22 August 2004

Alright, alright, here it is, my triumphant return.

Larry, Trow and I did some F-Spot hacking this week, and built a super-cool quick preview feature. Hold down ALT as you move over the photos and a little preview window appears. This is great for me, because I can never tell if a picture is any good from the tiny thumbnails, but big thumbnails mean you get fewer pictures on the screen and double-clicking the image to switch into single-image mode takes too much time.

“Get it out! Get it out!”

F-Spot in general is really coming along. It now has a timeline widget and can publish directly to gallery. Larry finally started hacking on it full-time a couple weeks ago.

I wrote a systray applet that uses XRANDR to change your screen resolution.

Especially handy when you need to use a shitty projector that only supports 1024x768, which is most of them.

.And of course Joe and Robert’s netapplet is a god-send for laptop users like myself. Two clicks to switch between ethernet and wireless, or to change wireless networks.

Earlier this week I made the little icon at the top show signal strength when you’re on a wireless network.

And in other hacking news, today I spent some time on my activity-tracking tool, timeline. People laughed at me for writing it in shell originally, so I redid it all in C# and built a systray applet that displays how long you’ve been running the current application, and can show you a pie chart of your application use patterns. Trow wrote the PieChart widget.

The sampled data is much richer than what’s shown; you could conceivably do things like watch quick-switches between windows and figure out that someone is using two different windows for the same task (e.g. consulting a web page while writing a document). All of the observed activity is logged into a file; we might try to use it for some usability studies at some point.

This week I held most of my meetings using Skype and VNC.