Redondela en Foto

It's sad to announce that F-Spot/gtk3 branch is not ready, but at least there are some advances due to this GSoC. I'm writing this post as a summary of that I've been able to achieve.

I've continued my last summer work by being able to fix the main image displaying, known in F-Spot as edit mode, getting F-Spot displaying photos again, to later add some other missing decorations.

Then I've faced problems with the gtk-sharp3 package that is included in current Ubuntu out of the box, basically lots of critical warnings which I've managed to suppress simply installing gtk-sharp development version —easy, but only after debugging, searching the web, and creating two little programs to see if the error was with F-Spot or with something between gtk-sharp or GLib itself.

By the way, more or less in a couple of weeks I'll be posting some instructions about installing F-Spot/gtk3 branch and gtk-sharp development version in an Ubuntu out of the box, since some steps are needed other that the classic ./autogen.sh && make && make install in order to get F-Spot working —not sure if that's fault of gtk-sharp or F-Spot itself... maybe that post could lead to fix it by someone, since I don't know a bit about Debian packaging.

That was June, but July was a more difficult month, having problems with photo thumbnails and the lack of Gnome.Thumbnail class, and fullscreen mode opacity and scrollbars.

I've reached August being able to solve a little problem about icon view mode —the mode where you see the photo thumbnails to manage them— that was annoying for a while: If you was in that mode and tried to resize the icon view area, dragging the separator between it and the sidebar, while resizing the icon view area would be blinking a lot. The reason was only one line of code that was making F-Spot process too much events. I've also restored the timeline —the thing you can see in the screenshot on top of this post above the icon view area.

August was inverted mostly walking in circles with the filmstrip, which is an area in edit more where you can still see the thumbnails to navigate while displaying a large photo. I've got blocked due to some null variable that almost got me crazy, since looking at the code it was supposed to never become null, so I've started wondering the problem and discarding things like multithreading, until I've figured out that it could be something related to C# binding problems again —but the glue-code of Pixbuf.CopyArea (the method natively complaining about the null) is really simple. I've started to loop trough the code until I've luckily decided to add some basic Console.WriteLine on gtk-sharp to debug that way, and it happened that I couldn't see those messages anywhere... A mystery until I've realized some *-sharp.dll files inside F-Spot's installation directory: Some kind of dirty F-Spot installation in my system. Deleting those files solved the mystery.

Sadly, the only thing I have now is a non-displaying filmstrip —you can click in the area where it is supposed to be and you would see the current photo changing, but nothing gets drawn in that filmstrip area and having it activated makes F-Spot/gtk3 even more unstable and slower.

But well, from my point of view —maybe not the F-Spot one— this have been another great Google Summer of Code learning about various components and way of doing this of the GNOME platform. Thanks a lot to Google, GNOME and Stephen Shaw —my mentor— for this (: