frogr

It’s almost one year later and, despite the acquisition by SmugMug a few months ago and the predictions from some people that it would mean me stopping from using Flickr & maintaining Frogr, here comes the new release of frogr 1.5. Not many changes this time, but some of them hopefully still useful for some people, such as the empty initial state that is now shown when you don’t have any pictures, as requested a while ago already by Nick Richards (thanks Nick!), or the removal of the applications menu from the shell’s top panel (now integrated in the hamburger menu), in line with the “App Menu Retirement” initiative. ...

Another year goes by and, again, I feel the call to make one more release just before 2017 over, so here we are: frogr 1.4 is out! Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Who uses Flickr in 2017 anyway?". Well, as shocking as this might seem to you, it is apparently not just me who is using this small app, but also another 8,935 users out there issuing an average of 0.22 Queries Per Second every day (19008 queries a day) for the past year, according to the stats provided by Flickr for the API key. ...

Quick post to let you know that I just released frogr 1.3. This is mostly a small update to incorporate a bunch of updates in translations, a few changes aimed at improving the flatpak version of it (the desktop icon has been broken for a while until a few weeks ago) and to remove some deprecated calls in recent versions of GTK+. Ah! I’ve also officially dropped support for OS X via gtk-osx, as I was systematically failing to update and use (I only use frogr from GNOME these days) since a loooong time ago, and so it did not make sense for me to keep pretending that the mac version is something that is usable and maintained anymore. ...

Of course, just a few hours after releasing frogr 1.1, I’ve noticed that there was actually no good reason to depend on gettext 0.19.8 for the purposes of removing the intltool dependency only, since 0.19.7 would be enough. So, as raising that requirement up to 0.19.8 was causing trouble to package frogr for some distros still in 0.19.7 (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), I’ve decided to do a quick new release and frogr 1.2 is now out with that only change. ...

After almost one year, I’ve finally released another small iteration of frogr with a few updates and improvements. Not many things, to be honest, bust just a few as I said: Added support for flatpak: it's now possible to authenticate frogr from inside the sandbox, as well as open pictures/videos in the appropriate viewer, thanks to the OpenURI portal. Updated translations: as it was noted in the past when I released 1.0, several translations were left out incomplete back then. Hopefully the new version will be much better in that regard. Dropped the build dependency on intltool (requires gettext >= 0.19.8). A few bugfixes too and other maintenance tasks, as usual. Besides, another significant difference compared to previous releases is related to the way I'm distributing it: in the past, if you used Ubuntu, you could configure my PPA and install it from there even in fairly old versions of the distro. However, this time that's only possible if you have Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak", as that's the one that ships gettext >= 0.19.8, which is required now that I removed all trace of intltool (more info in this post). However, this is also the first time I’m using flatpak to distribute frogr so, regardless of which distribution you have, you can now install and run it as long as you have the org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.22 stable runtime installed locally. Not too bad! :-). See more detailed instructions in its web site. ...

I’ve just released frogr 1.0. I can’t believe it took me 6 years to move from the 0.x series to the 1.0 release, but here it is finally. For good or bad. This release is again a small increment on top of the previous one that fixes a few bugs, should make the UI look a bit more consistent and “modern”, and includes some cleanups at the code level that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, like using G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE, which helped me get rid of ~1.7K LoC. ...

So, after neglecting my responsibilities with this project for way too long, I finally released frogr 0.11 now, making the most that I'm now enjoying some kind of "parenting vacation" for a few days. Still, do not expect this new release to be fully loaded of new features and vast improvements, as it’s more like another incremental update that adds a couple of nice new things and fixes a bunch of problems I was really unhappy about (e.g. general slowness, crashes). ...

Quick post to let the world know that I’ve just released a new version of frogr right now, in order to address a few issues present in the previous version. Mainly: Deprecation of non-SSL end points for the Flickr API (see these two posts for more info). From now on, frogr will use SSL-only API calls. Address issues with frogr's AppData file. Apparently, the AppData file was neither valid (according to appdata-validate) nor being installed properly, preventing frogr from showing up nicely in the GNOME Software app. Allow disabling video uploads at configuration time (enabled by default), instead of making the decision depending on the detected platform. This will hopefully make life easier for packagers of other platforms (e.g. MacPorts). Removed libsoup-gnome code once and for all (API deprecated a while ago). Other things: updated translations and fixed a few minor bugs. As usual, feel free to check the website of the project in case you want to know more about frogr, how to get it or how to contribute to it.

