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.