Day Planner 0.10 was released on the 25th of March! This release is, imho, a great step forward from 0.9. It fixes various minor bugs, cleans up parts of the UI, handles strange or broken iCalendar files better, enforces UTF-8 encoding on the calendar and adds a plugin system.
The largest new feature is the plugin system. Day Planner now comes with support for plugins, complete with a simple file format that allows users to easily install third party plugins. Its purpose is of course to make it easy for other people to alter the behaviour of Day Planner, or add features to it easily, without having to resort to patching the app itself, but also to make it easier for me to add optional features that perhaps not everyone wants (for instance, 0.10 comes with a tray icon plugin. It is disabled by default, but those that want to use it can do so quite easily). The API is simple, and somewhat inspired by the Gtk2-perl API, to make it feel somewhat familiar for people already used to signal-based programming.
The tarball comes with an example plugin, plugins/HelloWorld.pm that is well commented and explains how to do some of the basic things like hooking into signals, displaying simple dialog boxes and adding events to the calendar. The API itself is documented in DP::CoreModules::Plugin (access the documentation by running perldoc modules/DP-CoreModules/lib/DP/CoreModules/Plugin.pm from the base directory of the Day Planner tarball or git repo).
If you want to write a plugin, and need some help or pointers, feel free to join the Day Planner irc channel, #dayplanner on irc.freenode.net and I’ll be glad to help.
Git
As mentioned earlier, Day Planner is now using git instead of subversion. After I learned git I now greatly prefer it over subversion, and have thus moved all of my projects to it. Information on how to use the Day Planner git repo can be found at http://www.day-planner.org/index.php/development/git:
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First I gotta say: I love this program. Thank you for creating an easy to get to basic but very usable program to regular help me keep my plans with.
I tried to use the gna mailing list but FF is telling me ‘This Connection is Untrusted’ so I hope you don’t mind too much if I comment here.
I have a couple requests if it isn’t grasping too much.
1) Could the current day be highlighted in some fashion? I ask this because it always takes me a couple seconds to remember the day before I can click back to it (not sure just why :)).
2) Would it be possible to add an audible alarm option? Sometimes I can be off my computer so being able to hear it would help in these cases
I created a couple tray icons. I tend to use a darker theme so a created a couple calendars that are more mid-tone.
http://omploader.org/vM3Z5dw
http://omploader.org/vM3Z5eA
Please be free to use them if you like. I created them specifically for this app and they haven’t been used anywhere else.
Again, thanks for the great application.
Regards,
Todd (aka Gen2ly :))
Created a 48×48 png and a 24×24 png for the icons, and put them up here:
http://omploader.org/vM3Z6dg
Oh, forgot one thing. Could you add Arch Linux to your list? Here’s an icon if you need it:
http://omploader.org/vM3Z6eQ
Instructions are pretty simple.
Dayplanner is in the Arch User Repsository. You can install dayplanner with an AUR helper like yaourt:
yaourt -S dayplanner
Please be free to get back to me at my email address if you have any questions.
I don’t mind you commenting here, all feedback is helpful :).
First, if you’re having problems using the gna bugtracker as well, pleas use the new one on github: http://github.com/zerodogg/dayplanner – I’m going to be moving everything over there soon, so you may as well just report there :).
1) This is limited by what I can do with the Gtk2 calendar widget, as that’s what is being used. I know there are some people working on a better one in newer versions of Gtk2 that I’m thinking of switching to once it’s usable, at the moment though I don’t think I can highlight the current day in any fashion. The reason it hasn’t already been done is that it only provides a single way to highlight dates, and that is already used to indicate that there is an event on a date. What CAN be done however (and quite easily as well, by writing a plugin) is a menu item and hotkey to jump to the current day. If that sounds useful, feel free to add an issue requesting this feature, I need to be able to track it and it is also useful to communicate further if needed.
2) I’ve actually thought of this, and it’s mostly that time hasn’t been sufficient yet. Hacking it in should be trivial, but to get a proper implementation of it I’d need to find some lib to use to play sounds as well as free sounds to use. Feel free to open an issue for this too though.
Your icons are nice, but DP already ships quite decent Tango icons, so for now I won’t exchange the current ones for yours.
Concerning Arch Linux, no I can’t add it to the list, simply because it’s not a platform that I directly build and host packages for. All the distros that are listed on the website have packages available there along with instructions on how to install them, and I don’t run Arch so I’ve never built any package for it :). If you want to become a permanent contributor and contribute builds for each release I do though, I can add it to the list.
Thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming :).