Tag Archives: ubuntu

Starting a new Diodon era with a new look and feel

It has been two years when the first version 0.1.0 of Diodon has been released. A lot of work has been done since when it comes to features but mainly to integration into the desktop. This new release is just one of those little steps to make Diodon better integrated and even more useful (see issues solved). And there are still many ideas to be implemented in the future.

Nevertheless is this new version of Diodon a special milestone and therefore I want to give it the version 1.0.0. This is mainly to its long overdue new icons set which gives it’s unique look and feel. razvi of iloveubuntu.net has summarized the significance of this change in this blog post which I want to quote here:

Usually, app icons play an important role on establishing the identity of applications, visual items that contain essential aspects of applications and/or shapes, colors, patterns, etc, designed with an easy-app-identification process in mind. […] Diodon has just been enriched with new icons, refreshing its identity and properly expressing itself via simplistic yet interesting monochrome icons, as well as adopting colored icons.

DiodonIndicator

As a celebration of this new milestone I think it is also time to start promoting Diodon even more. I therefore put a list together with possibilities for you to help out. And I am sure you will have plenty of more ideas.

  • Post about Diodon on your blog
  • You use another distribution then Ubuntu? Create packages for this distribution (I promise that I will soon look into making a package for the official Ubuntu repository).
  • Add Diodon to your software stack on Ohloh.net by using the I Use This! button.
  • Mark Diodon as “Like” on AlternativeTo and add alternatives
  • Now, there is also a Diodon user group on launchpad. Join in to show your appreciation to Diodon and also optionally take part in the mailing list conversations.
  • Or simply follow Diodon on Freecode

I am looking forward to see Diodon getting more adapted in 2013. I herewith also wanted to take the opportunity to thanks the Diodon user community for all the valuable feedback I have received and for you loyalty ;). Thanks… and have a happy new year 2013…

Diodon now with a zeitgeist

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.

Saving power with Diodon 0.8.0

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.

Happy Diodon New Year with 0.7.0

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 ;).