System menus, new plugins, and more!

Written for Cardapio by Thiago Teixeira on 2010-07-31

Cardapio v0.9.132 has been released* and it now brings a mouse-based interface for browsing the System menus. This was a commonly asked-for feature, and its design came directly from our discussion in a Launchpad blueprint [1]. How does it work? See the blueprint :)

...or just toggle the new mode-switcher button (labeled "System"), which is present at the bottom of the menu, and see Cardapio become a Gnome Control Center of sorts. Good times!

*well, the package has been waiting in the queue in Launchpad for the past 17hrs. So hold your horses :)

    ~

The next news-item is that Cardapio users have been hard at work on some of the plugins we suggested in the beginning of July [2]. As a result, we are now (after just two weeks!) shipping *four* new plugins with Cardapio -- courtesy of Pawel Bara. These are:

* Bing plugin
* Yahoo plugin
* Wikipedia plugin
* Youtube plugin

Great work, Pawel! I should also take this opportunity to thank Clifton Mulkey for writing plugins *even before* we ever made that public call. He's responsible for the Software Center and Virtual Box plugins. You guys are awesome :)

    ~

Next step
=================

With the great plugin proliferation, searching with Cardapio may become a bit unwieldy, especially if you have too many plugins turned on. So there's a small usability tweak that will soon be coming to Cardapio, as proposed by user Bert de Bruijn [3]. It is only a small feature, but l think it will be pretty amazing.

The idea is to assign customizable search prefixes to different plugins. So, for example, you could search for "Gnome" on Wikipedia just by typing "?w gnome". This would cause Cardapio to only show results from the Wikipedia plugin -- possibly showing more results than usual as there would be more UI space to play with.

    ~

In sum, things are shaping up nicely for the big v1.0! So keep those blueprints coming, keep on hacking on Cardapio plugins, and please take a look at some of the outstanding bugs that need some attention [4].

[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cardapio/+spec/always-show-administration-and-preferences
[2] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cardapio/+spec/plugin-suggestions
[3] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cardapio/+spec/letters-to-use-only-specific-search-method
[4] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/cardapio/+spec/road-to-version-one-point-oh

PS: As of *right now* the old PPA will no longer be updated. The correct PPA is ppa:cardapio-team/unstable . Please help spread the word about this. I wouldn't want any Cardapio user to be left out of the fun :)

You can update your PPA either through the Software Sources application (search for it in Cardapio!) or on the terminal with these commands:

$ sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/tvst-hotmail-cardapio-*
$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cardapio-team/unstable
$ sudo apt-get update