So, after a bit more than one year without releasing any version of frogr, I finally managed to get some “spare” time to put all the pieces together and ship the ninth version of it, which I believe/hope is going to be a quite solid one. In all honesty, though, this version does not come with many new features as the previous ones, yet some changes and fixes that I believe were quite necessary, and therefore should help improving the user experience in some subtle ways. ...

During the last weeks, I decided to make the most of some spare time I had while still in “nowhere land” (see my previous post) and so I’ve been working in frogr to see if I could release the 0.8 version before the end of the year. In my mind it looked like kind of a nice and humble Christmas present to the world and, at the same time, a interesting way to spent this time I had between my depart from my previous job and the start of the new one. ...

As you might already know Flickr has added support for OAuth a while ago, which is meant to be the obvious replacement to the old Flickr auth API that has been available since a long long time ago, which has been used by many applications our there, like frogr. But the important point here for apps using the old auth method is that it won’t be longer available after July 31st, which means they should get updated if they want to keep working as so far. ...

Shit happens in many ways, and sometimes that means you release an application with some bugs you just can’t stand and need to roll out a bugfixing release as soon as possible. Does this sound familiar to you? :) So that’s why this new release of frogr, just one week after the 0.6 version had been published, has arrived, taking care exclusively of fixing the following problems, as stated in the NEWS file: ...

After some changes here and there frogr 0.6 is finally out. Besides the usual bugfixing work, the main new features on this release are: Integration with the GNOME general proxy settings (optional). Open pictures in the default image viewer from the details dialog and the main view. Allow users to specify the license to be set for the pictures. A new User Manual, under "Help > Contents". Some UI improvements. As usual, you can get frogr through different ways: you can grab the source code from its git repository or via the xz and bzip2 tarballs, specific packages for Fedora or for Ubuntu (ranging from Karmic to Oneiric) and even a version for MacOSX, if you dare to use it. By the way, at the moment frogr is already being packaged in some distros (see this) and others might follow, so perhaps it could be that you already were able to install it by just using your favorite package manager with the standard repos. Otherwise, it might be just a matter of time, I guess… ...

Now announcing that the new release of frogr is finally out. This time, I’m afraid you won’t find huge changes in the application, but a bunch of small improvements instead, in the way of subtle -yet handy- new features, bug fixes and new and uptaded translations mainly. Still, I can mention some of the new small features that I specially like, since I use it a lot: Uploading pictures stored in remote machines via well-known protocols like smb, ssh, ftp... well anything supported by GVFS, basically. Sort pictures in the interface by title and date taken (and keep the pictures sorted as you add more pictures!). Allow disabling tags autocompletion (seems to slow frogr down when you have thousands of tags). Tooltips with basic info about the pictures in the icon view (title, size, date taken). Show the total amount of data to be uploaded in the status bar. Allow filling the details for pictures right from the photoset details, when creating a new one. Correct picture orientation in the icon view, if needed (rotation). Support both for Gtk+2 and Gtk+3 (now this is the default toolkit for building). Support for generating MacOSX packages, thanks to the GTK-OSX project. As usual, several other bug fixes, improvements and nitpicky stuff. As usual, you can get it through different ways: Source code: clone from the git repository at gnome.org. Tarballs: both in xz and bzip2 formats. Pre-compiled packages for Fedora: at my personal public folder in gnome.org. For the specific case of Ubuntu you can use this PPA at LaunchPad. MacOSX packages (Intel) in the GNOME FTP server (experimental, yet ready for everyday use) [Update 31/05/2011]: If you have already installed frogr 0.5 for Ubuntu from my PPA or from the pre-compiled packages, please do upgrade to the latest version of the Ubuntu packages as soon as possible, as available in my PPA. If you already have the PPA configured in your system, you can upgrade just frogr by simply doing this: sudo apt-get update && sudo install frogr There was a problem with the generation of the previous version of the packages for Ubuntu (files being installed under /tmp/frogr, instead of /usr/share) and all of them are broken and need to be updated. Sorry for the hassle. If you want to contribute, remember you can do it by proposing ideas, translating, coding, discussing or filing and/or fixing bugs. ...

