e17 News

• E has a new shiny (figuratively :)) splash screen.
  
  changeset:41519

• Gustavo added an Aspell plug-in to the Everything module. This means it can now tell you how to write words correctly (in multiple languages).
  
  changeset:41536

• Raster worked around the 100% CPU batget issue. It now gets battery changes not as soon they happen, but only in a certain interval. A proper fix for very recent kernel versions is still wanted.
  changeset:41836

• He also is working on a successor of the illume module for small touchscreen devices, called illume2.
  changeset:41883

EFL News

• Enhance, the Glade/XML based Etk-GUI-Builder is unmaintained and has been moved to "OLD/". So has Extrackt which is based on Enhance.

• Raster did a big release of various EFL: Eet is now at 1.2.2 (new stable release, no API change but lots of improvements).
  Various other EFL have been release as snapshot 062, while Elementary is now at 0.5.1.0.
  See the announcement at  http://enlightenment.org/p.php?p=news/show&l=en&news_id=17

• Turran added two new EFL research projects to SVN: Ekeko, a object/property system and Eon, a canvas/toolkit system.
  changeset:41542

• Although raster didn't believe in it, Gustavo is still planning to merge Guarana and Elementary. There are still quite some hurdles to take and it will require time and a lot of help from other people, but it looks like it's going to happen. The first step will be a change in the Evas_Smart_Class system which is currently up to discussion on the  mailinglist.

• Cedric added the ecore_thread_run function to spawn threads that are well integrated with the EFL. This also features automatic detection for CPUs with multithreading functionality (also multicores and so on).
  changeset:41555

• Thanks to Dave Andreoli, Elementary finally has a neat file selector widget. Although it's in a really early state, you can already use/test it.
  
  changeset:41709

• Another new Elm widget has been added by Michael Bouchaud: progress bars. Really rare is that the bars can be also vertical and go from top to down or left to right and vice versa.
  
  changeset:41710

• Last but not least, Quaker added horizontal and vertical separator widgets.
  changeset:41911

• Brought to you by Hanspeter Portner, Edje finally received Lua support. This means you can now use Embryo and Lua embedded in your Edje files to do awesome stuff. In the long term only Lua will stay, so you better start using it. :)
  changeset:41802

• A long missing feature has finally found its way into the SVN: Eina can now count your hamsters.
  changeset:41727

• Mikhail Gusarov provided ARGB -> Grayscale64 conversion support for Evas. This should allow to render on gray scale displays like the well known e-Ink displays found in some eBook-readers.
  changeset:41825

• According to Vincent, ecore_config is going to be removed soon. Don't forget to change your applications.

Application News

• Exalt can now create ad-hoc wifi networks.
  changeset:41638

• Raster committed his Elementary-based presentation tool (you can find it in trunk/TMP/st/).
  changeset:41729

• Watchwolf is currently writing Elementary front-ends for Eyelight. Initial support for the editor is in svn.
  changeset:41819

i18n News

• According to Gustavo there are some problems for Arabic EFL users with Fribidi, so Arabic letters won't show correctly. This is caused by a too old Fribidi version, 0.19 is known to work.

Developer Requests

• Cedric added caching support for the _edje_part_recalc_single function in Edje. This is still not much tested and might cause graphic problems in applications using Edje. If you experience any problems, feel free to report them on the list.
  changeset:41663

Community News

• This year's GSoC is nearing its end with the evaluation deadline on August 24th and the announcement of the results one day later.

• The people of ProFUSION announced their newest project, an EFL powered car entertainment software solution called Memphis. It is based on their earlier multimedia project Canola2 and available completely under a free license with optional commercial support. Let's hope to see this deployed in a production car soon! In the mean time, check out the demo media on their site:  Memphis by ProFUSION

• Following some other projects in this direction, the developers of the Pandora handheld gaming console (which is actually rather a quite powerful linux based tiny notebook) are  evaluating e17 as their main desktop for the device.

e17 News

• Sergey Semernin finally has a SVN-account and can commit directly. He already started with committing the support for Gadcon sites (like announced in ecn200925) and a lot of E_Fm improvements.

