F-Blog

August is over, and this mean that also GSoC is over. F-Spot had three projects accepted! So, to resume:

• RubenV’s new sidebar is already in SVN. Editors have been splitted too, even if they’re not yet pluggable as extensions they will probably be converted soon.
  An extension point for adding custom pages to the sidebar has also been added, so now user extensions can add their own page. Open field for new improvements!
• Apart’s DPAP library is in SVN too! It actually can expose F-Spot selected pictures on the net with Apple’s iPhoto. It’s also possible to share and browse photos between two F-Spot installations on the net. It’s not yet build by default, but it’s fully working.
• Wasja’s color profile patch has reached RC1 few days ago. It’s possible to test his progresses with the patch available from the mailing list. After some finetuning corrections have been made, the patch will go to SVN. This should happen in few days.

During the last month was also time for Novell’s HackWeek. Our super hero Sde had a full time week to freely concentrate on our favorite photo manager. This produced

• MergeDB extension: an extension that will allow users to merge an existing photos.db into the running one. This is a largely requested feature.
• exiv2 .Net binding (made recently available on mono svn): this will allow replacement of libexif into F-Spot code, and so (hopefully) lot of memory leaks and improvements in handling embedded tags (like XMP).

Besides of big improvements, a lot of little bugs have been fixed. Right today a patch for moving into zoomed picture (both in normal view and in full screen) have been committed.

After GSoC projects get committed into SVN, a new version of F-Spot is likely to be released. Which should make it in time for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex and OpenSUSE 11.1, a very large user-base for our photo manager. Translators are encouraged to update their po’s quickly!

Stay tuned!