F-Spot 0.6.0

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!

It has been quite a long time since last release, isn’t it? Eight months, during when a lot of things changed.

And couldn’t be anything else! It’s summer, but no F-Spot dev is on holiday! Expecially those engaged for it, as it’s the case of our RubenV, the only man for this year F-Spot’s GSoC.

As Stephane said, the NEWS file you will find in tarball doesn’t reflect the hard work done during the last months. Let’s have a look at the commit log:

• as I mentioned already, right after 0.5 the base dir was moved from .gnome2 to a more XDG-like .config. So your photos.db and custom addins are now in .config/f-spot
• the concept of Platform has been introduced in the code. Right now there’s only Gnome, but this will ease the port to other systems (Kde specific code, MacOSX, Windows?)
• speed up rating: now you can use ALT+[0-5], even in full screen view
• head to Gnome3: since long time the code introduced Gio and GtkBuilder dialogs, in order to drop deprecated libraries. Not all the work has been done yet, but the base is ready
• different C libraries were ported to managed code: zooming, libeog, and the most big change affected ImageView. The core of the viewing widget was completely rewritten by Stephane. And now is a lot faster than ever
• console verbosity has been lowered a lot, thanks to the usage of Log.* methods
• system proxy is now automatically detected for all exporters
• Gimp’s XCF support has been added, given that there’s a pixbuf loader for it
• renewed icons
• deeply updated Tabblo and Facebook exporters
• make auto-creating tag icons optional
• jump to random picture: type r anytime to go to a random photo of the current query
• faster type-to-tag: the much loved feature is now faster to use, as ‘,’ does what enter used to do
• allow printing more pictures and exif date near photos
• DnD code has been cleaned and split up, for better usablity
• new FolderView sidebar, to see where your photos are on fileystem
• added crop helpers in area selection
• new preference dialog: much simplier
• netbook love: all dialogs are now <600px
• adjustable filmstrip placement: improves photo view for widescreen monitors.

In summary, this can be a bare list of the most noticeable changes. Beside of these, there are hundreds and hundreds of small and big fixes, enhancements, cleanup which would take ages to describe.

And for all this we must thank Stephane, which still holds the lead of F-Spot development by writing the most exciting features as well as dealing with the most annoying cleanups and people (/me included ).
Along with him, RubenV is taking his GSoC work beyond the strict needs by cleaning up, helping contributors, reviewing patches. Other than that, RAW support is running fast! You can check on Gitorious.

As already said, since the move to git a lot of new contributors showed up. And the list increased day by day, you can check on Gitorious yourself. The main contributors which helped a lot for this release are certainly Anton Keks, Jan Klícha, Jim Ramsay, Markus Lindqvist, Mike Gemünde, and the others you will find in git log.

A lot of other wonderful people deserve mention. I’m talking about all the cool guys showing up in IRC for discussing, helping and welcoming new users. If you drop in #f-spot, you will certainly find a lot of help from piz and pmjdebruijn. Their blog also host a lot of cool info about photograpy and F-Spot itself.

So what are you waiting for? Join development of the most appreciated photo management for GNU/Linux!

Git is very powerful, but I bet you all already know. Git speeds up collaborative development, and makes merge of patches much easier than Subversion.
This, and less restrictive requirements, raised back attraction to higher, deserved standards.
And here comes Gitorious, a very powerful git-based platform which allows contributors to freely express their fantasy, and still keeping easy the merge of those fantasies into F-Spot’s master. And really, it already helped, you can see it yourself: new (and old!) patches got merged, many new branches born (some were already merged in), two clones present! And most of this doesn’t come from main devs only! Wonderful, isn’t it? (Well, I know I’m getting quite repetitive, but it’s really exciting, and I’m very happy of it.)

Come and feel free to join development on gitorious, which is kept up to date with Gnome thanks to RubenV.
I’m happy to see things moving again, and I’m happy to invite everyone join and enjoy F-Spot again, on gitorious or anywere else, to help this project towards the long awaited next release.
Just to let you know how things are moving, Tigger is uniforming and empowering IconView, Piz is improving visual experience, Ruben is preparing his GSoC summer job on RAW image handling, Sde works in the background to make F-Spot buildable, usable, stable and most enjoyable possible. Yes, he’s our superhero.
Free adv: it’s not breaking news, but he also has his own never updated blog at reblochon. Be sure not to miss it!