EFL News

• Cedric added an optimization inside Evas render loop that reduces the need for a memset to 0 in surface initialization (taking the alpha channel into account). The accelerated DirectFB and SDL engines directly benefit from this chance, but the Software_X11 engine needs to receive some fixes to make use of the improvement. This change breaks the Evas API.

• He also plans to do a stable release of Eina this summer, because the TODO is finally empty. However, there is still work to do, and everybody can help! Developers of external EFL apps can do testing and reviewing of Eina, check the API (for consistency and correctness) as well as file and fix bugs in trac. Also the documentation is not yet complete and has still quite some spelling and grammar problems that should be fixed.

• pfritz did huge changes in EWL, some of which break all existing EWL themes. You can get more information in his blog:  http://pfritz.wordpress.com/2009/07/01/the-new-state-system-of-ewl/ changeset:41306

• antognolli is still working hard on EThumb which receives a lot of new features and improvements constantly. For example it is now able to create animated thumbnails from videos. changeset:41322

• caro renamed the old software_x11 engine to software_xlib in many cases because x11 can also mean the XCB as Xlib replacement. This introduces several API brakes (most in-tree stuff is already up to date).

• Andreas Volz addad a new modular C++ wrapper, called EFLxx, and moved the old one (EFLpp) to OLD. For more information about EFLxx you can check the EFLxx wiki article. changeset:41355

Application News

• rephorm did a rewrite of the well-known elicit tool. It is not completely ready yet, but works fine so far. You can get the code here:  http://github.com/rephorm/elicit/
  

• morlenxus did a new release of easy_e17. You can find the changelog and the script on:  http://omicron.homeip.net/?blog_id=66

• mekius replaced the Etk-frontend of Empower with an Elementary-frontend and bumped the version to 2.0.0 (plus a lot other improvements from Quaker) changeset:41298

Community News

• Noorul Islam is moving the old 'Introduction To EFL' guide *by Kostis Kapelonis) to the Wiki. You can find it (and help moving it) here: IntroductionToEFL

This is the first episode of the new Enlightenment Community News (ECN). ECN is your new regular source of information in the Enlightenment project. We will release interesting stuff over the mailinglist and enlightenment.org. This episode is not yet on enlightenment.org, but we'll get to this.

Unlike the current "News" section on enlightenment.org ECN will not do release announcements, instead it will contain interesting new things straight out of the SVN tree and the community.

If you are not only interested in reading the news, but also participating in writing it, feel free to take part at EnlightenmentCommunityNews.
Feedback is also highly welcome.

e17 News

• Sergey Semernin introduced support for different categories for gadgets. With this, gadgets can be set to work only in specified containers, for now either 'shelf', 'toolbar' (e_fm) or 'desktop'. It's not in SVN yet.
• jeffdameth added more plugins to the "Run Everything" module. It can now also open files, and more. changeset:41135

EFL News

• Cedric sent a patch that moves Evas modules to Eina. This will allow static linking, but introduces an API break. It is not up for discussion and not in SVN yet.
• According to Gustavo Ethumb, the Epsilon replacement, is now mature enough to replace the latter completely. He suggests all developers to use Ethumb now. Python bindings are not ready yet, but on the way.
• Vincent created an installer for EFL on windows. You can try it out:  http://packages.enlightenment.org/windows/
• André Pedralho announced the 0.1 release of the EFL-webkit port. Eve, the Enlightenment web-browser, already works with this version. You can find more information here:  http://tonikitoo.blogspot.com/2009/06/webkitefl-01-released.html

Application News

• urandom is porting Edje_Viewer from Etk to the new Elementary widget toolkit. The port is almost finished. changeset:41005
• watchwolf did a big update on his presentation tool Eyelight: it now uses standard 'edj'-files for themes and 'elt'-files for the presentation. changeset:41090
• quaker imported a new application in SVN: it's called Shellementary and allows you to give your shell scripts en elementary GUI (like Enity, which was moved to OLD). changeset:41141

Community Information

• Gustavo now maintains  http://planet.enlightenment.org/ and wants to make it an interesting section again. If you often blog about enlightenment stuff, drop him a mail with your RSS/ATOM link and category.