS). Furthermore, it should now be much simpler to get Galago working cleanly with D-BUS 0.31+. I’m not going to be able to work on that right away, but it’ll happen sometime before libgalago 0.4.0.

The abstraction still has some work to go, but most of the codebase for libgalago has moved to it. I still don’t know what I’m going to do for galago-daemon’s D-BUS 0.31+ support, but it’s probably not as huge an effor as I’m thinking. Worst case, I do some more abstraction work, but it won’t be as bad as libgalago’s.

Also, I hacked up contact-lookup-applet a few days ago to check for libgalago at compile time and to use Galago for the Instant Messaging section of the Address Card dialog. If Galago’s dead due to some bug, it falls back on the default implementation of just showing a protocol icon. There is a patch available for now, and I’m hoping that perhaps support can be added to CVS at some point. Next stop, gnome-present-applet UI work and Evolution.

Well, I finally did it. The 0.3.0: Wrath of Squirrel release of Galago is out! No, seriously. It needs some testing, and I have a bunch of neat little projects in the works. If you’re in the Silicon Valley area, I’ll be giving a presentation at SVLUG in the near future. That is, if I can get everything working in time.

There’s been some concern of code theft in a project I’m involved in, so we put in place an SVN repository wrapping my Source COde authentication tool. This is an old project of mine, and for those interested, you can read about it. With SCO, you’ll never have to worry about code theft again.

I finally finished the transition to my new Linode account for Galago’s website and SVN repository. It should hopefully be more reliable, as I’ll have direct access to all services and account maintenance.

If you had an account on the old freedesktop.org SVN repository and need a new account, please contact me with your username/password, and I’ll set it up. Also, please update any bookmarks or trees. The new site URL is at http://www.galago.info, and the SVN URL is http://svn.galago.info.

Calum’s blog post showing a bunch of talking heads on his panel is pretty cool. I have the presence part of this already done in Galago’s gnome-presence-applet. It doesn’t display a talking head, but it displays service indicators and first/last names. It wouldn’t be hard to make it optionally display an avatar instead. The messaging wouldn’t be there until a future release of Galago, though.

A Galago release is imminent now. Just a few things left to do.

I am pleased to announce that due to some, um.. gentle nudging on Nat’s part, work on the Galago .NET bindings has started. There isn’t a whole lot there yet, but it’s getting there. I hope to have something usable this weekend, when I actually have time to hack on this.

The Galago release is still being held up by two (possibly very related) critical bugs in galago-daemon. Once I find those, and finish up the avatar support (almost done!), it’ll finally be ready to release. The Evolution integration will be finished later (although I’m near completion), and I’ll be providing packages as soon as that’s done.

Welp, I’ve been thinking about it, and with everything coming up in my near future (possible full-time job, and if not, school), and with the current state of Galago, it may be time to do an initial release. It’s Mostly Stable (TM), and the best way to get some bug reports in is if people use it. After I evaluate the possibility of getting some certain code working some time this next week, I’ll be making my decision regarding its release.

Unfortunately, the Evolution integration won’t be part of the first release (although the Evolution-Data-Server feed will be). I plan to build some custom packages of Evolution and E-D-S based on the unstable 1.5.x releases and my patches a bit after the initial Galago release. We’ll see how that goes.

I have some scary-neat ideas coming up for some of this technology.

Update: Happy birthday Todd!

I’ve been making some rather good progress with both Galago and the Gaim status rewrite as of late. Galago is becoming a lot more stable, and the structure is being more fine-tuned. Interest in the project has picked up as well. I have a guy working on some patches for Galago, and possibly working on GnomeMeeting integration. The Adium, Gnumail (so I’m told), and Proteus projects are interested in using it, so we’ll be getting a MacOS X port soon.

I’m in the process now of integrating Galago into Evolution. Very little work has been done on that yet, as I started tonight, but the results so far please me.

The Gaim status rewrite is coming together, and is forcing me to remove a lot of the old cruft still in Gaim. I don’t plan to finish this before 0.80, but we’ll see.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time on these projects lately, so I decided to learn to draw. I’m rather happy with the first drawing (shaded) I attempted, although I realize it has a lot wrong with it. I can only improve, and I’m striving to do as well as my “Harem” girls (which is what my friends are calling themselves lately).

Speaking of which, at some point soon, I’m heading over to one of their houses so they can use me as a model while they draw. That should be.. interesting.