New releases for xfce4-panel and xfce4-power-manager

xfce4-power-manager 1.6.1

After almost two years I finally managed to get around to release a new version of the power manager, including many bugfixes that have accumulated over this time over the original Gtk+3/GDBus port that is 1.6.0.

Users will mostly notice the improved support for Desktop systems (they used to have the “battery-missing” icon displayed in the panel plugin – a regression over 1.4.x, which handled desktops more gracefully). Those who also use xfce4-notifyd’s recent logging mechanism will notice that now not every power manager event (e.g. changing the brightness) ends up in the log, as many notifications are marked as transient.

xfce4-panel 4.12.2 and 4.13.2

Both the stable 4.12 series and the 4.13 development series saw releases of late.

4.12.2

4.12 saw a small feature release adding support for the much and often requested “primary monitor” feature of RandR. So when you now define a panel’s location as “Output: Primary” it will dynamically move to the monitor marked as “primary” through the xfce4-display-settings dialog.

The default value “Automatic” for the Output option remains, so users will not notice any invasive changes here. Also the behavior of this default option remains unchanged (usually pushing the panel to the left-most monitor – aka x=0/y=0 – by default).

4.13.2

4.13 also saw a release, introducing GObject Introspection support, which should enable people to write Panel plugins in different languages (e.g. Python). We still need a template for that (volunteers forward!) so people can get their hands dirty more easily, but I think this is a very nice addition.

Apart from this I fixed a lot of smaller and bigger issues in the panel’s core plugins (actions, clock, launcher, tasklist and systray) and the settings dialog can now again be plugged into the xfce4-settings-manager dialog.