NEWS about Dimbola ================== Dimbola is a photo management application. Version 0.0.3, 2009-10-24 ------------------------- NEW STUFF * Ratings are now shown as actual stars rather than asterisk characters (*). * Tag name editing now happens in the tag hierarchy, rather than in a popup dialog. * Photos can be rated with the 0-5 keys in the thumbnail grid and photo views. * Default thumbnail size in the grid is now 200 pixels, because liw got tired of having to adjust it every time he started Dimbola. * The Escape key returns from full screen mode in the photo window. * Control-W closes the photo window. CHANGED STUFF * The thumbnail grid and photo views are now switched via the menu. It was too difficult to find a solution for switching between the them in the tabbed interface, without the tabs occasionally getting focus and making things non-deterministic for the user. * Netpbm command line tools are no longer used to do image format conversions. Instead, the internal GdkPixbuf routines do that. PROBLEMS FIXED * When adding new tags, the tag hierarchy is kept sorted. * When tags are renamed or removed, the updates are immediately shown in the photo's tag list, and the search tag list. * Photo's tag list is now insensitive when no photo or more than one photo is selected. It can only be used with one selected photo. * When bringing up the popup menu in the photo or search tag list, if no tag is selected, the tag under the cursor is selected. The menu's "remove" menu entry is properly sensitive. * The "stop" button at the bottom left of the main window is now properly sensitive, and actually does stop background jobs. * The "remove tag" button ("-") at the top of the tag hierarchy is properly sensitive. * Folder list can now be scrolled. * Dialog windows are transient for the main window. This helps the window manager position them properly. * Thumbnail grid and photo view have a visual focus indicator and grab the focus when clicked upon. CODE STUFF Version 0.0.2, 2009-10-11 ------------------------- This release makes further improvements to code quality, and has few user-visible improvements. NEW STUFF * Application starts up in maximized mode. * Tags can now be arranged in a hierarchy, and tags can renamed. * Folders are now a hierachy as well, the way they are on disk. * All image file formats supported by dcraw (RAW images) and the installed GTK+ library (other images) are now supported. The import file chooser lets the user choose whether to look at all files, all image files, or just RAW image files. PROBLEMS FIXED * Added a build-dependency on markdown. Thanks to Timo Jyrinki. * Help/News now actually works on the `.deb` package. * When a tag is removed, the reference to it is also removed from the photos that had it. Previously, if one removed the most recently created tag, then added a new tag, all the photos with the removed tag would get the new tag. Quite confusing. CODE STUFF * Plugins may define order of menu entries and sidebar sections they add, using "weights". * "make check" now assumes a version of CoverageTestRunner that supports --ignore-missing-from. It's available from me. * All code modules either have a unit test module, or are listed in no-unit-test.txt. CoverageTestRunner will complain if it finds things to be otherwise. Further, all code modules with unit tests have 100% statement coverage, excluding parts of code that are marked explicitly as being outside of coverage testing. * The thumbnail grid module has been rewritten to be a cleaner model/view/controller design, and to have tests. * Various changes have been made to allow different parts of the code to communicate via signals (see MainWindowController.new_hook, for example), rather than direct method calls. This work is incomplete, and will continue in the future. * Added Plugin.enable_signal and .disable_signal methods, for easier management of connected signals in plugins. * All plugins with UI elements now have their own .ui file (foo_plugin.py has foo.ui). This removes further coupling of the core parts (ui.py, grid.py) and the plugins. * The selected photo's tag list and the search tag list now share code. (See dimbola/taglist.py.) * Various updates to the HACKING file. * Now supports Python 2.5, and therefore Debian unstable (sid). Version 0.0.1, 2009-09-24 ------------------------- This release aims primarily to improve the code so that it is easier and more reliable to add new features later. Right now, the user interface is a bit of a mess (things are in random order in menus or the sidebars), but this will be fixed soon. BUG FIXES * Debian packaging now declares a dependency on Python 2.6. * Canon RAW files are recognized even when the filename suffix is in lower case. * Menu entries are now made sensitive or insensitive based on whether the action is doable or not. * The thumbnail grid's vertical scroll bar now works correctly. Previously the limits were wrong and it would allow scrolling past the end of the grid. * Clicking outside of any thumbnails in the grid now does the right thing, rather than causing a runtime error. * The side bars now should no longer change side automatically. It was quite disturbing at times. * Display of EXIF headers is fixed. 77/8 was a very weird shutter speed. * All windows now have minimally sensible titles. * The separate photo viewer window can now get keyboard focus. NEW FEATURES * This NEWS file is included in the package, and accessible via the Help menu. * New option --version. DEVELOPER STUFF * There is now a plugin mechanism. The API is not very rich yet, but as much core functionality as possible will be implemented with plugins, too, to ensure the API will be useful for many people. * A HACKING file now documents stuff to get people up to speed with doing stuff for Dimbola. In particular, it has some info on how to write plugins. Version 0.0.0, 2009-09-17 ------------------------- * First release. This is not useful yet, but I need to make a release so that I can make .deb packages.