Gabriel Burt's Blog

17 Months Sprinting

2013-06-20T14:25:00.000+00:00

Two years ago, I joined President Obama's re-election campaign as one of the first engineers in the Technology department. I worked hard, learned an extraordinary amount from a host of fantastic coworkers, and was privileged to get to apply my craft to help re-elect the President.

After helping start the Narwhal and Dashboard projects during my first few months, I transitioned to lead the Analytics Technology team with Chris Wegrzyn. The Analytics department grew to 54 people, busy with managing polling, creating and updating statistical models, and analyzing any and all data to advise campaign leadership across all departments on program strategy and efficacy.

Our team of nine Analytics engineers created, curated, and maintained a 50 TB analytics database, uniting all the campaign's data into one place – letting us create, coordinate, and analyze holistic, data-driven programs.

Suddenly we could do things like notice a supporter had requested a mail-in ballot and assist them via email to ensure the ballot was cast and counted. We could analyze merchandise purchased via the mailing list, events, and the online store. We created a TV-ad purchasing optimizer that got us 15% more persuadable viewers per dollar.

We created a tool ("Stork") that connected our analytics database with a few key vendor APIs, Google Spreadsheets, mapping, and basic data processing features — and empowered analysts and state and HQ data staff to implement their own automated, data-driven ideas for helping re-elect the President. We released the tool to users when it had a single function, and let user feedback set the agenda for the next 23. We often added new features within hours of users' requests. Its functions were composable, and served as the basis for several of our own even higher-level tools.

Our process in Analytics Technology was partly agile, but mostly just keep-it-simple and get-it-done. Our team didn't have to be web-scale, we just had to be Big Data scale; instead of millions of web requests, we had 6-billion-row tables to join and keep synced, and 200 querying users (and dozens of apps) to keep happy. And mostly, we needed to move quickly to take as many creative (yet often simple, common sense) ideas and help make them happen while they could still have an impact. I think a lot of us wished we'd had just a couple more months, and oh what we could have created!

The Analytics Technology team; left to right: me, Bill Wanjohi, Christopher Manning, Chase Martyn, Erek Dyskant, Chelsea Zhang, Curtis Morales, Chris Wegrzyn, Zane Shelby, and Tim Trautman
We used SQL (oh, did we use SQL), Python, Ruby, Java, Hadoop, Postgres, Vertica, cron, git, ElasticSearch, EC2, DynamoDB, S3, SES, and much more. We were generalists, who built and maintained our tools collectively, who seamlessly multitasked on data ETL, Rails apps, database administration, GIS, data-triggered emailers, Hadoop jobs, and much more.

Some personal highlights of the 17 months included receiving extremely kind letters from state staff thanking the team for our work and our tools, giving a man the Heimlich maneuver at State and Randolph on the way into work, and shaking President Obama's hand:

What's Happening @Banshee

2011-05-03T03:01:00.000+00:00

@Banshee is finally on twitter, where we'll always keep you up to date and sometimes entertained if you follow us.

We also just released Banshee 2.0.1, a stable, bug-fix-only follow on to 2.0.0!

We've got 2.1.x releases scheduled leading up to 2.2 in September. We'll be porting to Gtk# 3 and dropping a bunch of legacy deps in the process, while still supporting users on older distros. I e-mailed banshee-list more about what that means and how we'll do it.

Banshee 2.0 is here!

2011-04-06T17:13:00.000+00:00

We are thrilled to announce the release of Banshee 2.0! It's the culmination of six months' work by 36 developers and dozens of translators, documenters, bug reporters, and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 1.8.

New Features:

Artist/Album Browser Track Actions
Play After Queue Options
Sleeker UI, Less Wasted Space
Video Subtitle Support
Lots of new devices supported
Amazon Cloud Player download support
Hundreds (277, to be exact) of bugs fixed, and dozens more minor enhancements!

View the release notes for much more information, or head straight to the download page.

The Banshee community has come a long way in the last six months.

