Author: Simon Steinbeiß

This release came a bit sooner than expected, but it’s primary goal is to fix a showstopper regression which slipped into 0.3.1 and practically rendered xfce4-notifyd useless on systems with Gtk+3 <=3.18 (i.e. not showing any notifications). Thanks to Olivier for noticing immediately and posting a patch!

But while this had to be a fast release I still managed to put in some feature-goodness. For instance I came through on my promise to add more default themes and in this release I added “Retro” and “Bright“.

The biggest feature in this release however is the support for symbolic icons. For those of you who haven’t heard of the feature before: it’s basically Gtk+ coloring your icon with the color of the font of that particular context, so the icon will color-wise match the font. This is especially useful for monochrome icons and (usually) prevents white-on-white scenarios. It also gives users and theme-makers more freedom (instead of having a “dark panel” or a separate “dark notifications” variant of an icon-theme). Note that your notification-sending application also has to request a symbolic icon, xfce4-notifyd is not enforcing symbolic icons.

Another notable fix (that I forgot to mention in the release notes) is the fix of styles of the progressbars in notifications. Those were not styled according to the notifyd-theme selected but always used the style of the base (as in: screen-wide) Gtk+ theme.

Finally, a minor improvement is that all themes are now sorted alphabetically in the Settings Dialog.

With this bugfix release out of the way it won’t be long until I merge my feature branch and get more testing for the “Do not disturb” mode.

Enjoy!

More good news in notification-land: I just released a new version of xfce4-notifyd – aka 0.3.1 – which fixes some nasty issues, amongst others

• memory leaks (thanks Tony!)
• an issue which caused build problems on Gtk<=3.18 systems (thanks Michał!)

I also added a Help button which links to the docs I wrote for notifyd a while ago: http://docs.xfce.org/apps/notifyd/start

I hope this will make 0.3 smoother in everyone’s daily usage and the Gtk+3 port more regression-free.

Read more here: https://mail.xfce.org/pipermail/xfce-announce/2016-September/000457.html

Upcoming changes

On the plate for the next release are more default themes (hint: “Retro” has already been pushed to git master) and potentially the per-application settings and “Do not disturb” mode which I previously teased. The latter might also warrant a major version number bump so we’ll see whether it’ll really end up in 0.3.2.

Stay tuned!

As previously announced I’ve been working on per-application settings and a “Do not disturb” mode for xfce4-notifyd, which is Xfce’s notification daemon.

Finally I’ve come to a point where I’m ok with pointing to the code and encouraging people to try it and spot potential issues with it. As both of these features have been long-time requested I hope it’ll make quite a few people happy. I know I’ve been quite happy myself since I can use it 🙂

The way that the “known applications” are handled by xfce4-notifyd is that they are remembered once they have sent a notification. This means that you can only mute applications which have – at some point since you’ve been running the code from the branch – actually sent notifications. I’ve been previously thinking about trying to collect all potential candidates somehow but this turned out too pesky and personally I think most users will want to mute those applications that send notifications often and those will quickly appear in that (alphabetically sorted) list.

Caveats: Some of this isn’t final – I might still be updating the wording on some of the labels or even some of the functionality might be amended a little, but generally I’m quite pleased with how things are working. Furthermore there may be memory leaks, I just haven’t had the time to really get to that (bugreports and patches are warmly welcomed ;)).

If you have feedback or suggestions please feel free to add some comments to this post or contact me on other communication channels.

So here’s the code: https://git.xfce.org/users/ochosi/xfce4-notifyd/log/?h=private/per_app_settings

Related bugreports:

• https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8069
• https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12172
• https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7437

So I’ve been busy lately porting Xfce apps and components to Gtk+3 (you can see on the roadmap page for 4.14 that we’ve come some way already – only the really uncomfortable behemoths are missing 🙂 ) and since I’ve been working on apps which I haven’t touched before (and which haven’t really seen much or any development in a while).

I thought I’d do a quick overview of some of my recent activities so everyone knows Xfce is still alive.

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  clipman

I have ported clipman to Gtk+3 mostly as an exercise, to get back to coding and to re-acquaint myself with the “fun” that is porting to Gtk+3 (including the obligatory #ifdefs for different Gtk+3 releases).

I didn’t really have the energy to add any new features there (apart from general Gtk+3 stuff like symbolic icons, which is nice for the panel plugin), but it had the intended effect for me plus Eric and Florian helped out, which made it more fun. In the end we even got Steve to sit down and crank out a very nice fix for an extremely widespread issue in Xfce.

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  notifyd

Basically Ali did all the hard work of porting notifyd to Gtk+3. I was left with the hard work of polishing the edges and making it release-ready (which ended up being much more work than I anticipated and now that I’m mostly familiar with the codebase I’ve also started to add – for now: small – features). So yeah, 0.3.0 is out! Hooray! 🙂

I also managed to write down some basic docs for notifyd (they’ll be linked to in the 0.3.1 release) which also explains the theming aspect a little bit.

For now I’ve planned some features – we’ll see when and if I get to them, but amongst others:

• “Do not disturb” mode (still have to figure out where and how to display the “missed” stuff or whether to bother with that at all)
• More themes by default (currently we only have good ‘ol Smoke and evergreen ZOMG PONIES!)
• More bugfixing
• Better docs

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  settings

This is actually Sean’s project and he already ported most of the dialogs (only display missing at the time of writing) and this is really exciting as it is one of the core components. Can’t wait to install this beast on a productive machine to see what will happen 🙂

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  libxfce4ui

I didn’t do much here apart from handling the release and fixing the theming of XfceTitledDialog for Gtk3.20 (and below) in accordance with the Gtk+ Devs (still unreleased, will come with libxfce4ui-4.13.1). Generally speaking now that Glade support is fixed and we have working dialogs I guess there’s not much more to do in that lib (I may be wrong though).

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  terminal

This is Igor’s playground now, I merely helped with porting the settings dialog and getting rid of some rough edges there. I’m using the Gtk+3 port of the terminal on a daily basis though and am very happy with it – nice work Igor! 🙂