With life work getting in the way, it’s been impossible for me to further maintain F-Spot. Fortunately, Stephen Shaw has offered to pick up the task. Expect new stuff soon.

Alternatively, check out Shotwell, which has been making excellent progress lately.

The GNOME file manager makes it trivial to open a terminal at your current location, if you have the nautilus-open-terminal package installed:

Going the other way around, from terminal to GUI is also easy:

• Open current folder in file manager: nautilus .
• Open any file with default application: gnome-open myfile.xyz

If you’ve grown into this habit, you’ll feel lost whenever you need to use a Mac. No such option in the file manager and no gnome-open command (obviously).

Don’t worry though, it’s all possible. Here’s how.

Opening a terminal at the current folder
Opening a terminal at the current folder requires you to make a small change to the preferences. Open the keyboard preferences, go to services (on the keyboard preferences page) and enable the two services shown below:

Once you’ve done that, you can simply right-click any folder and find the option under the services menu:

Opening any file from the file manager
Need to open an image from the command-line? Or a PDF? Or any other document. Simply use open: open myfile.xyz

To open a finder window and show the file in the file manager, use the -R (reveal) flag: open -R .

At least now you can switch back and forth between command-line and GUI quickly. Try Homebrew if you need to install your favorite missing tools.

The main goal of this session is to give our Google Summer of Code and Outreach Program for Women students a forum to show what they’ve been working on in the past few months. Your feedback and support will be very much appreciated by them.

Be there or miss out on the future!

If you would like to know what our future rockstars are doing, this is where you should be heading! The session takes place on the first day, Saturday August 6, between 5:15PM and 6:00PM in the Audimax room.

To students that are still in doubt: Having done two Summer of Codes as a student myself, I can only conclude that this is probably the nicest way to earn some bucks as a student. Fun and interesting. The deadline for idea submission is approaching fast, but there’s still plenty of time to write-up a proposal. Talk to a maintainer and please work on top of an existing project rather than building something new.

I myself won’t be able to take up the mentoring of a student as I’m too busy founding a company (but that’s the subject of a future post). Now go submit your ideas and prepare for an awesome summer!

Awesome.

More info on his weblog.

Some highlights:

• A fix for the rather annoying “Value is greater than Int32.MaxValue or less than Int32.MinValue”-bug.
• A fix for the “DateTime.DaysInMonth”-crasher.
• Loads of fixes to improve the handling of CR2 files.

Contributors to this release (developers):

Martin Slota, Nuno Ferreira, Paul Lange, Paul Wellner Bou, Ruben Vermeersch, Tim Howard

Contributors to this release (translations, documentation):

Andrej Žnidaršič (Slovenian), Bruno Brouard (French), Carles Ferrando (Catalan (Valencian)), Cheng-Chia Tseng (Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan)), Christian Kirbach (German), Damyan Ivanov (Bulgarian), Daniel Mustiele (Spanish), Gabor Kelemen (Hungarian), Hannie Dumoleyn (Dutch), Inaki Larranaga Murgoitio (Basque), Joe Hansen (Danish), Jonh Wendell (Brazilian Portuguese), Jorge González (Spanish), Lucian Adrian Grijincu (Romanian), Maetinee (Thai), Mario Blättermann (German), Matej Urbančič (Slovenian), Mattias Põldaru (Estonian), Victor Vislobokov (Russian), Yaron Shahrabani (Hebrew), Yoshizumi ENDO (Japanese), Zdenek Hatas (Czech)

Many thanks to all involved! Full details can be found in the release announcement.

Update: Due to a small bug that slipped through in the release process, we had to roll 0.8.2 immediately afterwards. Sorry for that. Second release announcement.

Many months ago I started contacting all F-Spot contributors and now I am happy to announce that the process has been completed: F-Spot is now licensed under the MIT X11 license.

This allows us to freely share code with e.g. the Banshee project. In the long run it will mean less code duplication, more sharing and more awesomeness crossing over between the projects. Let the fun begin!

Some highlights in the new version

• A completely new import system, which solves most of the crashes and memory-hunger of the old one.
• A switch to Taglib#, which brings much more robust and safe metadata handling.
• New and improved duplicate detection.
• Reparenting (combining photos as versions of each other) with drag / drop.
• Completely new documentation.
• A remove from camera option.
• Monodevelop support.
• Photo panning using the mouse.
• Stability, performance, memory and usability fixes in a lot of places.

Full details can be found in the announcements of the unstable versions: 0.7.0, 0.7.1, 0.7.2, 0.7.3.

The future
We will continue to work on the 0.8 series and provide enhancements and bug-fixes for a long period of time. No new features will be added here, but we will put an effort into fixing existing problems. This ensures that there is always a working and good version of F-Spot available for end-users. In the mean time we start working on big and radical changes in the master branch of git, with periodical 0.9 development releases.

Getting the code
This release should become available through your normal distribution packages. For those who can’t wait: you can get all of this goodness through GNOME FTP, the OpenSUSE build service or the F-Spot team PPA (packages will be up shortly). More info can be found in the release announcement.

A word of thanks
None of this was possible without the army of people that helped building this:

Ademir Mendoza, Alex Launi, Anton Keks, Bertrand Lorentz, Christian Krause, Christopher Halse Rogers, Daniel Köb, Eric Faehnrich, Evan Briones, Gabriel Burt, Harold Schreckengost, Iain Churcher, Iain Lane, Lorenzo Milesi, Łukasz Jernaś, Mike Gemünde, Mike Wallick, Nick Van Eeckhout, Paul Lange, Paul Wellner Bou, Peter Goetz, Ruben Vermeersch, Tim Retout, Tomas Kovacik, Trevor Buchanan, Vincent Pomey, Wojciech Dzierżanowski

Special kudos to the translators (we have 12 fully complete translations and 37 translations with over 80% coverage):

Andika Triwidada (Indonesian), Andrej Žnidaršič (Slovenian), Aron Xu (Simplified Chinese), Bruce Cowan (British English), Bruno Brouard (French), Cheng-Chia Tseng (Traditional Chinese (Hong Kong and Taiwan)), Christian Kirbach (German), Claude Paroz (French), Daniel Nylander (Swedish), Filipe Gomes (Portuguese), Fran Diéguez (Galician), Gabor Kelemen (Hungarian), Joe Hansen (Danish), Jordi Mas (Catalan), Jorge González (Spanish), Kjartan Maraas (Norwegian bokmål), Mario Blättermann (German), Mattias Põldaru (Estonian), Michel Recondo (Brazilian Portuguese), Miloš Popović (Serbian), Sira Nokyoongtong (Thai), Wolfgang Stöggl (German), Xandru Armesto (Asturian), Yoshizumi ENDO (Japanese), Zdeněk Hataš (Czech), Милош Поповић (Serbian)

In this release you will find more bug fixes and some small improvements, but in general it should be a stable evolutionary release: if 0.7.2 was working well for you, than this one should not give you any trouble either.

Please give this some testing and report your findings in bugzilla. We will continue to maintain this series after the 0.8.0 release, but anything that can be fixed before is nice.

Getting the code
You can get all of this goodness through GNOME FTP, the OpenSUSE build service or the F-Spot team PPA (packages will be up shortly). More info can be found in the full release announcement.