Beagle Newsletter - 10 January 2006 Welcome to another edition of the Beagle Newsletter. If you're new to the project you can read up about it on our website: http://www.beagle-project.org
Hacking ---- While much work has been done stabilizing the Beagle core a few new ways to search Beagle have come into existence: Holmes - The new Beagle search interface has been uploaded to CVS. The application was started with an initial hackfest organized by Lukas Likpa based up on mockups done by Garrett LeSage and Jakub Steiner. Dan Winship has continued to work on Holmes throughout the fall making it even better. Check it out of GNOME CVS under the module "holmes". Deskbar Applet - One of modules proposed for the inclusion of GNOME 2.14 is the deskbar applet. The panel applet allows users to search a variety of backends right from their panel. There has been talk of a backend that would use Beagle to provide search results. Nautilus - The GNOME file manager has recently had its search capabilities upgraded to allow for different backends. Anders Carlsson initially worked on this feature upon which Joe Shaw extended its Beagle support. Recently Alex Larsson has adapted this which you can read about on his blog: http://blogs.gnome.org/view/alexl/2005/12/07/0 Yelp - The GNOME documentation browser is another application that has recently added Beagle support. Chris Lahey has worked on allowing the numerous help pages to be easily indexed and searched. Allowing for the new search interfaces has been possible because of the new API's that have been created to interact with Beagle. pyBeagle - Raphael Slinckx's work has lead to the creation of a common way for python scripts to communicate with Beagle. One of the more powerful uses could be with the previously mentioned Deskbar Applet that was written in python. libbeagle - The Beagle C API has finally been put together to allow applications written in C to work with Beagle. After much, much work with wonderful help from the community to track down bugs, this API ensures Beagle's ability to work with the countless applications that have already been written in C including the previously mentioned Nautilus and Yelp. One of the welcomed side effects of the new search interfaces is the improved querying that the Beagle core allows. Some search interfaces, to work as designed, required date range query's or searches by extension. These and more have been built into the Beagle core now. Alongside all the work on the search interfaces, their has been enormous work on the Beagle Daemon as well. Reliability upgrades and bug fixes have been done to nearly every part of the application. Special thanks go to Jon Trowbridge and Joe Shaw for there work, however, it is in part due to the excellent bug reports from the community that lead to these problems getting fixed. In addition, Joe Shaw has worked with others to add Firefox v1.5 support. Project ---- Localization Since localization support has been added to Beagle, numerous contributors have pitched in. In fact, Beagle now supports 27 languages! Still, if you find something that does not look right please help out by submitting a patch for a localization fix. Wiki Cleanups Big thanks to David Coeurjolly and Joe Shaw for their work in cleaning up the wiki after several malicious attacks. The wiki has been upgraded and locked down to provide further protection. New Maintainer At the end of 2005 it was announced that Jon Trowbridge, the Beagle maintainer since its inception, will be leaving Novell and handing the rains of the project to Joe Shaw. Jon has been a wonderful maintainer, guiding the project thus far with remarkable skill. His code has created the base of the Beagle application that we all know and love. Finally it is Jon's overwhelming support of the open source philosophy that will aid him at his new job at Google. As always if you have any input to how the next Beagle Newsletter should be distributed or what should go in it please email Joe Gasiorek at joe gasiorek gmail com _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list Dashboard-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers
