Saturday, May 31, 2008

Text plugin for jasper

Well, I haven't had much time to work on jasper the past few weeks, but now there is a few new features.

Firstly, there is a new build script, thanks to some-guy. This is very useful to me, as it makes it less work for me to add new plugins. It also adds "make like" output, which can be useful if something is failing (if you pass quiet it will only display errors). Also, passing clean ("./build.sh clean") will clean up all files generated by building, which is also a very nice feature.

The only other visual change was the addition of the "text plugin", which is used to display the title of a window. Some things which I still have do do for this plugin is make it update when the title changes, and also properly handle the case when the title is too long (at the moment it will just keep on writing, potentially over-top of other buttons). The font and font-size is the only part which is currently editable by the theme, though I do hope to add some other options (such as colour, style, etc)

The updated theme now looks quite a bit more bulky, but I'm only updating the theme to show (and test) new features, so I'm not concerned with usability yet.

5 comments:

charlene said...

Hi joel, Glad to see someone comments on your blog as I have no idea what you are talking about :-)

Steph said...

Any developpement going on ?

Joel Bosveld said...

Well, I was doing some changes in the core to make it nicer to implement things such as tracking the state of buttons (mouse over, etc), but have been rather busy recently, so I haven't had a chance to fully finish it yet :(

Mauricio said...

Congratulations for the good job!
Thanks to the effort of people like you we can have the best desktop experience!
If you need any help puting out a good theme, let me know how can I be useful, ok?

rawash said...

looks very promising, although i think you ought to change the project's name (or at least the executable's) since "jasper" (or rather "JasPer") is already used by another opensource project (http://www.ece.uvic.ca/~mdadams/jasper) which is a core dependency of imagemagick. you'll be giving some poor distro-packager hell ;)