Today, while at the ATK/AT-SPI hackfest, I received a mail in my INBOX from a well known guy from the GNOME community stating just the following: Don't know if you read Hackers news, but this one is pretty nice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2532790 -- Regards So I followed the link and I found a nice thread titled "Love in GIT" where people were commenting about something which remind me of one of the last commits I did in frogr, which became my favourite one so far in the project, by the way. But the big surprise for me came when I realized that the thread was actually about the commit I innocently made last week, when I realized that the so-much-important THANKS file was outdated since almost one year ago, right when I got married, so I decided to update it. Then I understood that there was actually a good reason for the thread to remind me of that change… Yes, I know, sometimes I’m “a little bit too slow” :-) ...

As I said some days ago, in theory I should be releasing Frogr 0.4 this weekend while at FOSDEM, after a 2-week period of feature and string freeze to work on stabilization and bugfixing tasks only. Well, bad news (mainly for myself) is that I did not make it to FOSDEM at the end, due to unavoidable personal matters, but good news is that I’m finally making the release anyway today :-) ...

Too many things have happened to me during the last weeks (some good and some bad, as usual), but I still have found some time to continue improving frogr towards the 0.4 release, which I hope it’s gonna be, at least thinking of my very particular use cases, a very complete and functional release. Still, the UI won’t be great (I’d really need help with this), I know that… but I said “complete and functional”, right? I do not remember having mentioned “beautiful”, “eye candy”, or the like… that’s a matter, though, I’ll probably consider for following releases, but not for now. ...

After more than one year without writing almost anything related to my other pet project “frogr”, I finally found some time, motivation and energy to put all the loose parts I already had more or less in place together and evolve them towards what finally made a new release of this -yet another- GNOME flickr uploader. That way, I finally released frogr 0.3 two days ago (see the announcement here), featuring the following changes: ...

During the last days (well, actually during the last nights [*]), I've been spending some time in adapting frogr 0.2 to also compile and work on my brand new N900 (thanks Igalia!), and this is the humble result up to date: Perhaps you’re thinking why the hell I needed frogr to upload pictures when the N900 already comes with a nice and handy sharing application to upload pictures directly from the camera app or the image viewer, so here you have some use cases where I found the sharing app not enough for my needs: ...

After coming back from an awesome week of holidays in Paris (lovely city, btw!), today I finally managed to get some time for making up what it became the second upstream release of frogr: frogr 0.2 Just trying to give a brief update on “what is new”, here you have an excerpt from the NEWS file: Generate ChangeLog from git log with 'make dist' Added .spec file for fedora 11 packaging system (thanks Adrián Pérez) Added drag'n'drop support for loading pictures in frogr Added support to add tags to pictures (instead of just replacing) Fixed (legacy) support for libgnome2 to compile in debian lenny Use accesor functions instead direct access and removed some deprecated GTK+ symbols (thanks Javier Jardón) Added i18n support and a es_ES lang file (thanks Alejandro Piñeiro, aka API) Support silent build rules with automake 1.11 (thanks Javier Jardón) Bugfixes and several minor improvements Entering in more detail, and as you can easily extract from the list above, the main improvements from the user's point of view are: Drag'n'drop now supported, so having to add pictures through the filechooser is no longer the only method to load pictures in frogr. New "add tags" dialog, very handy to add tags to some specific pictures before uploading them. i18n support, which should make easier to get more contributions for frogr in further releases, in the form of new translations to make it even more accessible for people all over the world (did I say we're eager for new language files?) At last, just to mention that you already can find pre-compiled packages for some distros at the web of the project, as well as the source code tarballs in gzip and bzip2 formats. And of course, get the source code from the git repository at gitorius, in case you prefer to directly clone the source tree to make up wonderful and nice patches to contribute with, or just to provide new pre-compiled packages for your favourite distro ;-) So… what else could I say? Just go and get it… Hope you enjoy it as much as I do :-) ...