The 0.9.6 version is a really nice release. You have to get used to the new interface, but it’s nice. Check out the puzzle game mode!

• blog entry of my patch

If you have a reasonable new GNOME deskbar-applet, you probably use the calculator I, not wrote, patched. The main work I did was that it works together with the converter plugin (which is not distributed within deskbar-applet).
Anyway, GNOME (2.24) picked it up and the feature is on the release notes page of GNOME with a screenshot!
In the source package, you can find my name in the beginning of the file deskbar/handlers/calculator.py.
In newer distributions (like Ubuntu 8.10 for example), you’ll find my name in something like /usr/lib/deskbar-applet/handlers/calculator.py.

What this means is that my name will be on ten thousands to millions of computers, wasting space … haha ;-)

• blog entry of my patch

The thing that didn’t make it into a package is dualscreen presentations for evince (PDF viewer). It’s a cool idea, and it works.
But the patch adds a new window and has bad reuse, and is harder to maintain. Also, it has some usability issues. The patch and bug is in GNOMEs bugzilla, so someone else can continue the work.

• Changeset
• THANKS entry

I modified the deskbar handler “Files, Folders, Places” to also search in a user-defined directory. By default it only searches in your homedir, I also wanted it to look in my project directory.

Click the screenshot:

Here is the change as patch: deskbar-applet-otherhome.patch (patch, 5 KB), and also as full python file files.py (py, 9 KB).

You probably find the file to replace at /usr/lib/deskbar-applet/handlers, or just let “whereis deskbar-applet” guide you.

It is about presentations with multiple monitors (multihead, dualscreen). One monitor holds the presentation, the other shows a control window with overview on the left (current, next slides) and a large view for the current slide, or the notes on the right.

A screenshot.
Same in XL.

So far only a reorganizing patch is committed. I have hope though that it will be included in a future release.

GNOME bug for the feature

You can get the patch from the bug and compile it into a evince release (not too hard and worth it in my opinion).

Also we have bad quality videos:

• Previous version
• Good working version, shows a usable notes file: evince multihead presentations (ogg, 3,022 KB)

So far for the technical part.

To say the least, it is sooooo awesome to work in open source. Nice people everywhere, you can get help easily (you have and should have to work and learn things on your own though). Getting to know the inner works of these projects is a very good experience. I expect Google Summer of Code to be quite similar to the nice help and mentoring I enjoyed by nsh, KaL, jrb and others.

Also I can’t describe to you the feeling that maybe, in 2 years, your software will be delivered to a million users. So awesome.

Some Mac users will of course say this is all stolen from KeyNote. One could say: Um, having a different content on 2 screens is not particularly new (Xinerama). Having one as control for the other is not that far away. Also, the window content is really different.

But I would say … who cares about Mac users anyway :-P

Btw: If you wonder why I do not have a clock in the window … GNOME already has one. The window is maximized, not fullscreen to allow starting of applications you may want to show during presentations. The patch also works for more than 2 monitors.