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.

One direct consequence is that you can now install the packages for Ubuntu from my PPA if you have Ubuntu Xenial 16.04 LTS or newer, instead of having to wait for Ubuntu Yakkety Yak (yet to be released). Other than that 1.2 is exactly the same than 1.1, so you probably don’t want to package it for your distro if you already did it for 1.1 without trouble. Sorry for the noise.

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.

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.

That said, it’s interesting that you also have the portal frontend service and a backend implementation, so that you can authorize your flickr account using the browser outside the sandbox, via the OpenURI portal. If you don’t have that at hand, you can still used the sandboxed version of frogr, but you’d need to copy your configuration files from a non-sandboxed frogr (under /.config/frogr) first, right into /.var/app/org.gnome.Frogr/config, and then it should be usable again (opening files in external viewers would not work yet, though!).

So this is all, hope it works well and it’s helpful to you. I’ve just finished uploading a few hundreds of pictures a couple of days ago and it seemed to work fine, but you never know… devil is in the detail!

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.

Last, I’ve created a few packages for Ubuntu in my PPA that you can use now already if you’re in Vivid or later while it does not get packaged by the distro itself, although I’d expect it to be eventually available via the usual means in different distros, hopefully soon. For extra information, just take a look to frogr’s website at live.gnome.org.

Now remember to take lots of pictures so that you can upload them with frogr :)

Happy new year!

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).

Wrapping it up, the main changes included with this release are:

• Moved to the new GTK+'s header bar plus the typical menu button when GTK+ >= 3.12 (GTK+ 3.4 is still supported). I personally like this change a lot, as it makes frogr much more compact and sleek IMHO, and much better integrated with newer releases of GNOME.
• Added a new option to automatically replace the "date posted" field in flickr with the "date taken" value from the EXIF metadata when uploading pictures. Useful to keep your photo stream sorted regardless of when you uploaded which pictures. Thanks a lot to Luc Pionchon for requesting this feature. I never thought of it before, now I use it all the time!
• Sped up the load of pictures into the main window, as it was a very slow process when importing tags from the XMP keywords was enabled. I measured a 3x improvement, but YMMV.
• Fixed random crashes due to the missing initialization of the gcrypt library introduced with the recent changes to use SSL API end points. Thanks a lot Andrés for your help with this!
• Fixed issues related to the OS X port, which prevented frogr 0.9 from having video support and caused many problems with the 0.10 release. Now it should be fine, grab the bundle from here.
• Other things: removed calls to deprecated APIs, updated translations, fixed a few minor bugs and a bit of a clean-up here and there, which is usually good.

By the way, I’m going to FOSDEM this year again, so feel free to say “hi” if you want to chat and/or share a beer (or more!).

• 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.

And it turns out that, at the end, I didn’t manage to have as much spare time as I initially expected to have (I was pretty busy most of the time, actually), mainly due to many unrelated things I needed also to take care of, but in the end I still managed to steal some minutes here and there and I’m now proudly announcing that the new release is finally out.

But before going on, see the mandatory screenshot, as taken in my Fedora 18 machine:

As you can already spot in the screenshot, some changes are already quite visible, but some others are not, so let’s now comment on the most important ones, one by one…

Ported to GtkApplication and GMenu

It’s no secret that one of my favourite changes in this release is the integration with GNOME 3’s “global menu” (aka the application menu), which makes frogr more beatifully integrated with the desktop than ever. However that came with a price: I needed to port frogr to GtkApplication first and then implement both the application menu and the menu bar using GMenu, which also made me raise the required version for GTK+ up to 3.4.

Sure I could have kept adding more ifdefs to the code to keep supporting previous GTK+ versions, but I also saw this as a good opportunity to clean up the code and get rid of so many conditional compilation units that were increasingly harder to maintain, and so I did it. As a plus, the OS X specific code has been reduced enormously as well, since GTK+ 3.4 integrates very well with OS X without having to do anything special, as I needed to do when I used GTK+ 2.24 for that port.

Loading and saving 'projects'

This has been one of the features that several people have suggested in the past in different occasions, and so one of those I hope people will enjoy the most with this new release: the possibility to save the current session into a “project file”, so you can resume your work later.

How it works it’s actually pretty simple: when you save a session to a project, frogr will just serialize your current pictures, sets, groups and local tags to a json file (using json-glib) that you can use to restore the state later. It could be more sophisticated, but I think that it works reasonably well in the tests I did considering what it was designed for. In any case, please feel free to report bugs or feature requests to improve or fix things if needed.