We now support Windows in addition to Linux and OS X. Our Windows installer has been downloaded by 12,729 unique IPs.
We are donating $1,200 USD per month to the GNOME Foundation — that's over $15,000 annually, or 5% of GNOME's 2009 budget.
And Ubuntu decided to make us their default music player, joining the ranks of openSUSE and Foresight Linux.

Congratulations and many thanks to everybody who made all this possible! If you want to learn more about Banshee, how you can contribute, get in touch, get help, etc, head over to our website.

PDF Mod Update

2011-03-03T19:53:00.000+00:00

I haven't blogged about PDF Mod since Nov, 2009. We've had five releases in the meantime, including 0.9.1 just released today!

We have had tons of improvements and fixes, and one major new feature: bookmark editing!

We're up to 26 translations now, including 11 of our user manual!

As a reminder, PDF Mod can:

pull out (extract) pages from a document into a new PDF
combine two documents, or parts thereof
reorder and rotate pages
extract embedded images
edit basic metadata (title, author, keywords)
edit a document's bookmarks (aka outlines)
and that's it!

Links
tarballs, release notes, git, mailing list, irc, bugzilla, website/wiki

Canonical's New Plan for Banshee

2011-02-24T16:58:00.002+00:00

This is an update to my previous post. Canonical asked the Banshee maintainers to join a conference call about an hour ago. They announced their new plan, calling past proposals mistakes:

Banshee's Amazon store will remain enabled, with Canonical taking a 75% cut of all affiliate revenue; 25% on Ubuntu will now go to the GNOME Foundation.
The Ubuntu One store for Banshee will remain enabled by default, but now Canonical will donate 25% of its revenue to GNOME. They will now do the same for Rhythmbox.

Banshee Supporting GNOME on Ubuntu

2011-02-15T16:23:00.000+00:00

Background
The Banshee maintainers and community have been proud to support GNOME by sending 100% of our FOSS Amazon MP3 store's affiliate revenue to the Foundation. We're already on pace to contribute at the same level as a small company on the Advisory Board, $10,000 USD per year, and revenue is increasing every month.

Canonical's Proposals
After choosing Banshee as the next default player in Ubuntu, Canonical approached us, concerned with how our Amazon store would affect their Ubuntu One store. They proposed two options:

Canonical disables the Amazon store by default (you could enable it in a few easy steps) but leaves the affiliate code alone (100% still to GNOME), or
Canonical leaves the Amazon store enabled, but changes the affiliate code and takes a 75% cut.

Our Response
We are pleased that Canonical is willing to leave the affiliate code unaltered.

As maintainers of the Banshee project, we have opted unanimously to decline Canonical's revenue sharing proposal, so that our users who choose the Amazon store will continue supporting GNOME to the fullest extent. The GNOME Foundation's Board of Directors supports this decision.

The Banshee Maintainer Team
Aaron Bockover, Alexander Kojevnikov, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Amazon Affiliate Revenue

2010-12-15T22:24:00.000+00:00

Since late July Banshee has had AmazonMP3 store integration, earning a 10% affiliate fee. We're proud to send all of that revenue to the GNOME Foundation. Here is the cumulative revenue breakdown per store:

Amazon.com	$1185
Amazon.de	€315
Amazon.co.uk	£80
Amazon.co.jp	¥28
Amazon.fr	€70

That totals to about $1800 USD, all going directly to the GNOME Foundation! This accounts for about half of what GNOME has earned from Amazon in the last six months.

Our revenue has increased every month, too; in December we're on track for another record month! Find out more about Banshee...

Use Bugzilla Like a Champ

2010-08-16T18:22:00.005+00:00

Things that can eat up way too much time:

Given a bug id #, going to its URL
Searching bugzilla

To save time, frustration, and get more done (since it's no longer time-consuming and frustrating), I added a few, special bookmarks. They contain a keyword, which you can type in the URL bar to go to the bookmark, and a %s, which is replaced by whatever you type after the keyword in the URL bar. In Firefox, you can right click a bookmark and edit its Properties to add a keyword.

