Another update

January 11, 2013

After some period of inactivity here, due various obligations and increased work on EDE, I'm putting a short list of completed changes; some of them are visible and some not.

First the biggest one: a big overhaul of window container inside panel (the place where window icons/buttons are hold). In previous iteration, every window list change, which is emitted by window manager, would trigger buttons cleanup and recreation; not very efficient because this would make many C++ new/delete calls.

Now, those calls were dramatically reduced by tracking window states and desktop position, outside window list received from window manager; this also fixes one bug that annoyed me for some time: when you would focus window by clicking on window titlebar, order of window buttons inside panel would be changed. This is probably pekwm optimization for faster access of top level windows.

The next one is tray icon removal fix: when you had a bunch of apps inside tray and after you did some manipulation with them (close app, reopen and such), tray would leave empty boxes around. No more ;)

jam, a tool for building EDE and edelib, is now bundled with edelib. Beside it is easier to install it on platforms where is not installed (just go to edelib/tools/jam and hit make && make install), it is much easier to fix issues in it and distribute those fixes; you always get updated version with fresh edelib release.

Also, the last but not least, EDE and edelib are updated to compile and work on OpenIndiana, a fork of OpenSolaris. I'm not sure why, but I always get warm feeling around Solaris-es, no matter if they aren't popular much these days.

Upcomming planned changes should be mostly related to EDE Manual transfer to wiki and adding configuration for panel.

Manual is quite incomplete and will be much easier to update it (and contribute with proofreading and fixes) on wiki. Also, this will make code lighter (bundled asciidoc will be removed) making default EDE non dependable on python; however, to build icon theme you will still need it, unless you are using official releases, where theme comes already prepared).

Panel configuration is must feature before 2.1 release because it is often requested feature. Some people would like any kind of configuration and some GUI frontend; I'll see how can be added without delaying release 2-3 months more.