Monday, August 28, 2006

Mathusalem

Now, here's an idea that should have been thought of a long time ago: Integrate a universal progress bar into the desktop environment.

Luckily, Steve Frécinaux's finally started working on it, and it's first implementation is called Mathusalem.

The author's breakdown of Mathusalem 0.3 gives a good explaination of how it works (and includes a nice screenshot).

Last week, version 0.4 was released and shows some more progress, including:

- Nautilus integration via extension.
- Improved Epiphany integration.
- Only show the status icon when there is an active task.
- Show a notification bubble on task completion/failure.

Very cool stuff, although I think it might make more sense for this to be implemented as a GNOME panel applet. Either way, the author knows clearly what he's doing, so he probably knows better than I. Google's Summer of Code is over now, but let's hope the author keeps developing Mathusalem - it's just too clever of an idea to let go to waste.
Another one to watch.
:)

If you'd like to keep up-to-date with Mathusalem, it can be followed on the author's blog here.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I has been thought up. KDE has had a uiserver since version 3.0.

Bobby

Albert said...

Hmmm, maybe I should give KDE another shot.

Do any apps actually use the universal progress indicator thingy?

Anonymous said...

No, it doesn't use it for anything else than KIO jobs currently. So, only things that move or copy stuff around are currently shown in it and they're displayed on a separate window. In trunk for KDE4 there is a new kioserver, which will allow adding other jobs to it.

Here's a screenshot what it was like at the beginning of this year, being the first screenshot about it posted by the author of the code: http://bp0.blogger.com/_8yFnt8Ks1Dc/RZr2Ska2BeI/AAAAAAAAAAM/Ntdeommj8IU/s1600-h/screenshot.png Don't actually know if it has been changed a lot since that as I haven't had time to test it yet.

Albert said...

Cool, thanks for sharing that. :)

Definitely something to look forward to in KDE4. :)

Anonymous said...

No problem :)

You may want to stay in loop with dot.kde.org and its Road to KDE4 series in case you're interested in what's happening in there. There are also other articles related to KDE stuff...