Here are the ones I use most, and examples of what you can type in the URL/Awesome bar:

Go to a bug: bgoid
bgoid 585112
Search BGO: bgo
bgo product:banshee os:windows
bgo product:hyena status:needinfo
Other search fields you can use
Search Banshee bugs by summary: bbug
bbug startup crash
bbug metadata

Enjoy!

GUADEC 2010

2010-07-20T15:41:00.006+00:00

Business
I'm giving a talk on Friday, July 30 at 10:15am. I intend it for people who want to start hacking on FOSS and GNOME projects but haven't found a way in yet, and those of all experience levels who want to learn more about hacking on Banshee in particular. Of course I'll talk a lot about the state of the project, and some of our cool new features too.

Pleasure
If you want to meet up in Amsterdam sometime Wednesday through Saturday, or in The Hague after that, [email protected]">send me an e-mail. I arrive in AMS early Wednesday with no plans.

Finally, a lazyweb request: if you have advice on prepaid data SIM cards in the Netherlands, I'd love to hear it.

Update
After taking the train to Amsterdam Central, I went to this Vodafone store and got a €7.50 sim card, €5 of call/txt credit (incoming is free, outgoing is 30 cents/min and 19 cents/txt) and a 50% off €10 30 days of data — so all told, €17.50. The guy spent 10 min or so fiddling with my G1 (dev phone) to get it activated, and then I goggled the APN info you need to enter manually: live.vodafone.com with username and password 'Vodafone'. Seems to be working great!

Banshee 1.7.0

2010-05-05T21:04:00.001+00:00

We just released the first of the unstable/beta releases leading up to Banshee 1.8. We are aligning with the GNOME release schedule for 1.8, like we did for 1.6. The Banshee calendar has the full release schedule. Our download page describes how to get beta releases. See the 1.7.0 release notes for more information.

One small new feature is the ability to switch sources quickly via the keyboard. You can type 'g' to activate the switcher, then type a source's name, acroynm, or substring of the name to switch to it — eg g then np to switch to Now Playing.

Busy Busy
There is a lot going on in the Banshee community! For example:

Alex Launi was accepted to Google Summer of Code to work on Banshee's Now Playing source, making it slicker and more useful. Banshee co-maintainer Alexander Kojevnikov will be mentoring him.
Mike Urbanski is working hard to get his podcast-ng branch merged into master, get it tested, and possibly replace the current Podcast extension for 1.8.
Paul Cutler is preparing to ramp up his docs branch work, adding in-app end-user documentation to Banshee.
I'll be speaking about Banshee at GUADEC. More on this later.
We'll be making very frequent 1.7.x releases, quickly getting contributors' fixes and features into users hands.

There will be dozens of other features in 1.8, but they depend on what piques contributors' interest and motivation. You can wait and see what makes it — or get involved and make things happen!

Beautiful Evidence of Committers

2010-04-02T02:09:00.010+00:00

Background

A couple years ago I got turned on to Edward Tufte's books about visualizing data. It's inspiring work, showing the value and beauty of data-rich visualizations that work at multiple levels. Since then, I have wanted to apply the principles he espouses in my own work, leveraging software for data processing and interactivity.

This is my first attempt. I wanted to visualize who contributes to a given project and how long they've been involved. I knew I had speedy access to the commit logs via git, but the choice of tools or languages to process and generate the display was harder to make. I opted to try using Perl (a language ingrained in my memory from using it at the LJ World) and HTML/CSS (ingrained from numerous projects and jobs).

The Evidence

I'm happy with the result. You can quickly see when people started contributing, and the changing rate at which they joined. And you can see how long any given contributor stayed involved. I generated charts for a few git repos I already had checked out, including Banshee.

This is a scaled screenshot of the rendered HTML output, which I encourage you to click through to since it has tooltips and is zoomable in your browser. The script is available, and barring bugs should work on any git repo.

Banshee 1.6!

2010-03-31T21:50:00.000+00:00

As scheduled, we just released Banshee 1.6.0! This release has been a long time coming, and we're really proud of it.

A more detailed backstory

We originally intended to release 1.6 last fall, but we got caught short on time, and ended up calling 1.5.1 a stable release so distros would feel comfortable picking it up, but of course the weird versioning has caused quite some confusion.