So come, join, discuss and contribute!

(and have some patience )

P.S. on a side note, a bug emerged in last Ubuntu Jaunty. Well, two at least annoying bugs:

1. F-Spot placing imported photos to home folder instead under Photos (or whatever) directory: this is an Ubuntu only bug, and you can track it on launchpad.
2. Editing a tag’s icon doesn’t allow you to view all the associated photos: this is a regression in Gtk+ 2.16, which was fixed in master but obviously not in Ubuntu. You can track it on launchpad.

So, since the announcement of the plan for releasing 1.0 developers’ free time shrinked and shrinked… As of today the biggest improvement made to F-Spot since latest release is the port to gio, which will allow porting our favorite photo manager application to different platforms other than Gnome (MacOSX? Windows?).

So, as I said, long time since last stable release, 0.5.0.3, but still there’s a question which comes up very often on IRC: where did the editors go? Why I cannot see F-Spot sidebar anymore?

Everything is still there, they’re just hidden! That’s not done on purpose, it was a trivial bug, but it’s still hitting releases. So, if you just opened F-Spot, and even if you have View > Components > Sidebar option checked but you don’t see anything, try dragging thumbnail view left edge to the right… Your tags and available editors will magically reappear!

As you can see, even if highly annoying the solution is pretty quick. I hope Ubuntu users will appreciate.

Since this blog is about F-Spot SVN, few words about these days trunk: gio-sharp was recently included into Gtk-Sharp, so it was removed from being bundled into F-Spot itself. As result, F-Spot SVN now depends on Gtk-Sharp SVN. OpenSUSE builds may come in the close future.

• released a workaround for a bug on gdk-pixbuf, causing errors on png files
• fixed a huge memory leak in export to folder (and somewhere else also)
• removed automatic database upgrade for md5 hash calculation
• fixed a very bad bug in duplicate detection which slipped in
• added support for Sqlite 3.6.x (which is NOT backwards compatible for some stuff, see 1.4)

So, when you install 0.5.0.3 be aware that the long awaited duplicate detection works only for pictures imported from now on! The automatic MD5 calculation was removed because many user complained about having the hard disk spinning and taking CPU for ages without knowing why… People wishing to enable duplicate detection on their whole archive can enable and run the HashJob extension, which will perform MD5 hashing of all the pictures in database. The jobs can be stopped at any time, and restarted later on.

No big news in SVN, except the introduction of XDG-dir support: as of r4527 base directory moved from ~/.gnome2/f-spot/ to ~/.config/f-spot.

• 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!

On the GSoC side:

• rubenv has prepared a mockup of what the next editors interface could be. you can find an interesting video on his weblog.
• wasja is constantly reporting progress on the color profile work, and soon some of his job will be ready for SVN users.
• apart has started uploading changes to the svn repository for the DPAP sharing protocol.

About the rest, not many visible features have been introduced, but much more valuable ones have been!
The main actual goal is focusing on performances. Sde and RubenV (which is doing great stuff along with his GSoC project) have done an excellent work on this subject, by optimizing code and object structures.

In the last month small pieces of the puzzle have been placed: right now tagging, commenting and rating doesn’t refresh the picture anymore. And that’s already very good. Then it has been time for query optimization: F-Spot now uses more limited queries and temporary tables for handling request.

But the most stunning improvement has been committed in r4173: since last week you will be able to tag your pictures instantly! No kidding, that’s really amazingly fast! Tagging hundreds of pictures takes less than one second. Much less, we’re talking about 0,1s!

That’s great, isn’t it?

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.

Beside the fact that some should understand what an opensource voluntary project is and how it works, finally Thomas Van Machelen re spawned a quite old patch and updated/improved it to the current SVN version.

Now, people complaining for this missing feature should take some of their time and make some tests over this patch. Instructions on how to build the latest SVN and apply a patch can be found on F-Spot site. Always make a backup of your database before doing any test!

Tests could be:

• import the same picture with same filename
• import the same picture with different filename
• normally import a set of pictures and see if there are any false positive/negative

Feedbacks of your tests are welcome on bugzilla!

Ubuntu Hardy users can add RubenV’s PPA repository and install the latest gtk-sharp2.

OpenSuSE users can find updated gtk-sharp2 either in BuildService or in Factory distribution.

Debian users can find the required package both in testing and in unstable.