I just recently released version 0.1 of my day planning app suitably named, well, day planner. It’s written in perl and uses the perl-gtk2 library. What I would like you (the readers of planet mandriva and/or my blog) to do is go test it. Poke it with long and small sticks, smash at it, punch it, hit it, kick it. I want the program to be as stable and usable as possible. Report bugs, report usability problems and report feature requests. I want them all, and all help is welcome.

You can find a day planner RPM in cooker or on the day planner download page (along with numerous other options).

Please read the day planner TODO list before reporting issues. It’s not that long :).

You may also be interested in reading the day planner vision.

In the beginning there was…blah, okay I won’t go that far. Though, the first host provider I used was SourceForge.net. I used that for three projects: GFSGL, GFSI and GoldenFiles. Mostly random stuff there, not too large projects.

Then one day I thought about this and well, using a proprietary website to produce and manage a free software project makes…well…no sense. So then I started looking at the alternatives. I landed on Savannah. My first Savannah project was GoldenPod. Followed by the (mostly dead) GoldenBackup (no link due to no website nor release, it does have a CVS though). Then followed by the common configuration parser. Then I had my disagreements with Savannah (as some of you might remember).

Then I started looking at GNA! which I am now using for my most active project, Day planner. Now what does GNA! have to offer that Savannah doesn’t? Well, it offers easier access to the downloads directory, I can simply rsync/scp stuff from my box to the GNA! download directory. It also has SVN which is imho MUCH better than CVS (I’ve never used Arch, so I won’t say anything about that). They also offer download/website statistics, something Savannah doesn’t. The only plus of Savannah I can find is some of their admins. I’ve spoken with a few of them and they where very nice, savannah also has an IRC channel (#savannah on freenode) which is rather nice. Though currently, I’ll take my GNA! without my Savannah if that is possible thank you very much.

http://www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/CodeMonkey.mp3

This code monkey like Lisbeth. Who do you?

Great song. For those lazy of you out there (yeah, there’s quite many lazy people that will read this blog post):

wget <a href="http://www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/CodeMonkey.mp3">http://www.jonathancoulton.com/music/thingaweek/CodeMonkey.mp3</a> ; mplayer ./CodeMonkey.mp3

I never before realized how useful it would be to have an entire operating environment inside my text editor! How useful indeed, it can even do my window management if I want to. Yes, I’m ofcourse talking about the ultimate text editor/operating environment/irc client/psychologist combo: Emacs! Today I switched to using emacs, and I haven’t looked back at that little text editor called vim, not once. Finally I don’t have to leave my text editor to check IRC! How useful. Now now, all vim fanatics, don’t rush all over me. Go try it! :)

I don’t see what all the fuss about XGL, GNOME and KDE is when we already have the ultimate operating environment and more in emacs. Due to this amazing discovery there will also be a special club-only version of Mandriva Linux 2007 called “Mandriva Emacs/Linux 2007” featuring a full Mandriva patched Linux kernel with Emacs as the default operating environment.

Edit: Yes, you should check the date before jumping to conclusions :)

Just found this on a jobs site at Last.fm. Indeed it is a plus! ducks and runs

Pluses:  

...  

- A preference for vi over emacs.  

...  

See http://www.last.fm/help/jobs.php

Since some people seemed a bit interested in my opinions on the various music players and music managers I’ll go through a few of them - beginning with quod libet.

The initial interface looks like this:

In my opinion its interface is less than elegant. It devotes almost the entire interface to the list of tracks available and a tiny portion to a playlist-lookalike thing called the queue. Searching the library requires a pop-up window which has to be dug out of the menu. I could not immedietly find any way to have it submit my tracks to my last.fm profile, nor did I find any way to make the player harvest album covers - not a requirement ofcourse, but it does look nice. Lyrics browser was also a bit too hidden.

Here is one screenshot of amaroK using a GTK/GNOME lookalike theme: Information about the currently playing album easily within reach and the lyrics are just a tab away. Here is the amaroK collection browser, it takes up alot less space than that of Quod Libet and is imho much more elegant and easier to use:

Now I know quod libet is suppose to be customizeable, but I couldn’t find a way to make it look this good, if you know one, don’t hesitate to comment (link a screenshot too perhaps?)

Note also that I’m a GNOME follower, which is why I want to look at the GTK and GNOME alternatives for something better or at least as good.

I’m currently using amaroK. Now that’s a great player, and software HAS to be great for me to use a KDE program. Now, I have a music player, sure. The problem I have with amaroK is that it’s a KDE app. It brings along kded and dcop. That’s the bad part, kded crashes, dcop brings along alot of junk during startup that I don’t want, and it’s QT - so it doesn’t look as good as my GTK apps. KDE software is fine for KDE users, but KDE software is too bloated and such for other users. I’m still using amaroK, but I’d wish I could get something more. Now flame me, kick me, punch me - I’m still not going to say KDE sucks. I don’t like KDE, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it. But it shouldn’t mean that I can’t be allowed to prefer GTK/GNOME apps over KDE/QT.

I’ve tried quodlibet, it might be good, but it isn’t what I want, doesn’t have the features of amaroK that I like, nor an interface as easy to use as amaroK. I like the amaroK interface.

Rhythmbox doesn’t provide the same as amaroK, it gets too much in my way.

Okay, this rant is over, don’t take it too seriously. I’m happy with amaroK, but I’d really wish there’d be a good GTK/GNOME replacement for it, but, there isn’t - at least not for me, there might be for you.

I’m tired of mozilla stuff (wow, you didn’t know that now did you). So I’ve tried the last month to get rid of Thunderbird the last few months, I tried Evolution, but evolution was way too bloated for me, and now I tried Sylpheed Claws.