We continued the 1.5 series with 1.5.2 though 1.5.7 betas, leading up to this release: 1.6.0. The process really started 14 months ago when we branched off 1.4, and master became the workplace for 1.5. It wasn't even until after we branched that Alexander Kojevnikov, now one our most prolific contributors and a maintainer of the project, got involved!

Beautiful numbers

53 programmers contributed to Banshee 1.6 just since 1.5.1, and over Banshee's full history, 142 programmers have contributed. I think these are astounding numbers. And these don't include Banshee Community Extensions, which started two months ago today and already includes 15 extensions and 19 maintainers.

We fixed 265 bugs since 1.5.1 as well (over 500 since 1.4), added dozens of new features and enhancements, and had over 2,000 beta users opt-in to report anonymous usage data that we will use to make Banshee better.

Banshee 1.6

Here are some of the new features in Banshee 1.6. Read the Release Notes for more detail, screenshots, and enhancements not listed here.

Play Queue Auto DJ
Sync Device From Playlist
Grid View
Type-ahead Find in Track, Artist, and Album Lists
Automatic Scoring
New Shuffle Modes
Audiobooks Library
Library-folder Watcher
eMusic Importer/Downloader
Internet Archive Extension
YouTube Extension
Improved Metadata Handling

A community effort

Thanks to everybody who has helped make Banshee such a success! Tremendous thanks go to Bertrand Lortentz and Alexander Kojevnikov, who over the last year in particular have contributed countless hours writing their own patches and reviewing others', triaging bugzilla, being active on IRC and the list, and generally being great maintainers of the project. They have invested in Banshee, and the effect on Banshee's quality and the community's growth is evident.

You can tap into the Banshee community and energy in many ways – read Planet Banshee, follow us on Twitter, lurk in the #banshee chat room, subscribe to banshee-list, monitor bug activity, and keep up with the latest code. We're a friendly, productive bunch, so stop by if you have a question or idea, if you want to contribute or you just want to learn how you can make your own project better.

Banshee 1.5.5

2010-03-11T19:14:00.003+00:00

We released Banshee 1.5.5 – aka 1.6 RC 1 – yesterday, with a lot of bug fixes, polish, and a couple new features.

Gapless Playback / Playbin2

Banshee now uses the playbin2 GStreamer element. With this comes support for gapless playback, which is the default now for users with GStreamer > 0.10.25.2.

Grid View

We are debuting a new grid mode for our custom list widget, visible in the modified Album browser. It will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.

Album browser, now as a grid

YouTube Extension

This extension shows YouTube videos in the Context Pane related to what you're playing, and lets you watch them within Banshee. You can enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

Contextual YouTube videos

Banshee Community Extensions Update

We also released Banshee Community Extensions 1.5.5, including five new extensions: CoverWallpaper, LiveRadio, Magnatune, Telepathy, and Ubuntu One Music Store (not ready for users yet).

The Mirage shuffle/fill by-similar mode has been greatly improved. It's smarter, now looking for tracks similar to the last several you've played, and dissimilar from ones you've skipped.

Enhancements and Fixes

Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks
Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4
Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
Accept feeds with empty title
Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
Fixes to the OS X build

Plans

We are now string frozen in preparation for our 1.6 release on March 31st - so translators, full steam ahead! We might do a RC 2 in a couple weeks for additional testing and fixes. File bugs for any issues you find, and help us make Banshee 1.6 the best release ever!

Banshee Metrics

2010-03-03T18:18:00.008+00:00

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.

383	Ubuntu
33	source-tarball
27	openSUSE/SLED
22	git-checkout
20	OS X
16	Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.

223	en-US
51	en-GB
41	de-DE
35	unknown
21	ru-RU
18	it-IT
14	fr-FR
12	en-CA
11	en-AU
11	es-ES
9	pl-PL
8	pt-BR
6	es-CL
5	es-MX
5	nl-NL
5	sv-SE

About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

Banshee 1.5.4

2010-02-25T01:12:00.000+00:00

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar

Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned!

