<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<sparkleshare>
  <plugin>
    <info>
      <name>Red Hat UX Team Hub</name>
      <description>Internal server for the UX team</description>
      <icon>redhat.png</icon>
      <backend>Git</backend>
    </info>
    <address>
      <value>ssh://git@design.bos.lab.redhat.com/</value>
      <example></example>
    </address>
    <path>
      <value></value>
      <example>/project</example>
    </path>
  </plugin>
</sparkleshare>

Save the XML file (ending with .xml, and along with the 24×24px icon) in ~/.config/sparkleshare/plugins and it will appear the next time you start SparkleShare. Granted, it’s not a very friendly way to add plugins, but I’ll work on that.

By the way: does anyone know how to make the secondary description line in the TreeView row 50% transparent and white when the row is selected? I guess I have to take the selection background colour and the selected text colour and then blend them, but I’ve no idea how…

Put some effort into revamping the SparkleShare event log this weekend. It aggregates all events from all your of folders into one window. Amazing. Much more useful and easier to see what what happened to all your projects during the time you were slacking off. Fantastic. Dealing with several windows felt a bit clunky, so now you can filter the list by using the dropdown at the top. Great. The folders in the menu now take you to the actual folders instead of opening a log, which is a much better mapping. Super easy.

Also added libappindicator support so it integrates well on Ubuntu with help of Bertrand. All of this will be available in stores when someone decides to package it.

Thanks for coming. We’ve got a hands-on area for the press set up. See you soon. Thank you very much.

Get the Linux an Mac versions fresh off the front page. There is a Mac binary available, but for Linux there’s still only source code. Hopefully the Linux distributions will make installable packages very soon. Please read the documentation before getting started.

Changes since 0.2 RC1

• Added support for Growl to show notifications on Mac.
• Removed the dependancy on GitSharp.
• File rename detection support in the event logs.
• Fixed all crashes reported in RC1 and improved sync algorithm.
• Redid collision detection and conflict resolving (use a copy of each version).
• Improved about dialogs with version checking.
• Pluggable backend (experimental Mercurial support).

Known issues

• For now, a central notification server (an irc daemon) is needed to notify clients of changes because there is no specific server side code yet. Only update infomation “Hey, there are new changes on the server!” is send. You can override this to use your own server by adding a <announcements>my-server.com</announcements> element to the appropriate folder element in ~/.config/sparkleshare/config.xml.
• The Mac version doesn’t have file manager integration yet.
• Resuming from suspend is a bit buggy. Restarting SparkleShare fixes it.
• SparkleShare won’t yet be notified of changes made to the git repository manually by using the command line tools.

Plans for the near future
I would really like to try and get more people involved to work on the Windows version (it runs, but it’s hard to get running and it doesn’t integrate well with the system) and mobile versions for Android and iPhone (these would be simple clients, able to browse your files on the server, download and upload stuff, etc.).

Now that SparkleShare’s backend is pluggable, I’d like to implement something based on SFTP or similar. While Git is very cool, it’s not always the best solution for storing huge files in. So there are problems to be solved there. Git support will definitely always stay by default though, because it’s the most awesomest DVCS ever made. The right balance needs to be found between having a history and not using too much space.

More ideas can be found on the wiki. Join the IRC channel: #sparkleshare on irc.gnome.org, if you’re interested in helping.

Finally…
…I’d like to thank all contributors and testers. Specially Alex Hudson, Bertrand Lorentz, Lapo Calamandrei, and Łukasz Jernaś. Thanks!

Now have fun and create cool stuff!

One thing I still don’t understand though, is this resistance to making things better: denying there is a problem, and trying to think of reasons why you should not improve things. This isn’t because “your design sucks” or “you should have done it this way”, those kind of comments can actually be useful to an extent. The kind of comments I’m talking about are the ones oblivous to the points made and those that just resist change for no good reason.

