F-Blog » extensions

The road to 0.6.1 – bye bye Tao

Maxxer — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 21:40:40 +0000

F-Spot 0.6.0 is not very old yet, but the team is working hard on a new release already. The main goal is addressing bugs left over here and there.
Some of the most annoying bugs were related to the slideshow. F-Spot has so far relied on the Tao library to render the animation of the, sometimes called, diaporama.
Unfortunately the embedded library was quite old. Which could even be the cause of most of the problems. Instead of upgrading, our proud Stephane decided to move to Cairo animation.
You may notice that now animations are fewer than before. I like to consider it a feature more than a bug, because now animations are extendable! Yes, you can write your own transition for F-Spot! You can see an example in the Dissolve transition.

Obviously, along with that, the screensaver configuration lost in 0.6 is now back with it’s own dialog, now with timing customization.

More news to come… Happy hacking!

http://www.maxxer.it/f-blog/2009/08/f-spot-0-6-0-is-out/

f-spot 0.5.0.1 – Remember the Rubik’s cube

Maxxer — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 20:52:42 +0000

F-Spot 0.5.0 is out since long time, right now. I know I should have posted something before, but… I’m often lazy!
No big news happened in SVN since last post, when I talked about the big features being committed in.
But there’s a (sadly negative) noticeable thing: DPAP support has been excluded from release, not yet being considered user ready.
On the other hand, F-Spot 0.5.0’s week release marathon, namely F-Spot-athon, produced a lot of last-time fixes and inclusions:

Zooomr export
Facebook export enabled by default
Tabblo export
Compressed file export enabled by default
fixed a problem with duplicate detection and gif files
hidden cursor in full screen and slideshow
rating in full screen infobox
image resize
better handling of keypress in full screen
page setup in print dialog
… a lot of less noticeable improvements, as well as updated translations

As I already wrote, F-Spot 0.5.0 includes duplicate detection: this means that you won’t accidentally import the same picture twice! During the process the algorithm creates an unique md5 hash for your image data only (that means: not including exif/xmp data), and compares it to the ones present in db. If an equal hash exists, and the duplicate detection was enabled, the already present picture will be ignored.

As you might have guessed this requires a database upgrade, and a time expensive job of calculating md5 for your existing images. This may result in F-Spot taking some high CPU and disk usage after upgrade, until hashing is finished. This job is scheduled in background, and shouldn’t harm the user experience too much. And don’t worry, you can close F-Spot at any time you wish, the job will resume next time from where it left!

F-Spot 0.5.0.1 should be included in all the main distributions getting out in the next months, that is Fedora 9, Mandriva 2009.0, OpenSUSE 11.1, and Ubuntu 8.10.

Enjoy!

August is over

Maxxer — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 19:48:08 +0000

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!

New service extension point

Maxxer — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 21:51:12 +0000

A new extension point has been recently introduced in F-Spot.
It’s named Service and will allow developers to introduce custom services for interfacing F-Spot with other programs.

A typical example is the Beagle Notifier, which has been moved out as extension. This addin can be used to understand how this new extension point work. Another example can be DBus.

Keep in mind when designing service extension that it’s essential for the Start () function to be the lightest possible, as affects F-Spot’s startup time. More informations at F-Spot.org.