New gnome-phone-manager maintainer

Seeing as I haven't given gnome-phone-manager enough love lately, Daniele Forsi, of gnokii fame, is stepping up as the new maintainer for it. Bug fixes coming your way very soon!

I'll still be handling the packaging of gnome-phone-manager in Fedora.

House arrest, or just document sharing

Yesterday and today, I wrote a chunky patch for gvfs to allow it to use the "house arrest" protocol for iOS devices. This is the protocol is rather more well-known as "iTunes documents sharing".

You can see a tedious example of how you can use it in this Apple KB.

For GNOME, we did it slightly differently, and you don't need to use your music manager as a file manager for your non-music device. Plug the device in, and all the apps that support file sharing will be showing up in a "Applications on Foo" device, on your desktop.

Managing files with a file manager, what a brilliant idea.

Bluetooth in gnome-shell

Even though I'm still gnome-shell impaired (waiting on 3D support landing for my Radeon video card), I helped out Giovanni Campagna into getting Bluetooth support in the gnome-shell.

My work was to review Giovanni's code for gnome-bluetooth, and making sure that the gnome-shell behaviour matched that of the existing GNOME Bluetooth applet.

A lot of to-and-fro, but the gnome-bluetooth changes are now in, and waiting on sub-menu fixes for gnome-shell itself. Owen was kind enough to provide me with a screenshot for your enjoyment.

Bluetooth in the shell

This wasn't my first interaction with Giovanni, as, in another long-winded bug, we hashed out the volume control shell icon. This work is already merged, and lives in gnome-shell.

Fedora 14 is out!

With the latest GNOME 2.32, go get it!

The new control-center and you

URI scheme handlers

In the past, handlers for specific URI schemes lived in GConf. This caused multiple problems:

• it would cause problems when 2 applications tried to lay claim to the same URI schemes (say both Banshee and Rhythmbox wanted to handle the "itpc" scheme), because GConf would expect only one schema (thus one application) to handle a particular key.
• when the key was set, by the preferred applications for example, the key would lack important information to make things like startup notification work (or even whether it works), the application name, icon, etc.
• and for schemes where a desktop-wide modules (such as gnome-vfs, as listed above) would own the key, you'd still need to add a separate file to have the application added to the Preferred Applications control-center applet.

We now use mime-types for all this. If you wanted to handle the aforementioned "itpc" URI scheme, you'd just need to say you handle the "x-scheme-handler/itpc" mime-type. This also means you could easily switch between applications handling a URI scheme, as you would a filetype.

You can track the feature, and its usage in bug 631433.

Non-panels in the dog house

For GNOME 3.0, the control-center "capplets" got turned into panels in a new shell. In addition to porting your old preferences application to being a control-center panel (see gnome-bluetooth, gnome-media, gnome-power-manager and others for a show-and-tell), you'll need to make a few changes to your .desktop file.

You'll need to add the "X-GNOME-Settings-Panel" category. If your dialogue is a panel, but lacks this category, it will show up under "Other" in the shell. If your preferences are not a panel but you try to cheat, you'll get a warning, and be removed from the shell altogether.

New sharing UI update

Even though the current status is best gathered from bugzilla, I'll post a few teaser screenshots to whet your appetite.

Sending to Twitter/Twitpic

Sending to Flickr

The interface will see a "folks" based sending item called "Contacts" at the top of the sidebar, and we should see some more services and devices appear as well, as libsocialweb gains support for them, and old nautilus-sendto plugins are ported.

More when those pesky upstream bugs are fixed.

libfprint project updates

As mentioned in my previous post, Bugzilla and translations project setup were still pending.

They're now all setup.