Support for video uploads

Believe it or not, frogr has been almost ready to upload videos since some time ago, since for Flickr a video is just a “moving picture”, and it’s treated in exactly the same way than pictures when it comes to the upload API.

The only thing that was missing to remove that almost from here was to generate thumbnails for videos so they could get loaded into the UI. Not rocket science, sure, but something which needed doing and which was not a priority at all until now. And to be honest, it is not a priority yet anyway, but I felt like doing it this time once and for all, so from now on you can upload videos too.

Other features & bug fixes

Some examples of those other new things are, as taken from the NEWS file:

• Handle and report errors in a better way (no more mysterious failures).
• Perform after-upload operations (add to sets/groups, set license...) in parallel.
• Avoid fetching sets/groups/tags when still not connected yet to Flickr.
• Hide title bar when main window is maximized (see screenshot above).
• Renamed the 'Actions' menu to 'Edit' and brought the 'File' menu back.
• Allow sorting elements in the icon view by size.

Check out the README file in the osx/ directory if you feel curious about the process or if you want to build it yourself. It shouldn’t take more than 2-3 commands in the terminal to get something like this running in your OS X machine:

Also, another advantage of having that moduleset created, is that now it’s trivial to properly document (by means of a shell script) the bundle file used to distribute frogr in OS X, instead of just providing an “opaque” pre-compiled bundle, as I used to do in an “unofficial way” with previous versions. Feel free to grab the bundle I’ve just created for this release from the GNOME FTP server.

So that’s it. I hope you enjoy using frogr 0.8 as much as I did writing it, and if you eventually find it useful too, then even better! As usual, check the website of the project for additional information or just to know how to install frogr on your system.

So, this is the main point of this release: to update the internal implementation of the Flickr REST API in frogr (which, ideally, will be released independently as a library at some point) to use OAuth instead of the old authentication API.

Additionally, in order to make things easier for users of older versions, the application will take care of exchanging the authentication token from the old system to the new ones used by the OAuth API. If you want to know more details about this, check the related API. For the rest of you, you shouldn’t notice anything the first time you run this new release.

Still, some other things were included in this new release that are worth mentioning:

• Ability to import tags already present in pictures  (e.g. as set by f-spot or shotwell).
• Allow users deciding, right from frogr and on a picture-by-picture basis, whether to set the geolocation information for pictures when uploading them to Flickr.
• New tags are added to the auto-completion without having to upload anything first.
• Allow using a dark version of your theme if available (e.g. Adwaita).
• Some redesign of the menu bar, thinking of a future migration to GMenu.
• Added menu accelerators for the most common operations.
• As usual, bugfixes, cleanups... that kind of stuff.

I think that’s it. Enjoy!

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:

• Fix memory leaks, the most important one happening in the editing details dialog.
• Problems using combo boxes with versions of GTK prior to 2.24.
• Fixed problems authorizing frogr on the MacOSX version.

So that’s all, if you were already an user of frogr, go and grab it through the usual ways.

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.

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…

For more information about the project and also how to contribute, check out its web site.

Last, but not least, I’d like to make an special mention here to the awesome Quinn Dombrowski, who very well could be the “most passionate frogr user I’ve ever known” and who was kind enough to design, handcraft and send -from Chicago to Spain- a stuffed frogr mascot plus a beautiful vest for my son (which design comes also with its own incredible story), as a sign of gratitude for writing this tiny app. I’m still shocked about it, see what I’m talking about:

If you want to see more pictures you can check my set in flickr, although I warn you these two ones taken by the artist are way better than mine :-)

Seriously Quinn… and yet once again: Thank you!

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.

• 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)

sudo apt-get update && sudo install frogr

If you want to contribute, remember you can do it by proposing ideas, translating, coding, discussing or filing and/or fixing bugs.

Also if you want to see frogr packaged for your favourite distro and can help with that (maybe you’re a packager or know better than me the required steps for that), that would be awesome. At the moment only Debian has packaged it so far that I know of (thanks Berto!), but I would love to see it also in other distros (specially in Fedora, which is what I currently use) so more people can use it without having to use either the Frogr PPA or the homegrown packages I usually prepare with each release.

For more information, just check out its web site. Here you have a screenshot of how frogr 0.5 looks in the awesome GNOME 3 in my Fedora box: