News and announcements
Polly 0.93.11 (pre-alpha 3.11) released
Written for Polly by Conscious User on 2013-10-27
While I'm focusing most of my efforts in 0.94, I believe the main branch received enough changes to deserve a new minor release by now.
Most notable in this release is the addition of the beautiful Numix icon theme, but there are also fixes for Fedora packaging, some link optimizations, and the addition of an internal keyring module to avoid incompatibility with recent distros.
Polly 0.93.10 (pre-alpha 3.10) released
Written for Polly by Conscious User on 2013-06-27
Version 0.93.10 (pre-alpha 3.10) of Polly has been uploaded to the unstable PPA.
This release ports the search functionality to version 1.1 of the Twitter API. I thought/hoped that the search endpoint of version 1 wasn't going to be retired, but it was. So this release now ties this loose end and fixes the remaining 410 errors.
Some of you might be thinking "what search functionality?", since selecting "Search..." on the menu so far did nothing more than showing a "NOT IMPLEMENTED YET" popup. Polly has had, in fact, a rudimentary search implementation for a long time now. But so far it could only be accessed by clicking on a hashtag. I have now added a basic popup for opening search columns with arbitrary queries, but it's still a rudimentary implementation that has no real-time streaming support.
On the other hand, an welcome bonus of this 1.1 port is that search columns now contain full-fledged tweets instead of the incomplete tweets given by version 1.
Updated .
Polly 0.93.7 (pre-alpha 3.7) released
Written for Polly by Conscious User on 2013-03-16
This release fixes a couple of bugs caused by the transition to version 1.1 of the Twitter API.
IMPORTANT: Please upgrade to the upcoming version 0.93.6
Written for Polly by Conscious User on 2013-03-04
Dear users,
As I type this, a new bugfix version of Polly, 0.93.6, is being built. I advise you all to upgrade to this version once it lands on the repositories.
The reason is that this update switches Polly to version 1.1 of the Twitter API. Up until now, I've been using version 1, but that one is going to be shut down very soon:
https:/
my original plan was to move to 1.1 in the upcoming 0.94 rewrite. Unfortunately, several personal factors including a new job forced me to postpone it until at least April. So I'm releasing this emergency bugfix to move 0.93 to 1.1.
So please update in the next days, otherwise you'll start experiencing the "blackouts" described in the link above. Please report any bugs you find in the transition.
I'll release a 0.93.7 bugfix if needed.
Updated .
What's happening in Polly Land?
Written for Polly by Conscious User on 2012-10-24
As some of you might have already noticed, Polly 0.93.5 (pre-alpha 3.5) has been released yesterday. This release has a fix for the issue that makes streams stop being updated. It's an experimental fix, so I await for the (hopefully good) feedback.
Note for Ubuntu 12.10 users: the library needed to use the Messaging Menu has changed in 12.10, and the new version is not compatible with Polly's current code. I apologize, but until the next major version you'll have to start Polly with the --statusicon parameter to use the tray icon instead.
Given the very small nature of such update, and the very long time between this release and the last one, I feel I should tell the users and supporters what's currently happening in Polly Development Land.
The bad news is that I still can't give a proper ETA for the next significant (read: not just a bugfix) release.
The good news is that, despite the appearance of abandonment, I have never really stopped coding. I took a short vacation a little bit after defending my PhD, but it was just a couple of weeks.
So why the lack of updates? Because the current development cannot be done gradually, as it involves a port to different libraries, so it's being done at a currently unusable separate branch.
And why am I taking so long? Because of three reasons: first, I have a new job as a college teacher now and I'm prioritizing it. Second, my personal life is slightly messy right now, I won't go into details. And third, the changes in the upcoming release are huge and involve a lot of things. Mainly, it will be simultaneously a port to Python 3 and GTK+3. I'm also replacing a lot of deprecated and abandoned dependencies in favor of standard Python modules.
A lot of code is already done and I'd like to believe that I'm close to finishing the most complicated parts, though I can't be sure. Here are some things already guaranteed: (apologies for not separating geek and non-geek stuff, I'm not good at writing announcements)
- Improved keyring support, based on the Secret Service freedesktop standard. Hopefully, all major desktop environments will follow this standard in the future. For the moment, I also implemented a fallback KWallet support for KDE users.
- Support for Unity launcher features like badges and quicklists.
- Much improved proxy support, including HTTP authentication.
- Port from GConf to GSettings.
- Auto-detection of environment to automagically decide whether to use the Messaging Menu, and App Indicator, a tray icon or simply notifications with actions. The user will also be able to force one of those if he prefers.
- The vast majority of dependencies are now based on the new GObject-
- Update to the Twitter 1.1 API.
- Ability to customize the tweet font.
- Background color for mentions and unread items.
- Ability to use a custom account for bit.ly and goo.gl.
- Much improved account assistant: typing a PIN is no longer needed.
- Improved accessibility.
- I'm now trying to follow the GNOME HIGs as much as possible.
- More fine-tuned customization of notifications.
- Improved error bars, now animated and one-per-column.
Much more is to come! I really want to finish this and I ask for a little patience. Thanks for all the support so far!