I bumped into it again on this article at OMGUbuntu! (the writer has good points). Sure this is OMGUbuntu! which can be considered the new Slashdot (comments) from time to time, but because this one was about the font install dialog in GNOME that was redesigned by me and Thomas Wood about two years ago, it reminded me of the same comments we got at the time.

I did a bit of quote mining. Now some of these could be taken with a tongue in cheek kind of way, but it wasn’t very clear. You can read the comments yourself too.

Um… Just drag the folder into Fontmatrix, confirm you want to install those 20 fonts, tick families to activate

I don’t know if you hunted those chocolate eggs, in my ~ the .fonts folder isn’t really far away. Just had to copy fonts there and update the cache.

how is putting fonts in folder called .fonts not intuitive? And setting up a preconfigured copy operation is very easy. You can even add this folder to your favourties on the left and just drag the files onto it…

On ubuntu just double click… Only power users have to install a lot of fonts at same time, and they’re smart enough to locate the .fonts folder!

A simple custom action in Thunar would solve this.

sudo apt-get install nautilus-actions

I always install fonts manually (both on Windows and Ubuntu) just because I like it.

kde has a font installer does what you need

You can install fonts via synaptic. There is a package there that has 500mb of fonts.

This article is really a non-issue unless you install twenty fonts at a time, in which case, opening a file manager is really nothing hard and much better than cluttering up the right-click menu.

I found the same kind of backlash (altough to a lesser extend) in my post about the first redesign.

there is (was) an easier way to install fonts in gnome just write “fonts://” in the address bar of nautilus and drag and drop the font you want to install

I’m confused. Why is putting something in /.fonts so hard? When I download a font, the archive manager asks me where I want to stick it. So I say, “Archive Manager, my good man, put it in the .fonts directory,” and it is done. And the next time I fire up whatever program, lo, there is the font.

Why is this, and what can we do about it?

Make sure to read the updated documentation for use on Github, Gitorious, or your own server.

The NEWS file: 0.2-rc1 for Linux and Mac (Sun Mar 20, 2011)

Hylke: A lot of fixes and optimisations across the backend. Less memory
usage, less crashes. Instant notifications of new changes instead of polling.
Refreshed event log HTML theme. Keeping logs in memory for faster reopening and
loads more goodness.

A more detailed list of changes, and roadmap, can be found on the wiki.

Important: On Mac, make sure to have a symbolic link to git in /usr/bin/git.

Get it here.

Here’s a list of some contributors who contributed significantly to GNOME design in the recent years (or even longer) who are not coders and do not work for Red Hat.

• Allan Day (volunteer)
• Lapo Calamandrei (volunteer)
• Garrett LeSage (Novell)
• Andreas Nilsson (Mozilla)
• Kalle Persson (volunteer)
• Andy Fitzsimon (Novell)
• Vinicius Depizzol (volunteer)
• Jakub Steiner (sure, Red Hat, but he did the majority of his work not working for them)
• Calum Benson (Sun/Oracle)
• Matthew Paul Thomas (Canonical)
• Nick Richards (Intel)
• Hylke Bons (me, Intel)
• I’m probably forgetting a few… apologies, but the point has been made.

We hang out in #gnome-design on irc.gnome.org, along with the Red Hat designers and great GNOME hackers. There is no cabal. All design decisions happen in the open. We do not feel like competing with each other, but we want to collaborate and have fun on creating the future instead. Join us!

If you decide to give it a go, please make sure to read the documentation first, as the way of setting it all up isn’t very user friendly yet. You can download SparkleShare for Mac here.

Special thanks to the MonoMac team, for making native applications on the Mac a breeze!

UPDATE: Forgot to mention: you need to have Git, or a symbolic link to it, in /usr/bin/git.

The NEWS file:

0.2-beta2 for Mac (Sat Feb, 2011):
Hylke: Mac version! Massive restructure of the code to an MVC-like model
to make building different front-ends easier. Ported the event logs to
Webkit, so users can style it to their liking. It also reduces the amount
of UI-porting that needs to be done between toolkits.

We’ll meet up at 19:00 at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese for a few pints, then food afterwards.