I’ve been trying for a couple of days to figure out why a shaped window in Compiz doesn’t have a shadow. After looking through the Emerald and GTK+ decorators’ code, it seems that they only apply a shadow if the window has a titlebar decoration. This seems quite silly and limiting. Does anybody know of [...]

I used to use the same trick Rodney Dawes describes in Subverting Subversion. Yes, it was very annoying to have to set everything from a file every time, or from stdin.
Ah, but there’s a better way, and people new to SVN seem to somehow miss this valuable command.
$ svn propedit svn:ignore
Up comes your editor, just [...]

Another year come and gone. Hopefully everybody is out having a good time or recovering from a good time. I just finished up for the night and am planning to get some reading done before bed, but thought a quick blog post summarizing the year was in order.

This year marks my second year living in [...]

I’ve been planning on adding tab drag-and-drop functionality to VMware Workstation 6.0. Rather than implementing this ability from scratch (which I did with Gaim, and would rather not do again), I took the sane approach and started investigating the GTK+ 2.10 API for GtkNotebook tab drag-and-drop.
This is functionality that many applications have had to implement [...]

I’m very tired, so I’ll keep this brief.
I just put out libnotify 0.4.0, notification-daemon 0.3.5, and notify-python 0.1.0 releases. Most of the really annoying bugs people have reported have been fixed. More information is available on the news post.
I made a decision that will be unpopular to some, and I expect some disagreement on it. [...]

GTK+ and semi-transparent windows
Mike Hearn wrote a blog entry on writing GTK+ applications that provide semi-transparent Cairo-rendered windows. He suggests a SexyWindow class for libsexy, which actually fits in with some of my plans nicely. More on this… someday.

Galago 0.5.0.. Almost
Galago 0.5.0 is about to be released. I’ve said this for a while, but it’s [...]

Check this out (mpeg4, VMware video codec). Ahh yeah. David’s putting together some awesome code for tagging functionality in nautilus using Leaftag. Hopefully we’ll get it out into a release before long.

Luis: You wanted a taggable desktop? Oh, okay.
Announcing Leaftag, our desktop tagging framework. This is an evolution of the original prototype we created, originally named fstaglib (isn’t leaftag just so much better?).
The main part of Leaftag is a library called (oddly enough) libleaftag, which interfaces with the tag database. It’s GObject-based, and the API is [...]

Update: This is a general criticism of modern development trends. Despite appearing on Planet GNOME, and referencing a current debate, this is not at all specific to GNOME. The point listed below was more a maintainer screw-up than anything else. It’s not a debate on good usability, because everyone has different opinions on it, none [...]

I’ve been inspired by the December GNOME mockups. A lot of them are quite nice, and in the area of notifications, it had some good ideas on sprucing up the look and feel. So I present to you, notification-daemon v0.3.4!
Along with the usual assortment of bug fixes, I’ve improved the style quite a bit. There’s [...]