Diodon version 0.9.0 has been released today which is basically a maintenance release so it runs smoothly on Ubuntu 12.10. However, behind the scenes a few more things have changed.

For instance is there now a unit testing framework in place which I wrote about in a previous post.

What I want to introduce you in this post though is a start into a new Diodon era using Zeitgeist. You might ask yourself: What is Zeitgeist?

That’s a good question and I think best answered by the Zeitgeist folks themselves. So here is a quote from there website:

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users’ activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations had.

It makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

As Diodon is basically keeping a history of the last users’ copy events it makes perfect sense to store those events in Zeitgeist. Therefore is there now a Zeitgeist plugin (a so called Data Source) available for Diodon. You simply have to install the package diodon-plugins and enable the plugin by going to Preferences -> Plugins.

What this plugin for now basically does is storing a description of what has been copied at a certain time plus the path to the original application content has been copied from. It also points to a clipboard id. However as items currently get deleted when a certain history size has been reached, this id can not be used to execute a copy/paste event again. There are some ideas though for the future that it might be possible to replace the current xml based storage with Zeitgeist completely. This is however only an idea so far. This Diodon Zeitgeist Plugin therefore is a playground to really see what Zeitgeist is capable of and how well it works with a clipboard manager. So if you have any feedback where we can go further from here, please let me know.

Will keep you updated about more exciting news when it comes to Diodon.

Today, Ubuntu Precise has been released. Is this not a good time to release another Diodon version as well?

Well, here it is ;). This new release of Diodon, however, does not bring many new feature but is a polish of the application you are (hopefully) already used to. Changes have been done so it compiles smoothly in Ubuntu Precise with its new Unity Lens api. And now you should be able to use python plugins without any hassle as well.

But there is one small change which might interest you much more, if you often use Diodon on your laptop running on battery…

You might now ask yourself, what does Diodon have to do with my battery? Let me dive into this a bit deeper by explaining how Diodon works.

So to be able to create a history of clipboard items Diodon has to tell the clipboard that it has to call Diodon when there is any new content. Diodon will than add such to its history.

This works great for the normal clipboard which you use with Ctrl + C. Unfortunately the clipboard is not able to tell Diodon, when a primary selection has changed (an area on the screen which is selected by the mouse). To get around this, Diodon has to check in a regular interval whether the primary selection has changed. This works quite well on desktop machines and plugged in laptops.
However, imagine when your CPU wants to go to sleep and just before it wants to the interval is over and will check whether the primary selection has changed. This of course will wake up the CPU again. As this happens over and over again it will discharge your battery faster than it would be really necessary.

There is now good news to this. In Diodon version prior to 0.8.0 there was no way to stop this timer but closing Diodon. In this new version, however, you can simple go the preferences and uncheck “Use primary selection”. This way you can still use Diodon (of course whit the restriction that the primary selection is not added to the history) but not uselessly waking up the CPU and therefore saving power.

Here you can find the new version to be installed for Ubuntu Precise. Let me know what you think.

The new year has just started. And there is so much ahead what can be implemented for Diodon. Might it be a better GNOME3 integration or a thought about how Zeitgeist might be helpful.

There are also a bunch of ideas for different plugins. And I hope Diodon will finally get its own icon. (when you are a designer and would be willing to help us out here, please contact us).

We will see what of these things can be accomplished this year. However what I can assure you is that Diodon 0.7.0 will be released today.

It introduces a new key combination so the diodon history menu can be accessed just with one hand on the keyboard. You can read more about it here. Furthermore does this Diodon version also work together with Java applications. This has been a naughty bug and I am sure that quite a few people are happy to see this fixed.

You can install the new version with following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diodon-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon

Happy Diodon new year ;).

The development on Diodon has been continuing and I’m happy to introduce you to a new feature which makes accessing the indicator easier.

The idea for this has come from fatlp. Thanks a lot for this. You can find all details about it on this blueprint.

Up to today, when you wanted to access the indicator with your keyboard, you pressed and released <Ctrl><Alt>V and then used the arrows up and down following with Enter to choose a clipboard item.
This will still work in future releases. However in the new release (which is currently available in the daily ppa for testing) you can do the following:
Press <Ctrl><Alt>V. While you keep pressing <Ctrl><Alt> you can browse through the different clipboard items by pressing V multiple times until you have selected the item you want to paste. Now release <Ctrl><Alt> and the selected item will be copied to your clipboard and pasted (when enabled).
This of course also works with your customized key. The rule is that you keep pressing the modifiers and with the key you can browse through your history.

After I have been using this new key combination a couple of times I’ve already started to love. I hope you do as well ;).

I’m happy to hear your comments.

The last stable release of Diodon had been released quite a while ago. However the development has been going on and major changes now are ready to be released. Some of the changes have been discussed in this blog post

However here is a quick overview what has changed and what needs to be taken care of:

Release notes:

• Diodon has been updated to gtk+-3.0 and therefore runs only on Oneiric (or all other distributions supporting gtk+-3.0).
• gconf has been replaced with GSettings/dconf. All settings (except the history) will be lost after installing this version and need to be set again
• Unity Lens is not installed per default anymore. Install the package diodon-plugins and activate it in the preferences plugins tab. When building from source use ./waf configure –enable-unitylens-plugin to enable it.
• The Application Indicator is now also a plugin which is enabled by default. The plugin can be disabled in the preferences however.

Changelog:

• Implement plugin system using libpeas (LP: #826422)
• Unity Lens now runs on Oneiric (LP: #830001)
• Using libunique so only one instance can be started (LP: #870774)
• Update to gtk+-3.0 (LP: #794637)
• Fixed issues with gtk+-3.0 applications (LP: #879256, #875708)
• switching to GSettings/dconf (LP: #689462)

You can install Diodon with the following commands

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:diodon-team/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install diodon

This release also brought about changes which should make it easier to build Diodon on your preferred distribution. It used to be the case that Diodon required packages for the Application Indicators which are unfortunately not available on all other distribution.
When Diodon is built from source just running ./waf configure such packages will still be needed. However you can disable it with ./waf configure --disable-indicator-plugin.
Please notice when building Diodon with this option you can only use it with the Hotkey (<Ctrl><Alt>V per default).

I would love to see packages of Diodon for other distribution as well. So go for it :).
When you struggle building Diodon please contact us.