Loud ramblings of a Software Artisan

In the grand tradition of businessmen picturing, Nat decided to turn Miguel into a hottie (link and pictures are office safe). In short, the pictures: 1, 2 and 3

Any ressemblance with recently re-published pictures of Bill Gates would be pure coincidence :-)

Miguel and Nat, you rock !

I use GAIM for instant messenging, because it allow doing all the protocols at once. But I find its UI sometime really cumbersome or annoying. Here is my GAIM wishlist, all UI related:

• Buddy grouping is unclear. We don't know that a buddy is a group of buddies (like for example 1 person, 3 protocols), and the "expand" menu is cumbersome. Why no putting a disclosure triangle and setting up and explicit icon. The icon and the disclosure triangle only appears when the mouse is over the item in the buddy list.
• I need to know the default buddy that will be used when I ask to send a message to grouped buddies.
• Stop showing that buddy list when there is a connection/disconnection. If I happen to hide it, keep it hidden. This is really annoying and it only got better because Metacity in GNOME 2.9.x no longer put it fore front.
• There is a nice notification icon, use it. Update it to show any message unread in any of the tabs. Unread = either the tab or the window has not gotten focus since the message appeared. Bonus of that notification icon can provide the number of message waiting in the icon, or at least in the tooltip.
• There are lot of various cosmetic UI issues, like the account window that has checkboxes to connect the account, or the login window that does not have an "auto-connect" option.

I will report these bugs to the gaim bug tracker or comment existing bug that already report this. I'll also maybe sit to fix some, when I find the time to do so, or when the "piss off factor" will be so important to proritize this task higher. And I'm probably forgetting a few.

OK, I have been lame of this. I finally posted my gallery of GUADEC 2004 in Kristiansand, Norway, at least the gallery of the digital pictures. I still have a bunch of slides to scan, and I will post them ASAP.

Ximian/Novell hired Tor Lillqvist according to Nat's blog to help port Evolution to Windows. Some may wonder if it is a good idea. Tor has ported Gtk+ and The Gimp to Windows, and is still making sure all that work.

Since we already have AbiWord and Gnumeric running on Windows, that will brings more parts of Gnome-Office to run on Windows. And I'm pretty sure Gnumeric folks will be happy to put back the stripped out feature into the Windows port, like Bonobo.

When will someone sponsor a port of Gtk+ to MacOS X (without X11) ? There is already a Gtk+-1.2 port for MacOS X, but it does not seems to have evolved since July 2003. That codebase could be used as a start towords porting Gtk+-2.x. If only I had a MacOS X machine to do that now that AbiWord for MacOS X mostly run.

Today I sent my abstract for a talk proposal I'd like to do at GUADEC 6, in Germany. The topic is Connecting digital cameras to your desktop with libgphoto2.

That reminds me that I still have to scan the slides from GUADEC 5 and Norway. I only posted some snapshots of Oslo.