It turns out, I like Sylpheed claws (all parts except the spam filter, I’ll get to that). For instance the filtering is better, I like the GNOME/GTK integration better. It can autodetect ways to create a filter from a message. Now, spam filter, that’s tricky. It has a spamassassin plugin. That’s all fine ofcourse, the problem is that spamassassin is S L O W. It takes ages to process one mail. If you’ve got any hints on how to get this horribly slow thing to work faster PLEASE comment :P.

Anyway, right now I’ve got rid of Mozilla completely. I’ve dropped Firefox and I’ve dropped Thunderbird. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are both good and solid apps, and I don’t hesitate to recommend either one of them to other people - but they are just not right for me.

I used the tools/tbird2syl.py script from the Sylpheed Claws CVS to convert my thunderbird mails to sylpheed claws in case anyone else wants to too.

Last attempt didn’t go as well as I’d want. This time however, I’ve switched, and I’ve used epiphany for around 1-2 weeks now. The addressbar issue got fixed by using an extension (uh, I’ll find the URL to it later - can’t remember atm.). The search-as-you-type is still there and It appears I’m going to live with it, rather that missing than firefox’s continued crashes. The last annoyance i listed was the lack of keyword based search, If I’m lucky this will get implemented soon - but I’m still alive without it and getting used to the Epiphany search system.

Anyway, I’ve switched to Epiphany now, and I’m hoping to stick around to it, I’m getting used to it and I like it. It doesn’t have all the broken stuff that Firefox had - good riddance to bad rubbish? ducks and runs

UPDATE: The URL ot that extension is: http://www.peteogrady.com/temp/epiphany-blank-new-tab/

ENJOYABLE SIDES I must say that Epiphany impresses me. Even though I did have to bring out the gconf-editor to be able to get the tab bar to always stay open, it does reek of user-friendlyness (for the most part, see the annoyances section below). Its sleek GNOME HIG-compliant interface is great to work with, and it does most of what it can to stay out of my way. Visiting a website with a plugin i don’t have it doesn’t pop up an annoying yellow bar on the top of my screen like firefox does. Yes Firefox, I know I don’t have flash or java installed, that’s intentional - now shut up. Another pleasant thing is the stability. Firefox just keeps getting less and less stable. I updated some extensions a week or so ago, and firefox is still waiting for me to restart it even though I’ve done that a gazillion times. I’m also tired of repeatedly having to reset my firefox profile. As an example, have a look at this output from my current ~/.mozilla/firefox/ directory:

[0 zerodogg@drizzt firefox]$ ls
hup50563.default/  OLD/  OLD2/  p84edble.ZeroDogg/  pluginreg.dat  profiles.ini

Yes, no less than three old profiles I’ve had to move away from, sad. Also I keep getting firefox to crash in all the bad places (that might be gecko, but I haven’t had epiphany do that yet). Besides, the profile management in firefox is extremely redundant on a real multi-user operating system such as GNU/Linux. The extensions management in epiphany is also wonderful. As much as I don’t like python, knowing that it has support for it is pretty nice. The adblock extension included by default works nicely (better than the one in FF with the filterset.G (or whatwasit), at least in my preliminary testing). The extensions management is definetly different from that in the mozilla browsers. The epiphany ones (except pythons ofcourse) are shared objects, and can’t be installed (afaik) the way the mozilla ones can. I’m not saying THAT is a bad thing, nor a good thing, but that the extensions I want is just a “urpmi epiphany-extensions” away is a comforting thought :)

ANNOYANCES

In my testing of epiphany I have hit the following three annoyances:

• The addressbar is not in focus when creating a new tab (MAJOR annoyance) - breaks use of the browser with the keyboard
• Lack of keyword-based search
• Lack of search-as-you-type

The first one currently breaks everything. I hate being forced into using a mouse, and that is effectively what epiphany Is doing. If I want to move to the addressbar when creating a new tab I will first have to create a new tab with ctrl+t, okay - fine with me. Second I have to press the following keys to get to the addresbar: tab-tab-tab-tab-right-right-right-right And If I’m on a website it’s even worse, I have to tab my way through all of the links AND probably do right-right-right-right-right. Having to press around 30-40 keys (my normal start page has at least that many links) just to get to the addressbar is just not acceptable. This is likely going to be the one thing keeping me from switching to Epiphany right now, I just can’t accept having to use the mouse this much. In my other browsers (FF, Konq) ctrl+t brings up a new tab with about:blank loaded and focuses the adressbar. Epiphany brings up a new tab, loads my start page (it wasn’t told to do that, if I want my start page I click the home button) and focuses the website portion. This isn’t really intuitive. Especially if you consider that the user already used a key combination (ctrl+t) to open the tab, thus you might want to assume the user wants to type in the address to open in that tab too without having to strech out for the mouse.

Second is that I see no way to do keyword-based search. This means that I can’t type “gl something” to google something, I can’t type “wp bah” to look up bah in wikipedia. This is not fatal like the addressbar, but it’s fairly annoying. Epiphany is a webbrowser, a good one at that, and especially good as it follows the standard UNIX philosophy of making one app that does one thing but does that well. The problem here is that search is currently such an important aspect of webbrowsing that keywords can be considered a part of the webbrowser and is definetly not something that could be better handeled in an outside app.

The third is also related to search, however in a different way. Not being able to just start typing when the addressbar is not in focus is bad. Is there any good reason that I shouldn’t be able to do this? If I just start typing then it is obvious that the keys aren’t used for something else. If this is perhaps unintuitive for people not used to it, I would still consider adding it as a option since it is such a well-known feature in browsers these days (my non-technical friends even use it).

CONCLUSION