I’m nearing the end of a very busy few weeks, and getting very close to that soft pencils down date! With school starting up again this hasn’t been my most productive week on the GNOME Break Timer front, but I’m pretty happy with what’s been done.
First, most importantly, Jasper and the GNOME admins helped me get to set up on gnome.org’s infrastructure! This is really exciting to me, because hosting and bug tracking looked like a crazy jumble throughout my project, and they got it all sorted out very efficiently. This feels a lot more real now, somehow, and I feel like I’m in a better position to continue maintaining this for a long time.
So, here are the important links:
- Source code: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-break-timer/
- Bug reports: https://bugs.launchpad.net/brainbreak (Bugzilla eventually, I hope)
- Daily builds for Ubuntu: https://code.launchpad.net/~brainbreak/+archive/experimental
- Translations: https://l10n.gnome.org/module/gnome-break-timer/
Incidentally: l10n.gnome.org, you’re awesome. I noticed a bunch of translations committed before I even knew gnome-break-timer was up there, and I was blown away.
What else is new? Unit tests, bits and pieces for maintainability (including code format and documentation), and some visual fun for the status panel.
GNOME Clocks has a really new cool widget for its countdowns and timers. I went ahead and borrowed that design to replace the very boring (and repetitive) icons we had before. I think this helps to quickly get across what’s going on. Also, I’m just a fan of common UI elements.
I also added some arrows, like the ones in Alan’s early mockups. This was all really fun: I hadn’t really explored Cairo before, and I was very impressed with how easy it was to get nice looking curves drawing on the screen. It took a bit of tweaking to get that arrow arranged neatly, without overlapping the text (ever), but I think I got it where I needed. I guess I’ll wait and see if anyone manages to break it.
Over the weekend I’m going to be busy with yet more stuff my past self went and volunteered me for, but I’ll be back soon with some more progress. (Also, I promise one of those distractions is a really awesome charity web project that I’m very excited about. I’ll be able to show it off in the start of November, and I honestly can’t wait). I’m down to “nice to have” features at this point, and the next one is collecting some basic statistics like how many breaks you ignored (or didn’t ignore) last week. Of course, this isn’t so the application can label anyone a bad person. Instead, I’m hoping this will make way for simple, positive and helpful messages in the status dialog. A lot of that could use extra design work, but at least having the data in place will be a nice start – and I’ll certainly be giving it a shot anyway.
Other than that, I’m going to be improving the experience for translators with notes for some of the weirder strings in the application. A few more unit tests, some documentation, a placeholder icon, and a 1.0 release. Hooray!
Since I’ve been working on a lot of cleanup already, and the last few weeks were a bit slow, I’ll be working on code past Monday the 16th’s soft pencils down date (at risk of some panic near the end). Of course, that isn’t terribly important: I look forward to maintaining and improving this well into the future, too.
What happens to those arrows (which I love btw) if the translated text is significantly longer than the US English one? I could be up to 40% longer for some languages, if I remember correctly.
I’m wondering the same thing. But why are these arrows necessary in the first place? Isn’t the Settings icon clear enough?