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You can grab the 0.9.29 release-tarball here.

The bzr-branch (rev 424) can be grabbed with:

• bzr branch lp:notify-osd/lucid

Release notes:

• notify-osd 0.9.29 is a maintainance and bug-fix release. The main issues fixed are LP: #546650 (click-through regression) and LP: #451086 (correcting rb-cover-art display).

ChangeLog:

• change the way the “empty” 1×1 pixel large input-mask is created
• fixed the masking out of the bubble on mouse-over for the non-composited desktop
• reset the stored filename (or path) of an icon, when an icon is passed via a hint
• added C-example testing updating the icon of a notification using all three possible approaches (image_path hint, image_data hint, icon-parameter)

I guess in a few hours this will be automatically available to every user of Lucid (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) via the software-center, synaptic and apt-get thanks to the magic of the MOTUs.

Fixed the throbbing animation for over- and undershooting of the value indicator in notify-osd:

Major user-visible changes are the new vertically centered positioning of bubbles, the initial fade-prevention (if bubble opens with mouse-pointer over it), tweaked fade-out opacity and updated body-text height.

ChangeLog:

• updated sizing-factor of body-text height to be 0.9 EMs (of system-wide setting) according to body-text spec
• implemented fade-prevention when bubble is opened while mouse-pointer is over it/within proximity-fade area
• fade-out value now set to 40% as stated in interaction spec
• added support for automake-1.11’s slient output
• added valgrind make-rule
• experiment with centering bubbles vertically, sync. bubble always goes above center-line, async. one always below it
• ensure GErrors are correctly freed

Here comes the “spam-protection” release 0.9.18 of notify-osd:

notify-osd 0.9.18

ChangeLog:

• code-clean by extracting fallback-dialog from class Bubble
• fixes for i18n unit-tests
• enforce notification-spam protection (part of backlog-feature work), max. 50 allowed in queue
• Python-examples now get included in generated dist. tarball

This is a rather unspectacular release, as most time of this week was spent on app-integration patches, and not notify-osd itself. But a new week, a new release:

notify-osd 0.9.17

ChangeLog:

• added timings-object in preparation for coming “animations and durations” work
• patch from Eitan Isaacson fixing LP: #409810
• patch from Aurélien Gateau extending text-filtering to handle newlines and some HTML-tags

With all the busy schedule of the just closing sprint week in Dublin, Ireland I forgot to blog about the latest tarball-release of notify-osd 0.9.16. So “only” four days late I present you:

ChangeLog (only major changes):

• further preparation for refactoring of class Bubble and Stack
• mem-leak fixes and fix for LP: #378193 by Alexander Sack
• much code-refactoring
• adapted to 0.10 fd.o spec
• lots of autotools-related fixes and improvements
• added ATK interface by Eitan Isaacson
• fix by Chow Loong Jin for LP: #401809
• added support for image_data and image_path

There’s still some way to go for notify-osd until Karmic hits release, so don’t worry the next changes will be more interesting for users.

… I’ve new “fun” with release-management. This time “make distcheck”, which was recommended to me, is bocking my work.

The amount of work that is needed to “ship a line of code” to users is insane.

I just made a tarball-release of notify-osd 0.9.15 available here. I’m doing a PPA for karmic as you are reading this, which will be available here. Rest assured that it also works on jaunty and other non-ubuntu distributions. But be warned that the experience is likely to be degrated a bit as not many distributions share the ayatana-team’s view on the way notifications should look and behave (read: this mainly means integration-patches for applications).

The major thing in this release is the surface- and blur-cache allowing for in-bubble blur when the mouse hovers over it, achieving a kind of defocus effect to allow the user to better focus on what’s below the notification-bubble. This works on compiz and metacity+compositor. Yes, it also works on systems as low-spec as a Mini 9.

Work on this is not fully done yet, further optimizations are pending and there is a regression at the moment for over- and undershoot-effects. But I did not want to sit forever on this *g*

For the more curious reader, here’s an excerpt from the ChangeLog:

• fixed wrong default values for bubble-width, margin- and icon-size
• fixed regressions introduced by the move to the surface- and blur-cache
• improved drawing of gauge/indicator
• tweaked rendering of layout-grid, added display of layout-grid to debug-mode of notify-osd
• refactored rendering code for bubble
• migrated rendering of drop-shadow, background, icon, title, body and gauge to surface/blur-cache
• added surface- and blur-cache
• added debug-output for font-size, screen-dpi, pixels/EM and bubble-width in pixels
• fixed rounding errors in pixel-per-em calculation, changed default bubble width to 24 EMs, fixed title- and body-text height, fixes LP: #336110 and LP: #391190

And what would a blog-post as this be without a screencast:

With the surface- and blur-cache available now, it is now also possible to animate the resizing (actually only “growing” will be used by notify-osd). Here’s a small unspectacular example screencast:

You can find this example in a branch of notify-osd here.

… and with this I’ll give you:

Edit: This of course works under compiz and metacity (+compositor). Under plain metacity you would not get the transparency against the desktop though. You can find this and other examples in a branch of notify-osd here.