Other Notable Improvements

Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
Add support for Nokia N900 phones
Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
Fixes to GIO backend
Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Banshee Community Extensions

2010-02-18T05:39:00.015+00:00

Introduction

Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup.

Its source is hosted on gitorious, dramatically lowering the barrier to committing and sharing your code publicly.

This centralization makes things easier on translators and packagers, too. And users get access (without manually downloading/installing) to the fruits of the extension community's labor.

Creating a Working Extension in Minutes

It's ridiculously easy to make a new extension. Install Banshee 1.5.3 (including the devel package), or build/install the latest from git master instead. Then,

git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions.git
cd banshee-community-extensions
./create-extension Foo
make run

This creates, builds, and runs Banshee with your extension. Go to Edit » Preferences » Extensions to enable it, and see it appear:

We already have seven extensions migrated, and one brand new one!

AlarmClock
Awn
ClutterFlow
LCD
Lyrics
Mirage
RadioStationFetcher
StreamRecorder

And, we have 13 maintainers already!

We have bleeding-edge openSUSE/SLED packages available, and Ubuntu packages should be ready in time for Banshee 1.5.4 next week.

If you've been putting off some extension idea you've had, delay no longer! Read the full Extension Writers Guide, and get started today!

Thanks

Thanks to Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair, our fearless Ubuntu packager) for broaching the idea behind BCE, and to Bertrand Lorentz for teaming with me to get things to this state - in just two weeks!

Banshee 1.5.3

2010-01-27T21:52:00.006+00:00

We've just released Banshee 1.5.3, containing a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes.

New Features:

Sync device from playlist option
Type-ahead find in track, artist, and album lists
Optional cover art in lower-left corner
Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
Audiobooks library extension
Library-folder watcher extension
eMusic importer/downloader extension
GIO file backend, supports non-local files

Read the 1.5.3 Release Notes for the full scoop and some screenshots of the new features.

This release is what will become Banshee 1.6 and be picked up by distros; your help testing it and filing bugs is important and appreciated!

Try It

You can get packages for your distro, grab the source tarball, or follow the bleeding edge by trying it from git master.

Aaron worked hard to bring back the OS X build this release, too.

Digg It!

Banshee Release Schedule

2010-01-25T22:58:00.004+00:00

We are aligning Banshee's release schedule with GNOME's, at least for the next few months. Banshee 1.6 will be released the same day as GNOME 2.30, and we'll have three beta releases before then.

1.5.3 - Jan 27 - Wednesday!
1.5.4 - Feb 24
1.5.5 - Mar 10 - String Freeze
1.6.0 - Mar 31

I'm excited to try switching our schedule from feature and whim driven to time-based; I think it will be felt positively by everybody: contributors will know when their work will reach people, translators will have time to translate, and users can stop wondering what mixture of magic and bribes will cause a release to finally happen.

Subscribe to the Banshee development calendar, find out how to help test the latest Banshee, and/or contribute your creativity and sweat!

PDF Mod 0.8

2009-11-13T19:00:00.001+00:00

Contributors
Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Features

Add * to beginning of window title when unsaved
Can select more than one file in Open dialog
shift-ctrl-z now also works for Redo
Online docs now hosted on library.gnome.org
Add Invert Selection action

Bugs Fixed

Launching with relative filepaths in args works

New Translations
Bengali, Czech, Japanese, Russian

Translators
Alexandre Prokoudine, Daniel Nylander, Jorge González, Kris Thomsen, Łukasz Jernaś, Marek Černocký, Mario Blättermann, Og B. Maciel, Petr Kovar, Runa Bhattacharjee, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Takeshi AIHANA

