Author Archives: Marco Martin

Soviet videogames

BlaBla

Today I saw this, and it remembered me that little gem i had since centuries: it’s an Elektronika IM-50, an old (around 1992) russian clone of the Nintendo Game&watch or the Tiger (that was the most popular here in Italy when I was a kid).

It’s a Russian clone that I have absolutely no idea where it came from, but after all is very nice to play.

Elektronika IM-50

You have a starship, that is painted on the screen and little evil ufos come from four directions and you can neutralize them by placing a little parabolic antenna in one of 4 places of the ship (operated by these four round buttons), if you miss a flying saucer you lose a life, that’s it.

Polyester 2: the mighty future!

BlaBla

I’ve started porting Polyester to qt4/kde4, it has been a nightmare even to get it compiled and it will be a very very big pain in the ass.
Curious to see a very very early screenshot? here it is 🙂

Polyester kde4as you can see at the moment the only things that looks decent are the buttons, the rest is a little bit… aehm 🙂

Polyester 1.0.1

Graphics

Yeah, it’s alive :). Finally i’ve decided to release a new version of Polyester. it contains only some minor bugfixes, in particular the long-annoying bug with kcompmgr should be gone (sometimes the windows weren’t completely painted).

As usual here you can download it and here it’s the changelog:

-corrected a build problem with automake 2.6+
widget:
 -better management of the menu stripe width
 -another hack for gtk-qt: the menu stripe is always off (yeah, it’s a broken solution but it was managed too bad…)
 -when both toolbar separators and menubar emphasis with border are turned on don’t draw an extra line under the menubar
deco:
 -when the focus policy is set to “focus follows mouse” the bad flickering should be done (need some testing)
 -corrected a bug that caused the windows not being completely painted when kcompmgr is activated

Tasty Menu 0.8.1

Software

Fixed a nasty bug i’ve introduced in 0.8 with drag and drop (if you try it on recent documents or the other lists it destroys the favourite list, LOL :P), but most important i’ve added a german translation made by Jannick Kuhr (thanks:D).
Grab it from the usual place.

Tasty Menu and other things

Software

As I said in the previous post I consider Tasty Menu more or less complete respect the goals I had in mind. I probably will do some other releases tweaking here and there.

Probably this will be a better drag and drop support (from the menu to the desktop and from the second/third column to the first), fixing the ton of bugs I surely have introduced right now, maybe I will add a way to clear most used and recent used apps, some more configurability and who knows, to make the search functionality a little bit less painfully slow (/me begins to doubt that I will achieve to do that :P).

I still haven’t decided if there will be a kde4 port, partly because the spare time is always decreasing and mainly because Tasty Menu is very deeply tied to the qt3/kde3 technology. The listview api has totally changed (yeah, i know there is the qt3 support module but it’s so uncool:P)and of course the whole kicker thing is gonna being killed, and the (plasma?) replacement is in the early beginning. So it would be more a total rewrite than a port, so I don’t know if it will be worth the effort.

As I said I haven’t decided yet, so don’t desperate, there is still a little door open 😀

In the next few months I will be totally drown in courses exams and various university stuff, so probably there won’t be much releases of both Tasty Menu and Polyester.

Now I plan to make some more plain bugfix releases for both things (especially Polyester that has been negleted for a long time) and when (or if :P) I will have some more time there probably will be a Tasty Menu 1.0 release and maybe I will start the hyper-procrastinated qt4 port of polyester (and I ffear this also will be a very long work with more rewritting from scratch that I would like to)

Tasty Menu 0.8

Software

This update brings a big bunch of new features, including an initial rudimentary drag and drop support that i’ve procrastinated since version 0 :), probably i will do only few minor updates in the future (little explanation in the next post).
You can download it from the usual place.

The somewhat bigger changelog than usual:

-Favourite applications list can be rearranged via drag and drop
-new installed programs notification should be more reliable (some inspiration from Kickoff :P)
 -it finds also programs installed by other users
 -old programs shouldn’t be no more erroneusly listed
-updated russian and italian translations
-when there is only one search result, pressing enter executes it (and the search terms are cleared)
-added button to clear the recent documents list
-application descriptions can be removed also from the left column
-easier to start a program with a single mouse click when the tree is collapsed
-groups with only one item can be configured to be shown
-items can be ordered alphabetically (with applications after the groups)
-better managing of the button size (especially within a vertical panel) and when the menu text is disabled the button is exactly square
-the button icon is highlighted on mouse over according to the global settings
-in the search results the tree is always open