More Info
See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

Banshee 1.5.1

2009-10-14T18:22:00.004+00:00

After another 4.5 months development, including contributions from 51 people, we have released Banshee 1.5.1! Shuffle Modes Shuffle by artist or album let you listen to everything by an artist or on an album before jumping to a new random artist or album. Shuffle by rating or score lets you shuffle through your songs, with higher rated or scored tracks being more likely to play. Thanks to Elena Grassi for her patch for the rating shuffle mode that got the ball rolling. Alexander Kojevnikov wrote more about the new shuffle modes on his blog. Auto DJ This new feature gives you the option to keep your Play Queue filled with endless music. It builds on the shuffle modes work, letting you fill the queue randomly in artist, album, song, rating, or score mode. As ever, you can manually add, remove, and reorder songs in the Play Queue — even while in Auto DJ mode. Alexander, the mastermind behind this new feature, wrote more about the Auto DJ on his blog. More Info Other notable new features include keeping the playing song visible, showing tooltips for ellipsized text in the main grid view, and support for WebOS and Samsung Galaxy devices. There were over 130 bugs fixed and 20 other enhancements added since 1.5.0. Read about them on the release notes. Visit our download page to try it out!

The Secret About Amazon's API it Doesn't Want Distributed

2009-10-12T17:16:00.002+00:00

Amazon's Product Advertising API (PAA) lets you search pretty much everything they offer. But on August 15 they started requiring that all requests to the API be signed with the developer's Private Key. Any client-side software using the PAA directly, including website scripts, Firefox extensions, and desktop applications, would have to distribute their Private Key to all their users to sign the requests. But as you would expect, the license agreement for the API states

a private key...is for your personal use only and you must maintain its secrecy and security.

Others have written about how the PAA license agreement bars its usage on mobile devices. But in fact, it bars it from any client-side software on any device. Or at least from software you want to distribute. You can work around this by hosting a server to sign requests for your users, keeping your Private Key private. But anybody could use your service, pretending to be your client software if necessary. And you could wind up signing requests for half the Internet. The signing requirement benefits nobody. It impedes developers, turning them off from creating applications to serve users and send customers Amazon's way. Amazon should acknowledge its mistake with this policy and reverse it. Thanks to James Vasile for reading drafts of this.

PDF Mod 0.7

2009-09-09T23:04:00.000+00:00

Contributors Romain Tartière, Bertrand Lorentz, Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca Features

View Fullscreen option
User docs translated into ca

Bugs Fixed

Build fixes for *bsd
Update recent files list after opening a document
libdir expansion issue fixed in Hyena, depends on 0.2

Translations

es (Andreu Correa Casablanca)
pt (Filipe Gomes)
sv (Daniel Nylander)

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more. I'd like to thank Bertrand Lorentz for doing the actual release!

PDF Mod 0.6

2009-08-18T22:04:00.001+00:00

Contributors Łukasz Jernaś, Sandy Armstrong, Igor Vatavuk, Bertrand Lorentz Features

Open in Viewer action that launches the default app (usually Evince)
Remembers last folder a doc was opened from
Remembers if the toolbar was hidden
Remember accelerator customizations

Bugs Fixed

Uses the XDG cache dir for storing tmp files
Does a better job of cleaning up tmp files
Fix bug with installing to custom prefix
Fix some zoom inconsistencies
Got rid of bundled binaries; Hyena is needed at build-time

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.5

2009-08-07T20:46:00.001+00:00

In the spirit of releasing early and often, here is PDF Mod 0.5, a quick three days after 0.4. Contributors Bertrand Lorentz, Michael McKinley Features

Password-protected PDFs can be opened
Page labels shown in tooltip, eg A-10, or iii
Undo/redo have descriptions, eg "Undo Move 5 Pages"

Bugs Fixed

Loading document doesn't block GUI thread
Desktop file validates
Process name set to pdfmod
Parallel make (-jN) works
make distcheck passes
icon-theme-installer included in tarball

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.4

2009-08-04T17:58:00.000+00:00

Patch Contributors Julien Rebetez, Igor Vatavuk Features

Insert external documents via menu/toolbar
Drag pages between open documents
Export images (jpg/png) working
Beautiful new icon from Kalle Persson
UI translated into 10 languages: da de es fr hr lt pl pt_BR sv ta
User docs translated into 5 langauges: de es hr pl sv

Bugs Fixed

No longer jumps to top on zoom or delete
Error messages are shown to user in popup
Scroll when dragging near the top or bottom
Clicking on select matching button works

See the wiki for information on the mailing list, IRC, downloading, git, filing bugs, etc.