A few years ago, me and four of my friends were doing an university project, which was basically a web portal. While designing our application we needed a tool for creating mock-ups and screen prototypes. There are a lot of options like Wireframe Sketcher, Cleverlance Petra, but finally we ended up with Axure RP. Now I’m not sure why, but at least we had the motivation to finish the prototype early (trial period was only 30 days 
).
Today, I was again looking for the alternatives and found – Pencil. No, I don’t mean the office aid, but the Pencil Project. It lacks some important features like creating hyper-links between the components and thus exporting to HTML pages, but these are planned and I can say that I really like this tool. And not to forget – it is open source! You can install it as a Firefox extension or download it as a standalone application. Unfortunately upstream tarball contains the whole XULRunner, so I decided to create a package for openSUSE. It is available from our Contrib repository and is only 330kB large! (Big thanks goes to Wolfgang Rosenauer for helping me to tame XULRunner.)
Pencil right now supports common shapes like rectangles or bitmaps, annotations, GTK widgets and Windows XP widgets. The widgets (or rather stencils) are simple SVG files, so if we help Duong Thanh An, the author, we might see Qt, iPhone or Yahoo stencils as a part of the Pencil in the future! Wouldn’t that be sweet? 
Update: I just found Graffletopia – with hundreds of stencils (or so-called graffles) for Mac OS X tool OmniGraffle and some of them are really great. How about a converter ?
I’m happy to announce that this year I’ll be mentoring GSoC project which will attempt to create an alternative source backend using git. Student implementing the idea is Peter Libič. I have created an openSUSE wiki page with the copy of the proposal and some useful links. Some of my colleagues (like Andreas Gruenbacher and Brandon Philips) are also interested in topic and already provided a valuable feedback. If you’d like to get involved, feel free to contact me, edit the project wiki page or join us on IRC channel #obs-git@irc.freenode.net.
The Xfce development team announced today the release of the long-awaited 4.6.0 version of their Xfce Desktop Environment. There is also a very nice Visual Tour prepared by Jérôme Guelfucci and Jannis Pohlmann, which highlights some of the new and exciting Xfce features. For me, the most vivid change is the complete rewrite of the Settings Manager together with its configuration backend, but I’m sure that everybody will find his/hers own favorite .
It took me longer to prepare the updated packages than I expected, because of the busy BuildService, but they are finally ready in our X11:xfce BuildService project and I would like to encourage you to try them. If you encounter any problems, either upgrade issues from distribution 4.4.x series, issues with clean installation from repository or any other defects, please do not hesitate and contact me. Thank you very much and I’m looking for your comments and responses!
Instructions (command-line):
- add X11:xfce repository if it is not already added:
zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/xfce/openSUSE_11.1/ xfce
(replace 11.1 with your openSUSE version)
- refresh this repository:
zypper refresh xfce
- get new packages
Instructions (one-click install):
just click on the link with your distribution:
Due to some requests on mailing lists and Feature #305803 I decided to change the default behavior of command-not-found handler (in openSUSE 11.2 and SLE11).
Now it prints this info immediately:
$ blender
If 'blender' is not a typo you can use command-not-found to lookup the package
that contains it, like this:
command-not-found blender
bash: blender: command not found
$ ifconfig
Absolute path to 'ifconfig' is '/sbin/ifconfig', so running it may require
superuser privileges (eg. root).
bash: ifconfig: command not found
instead of directly performing the search.
If you want the old behaviour back (i.e. search invoked automatically), just add
export COMMAND_NOT_FOUND_AUTO=1
to your bash profile. (This is also documented in command-not-found man page).
You can install the updated packages from home:prusnak:scout BuildService repository as usual.
This years Google Sumer of Code, student Peter Libič tried to implement an idea of Migrating Assistant. MacOSX contains utility which can import users, application settings and various files from old Macintosh to new one. Idea to port this functionality to Linux is not new. Something similar was created during GSoC two years ago by Ubuntu, but we tried to use different approach (object oriented C++) so the code is better extendable and maintainable.
Application support is not as wide as it probably should be, but because of the clean design, we hope that the number of supported applications will rise in the future. You can try Mango for yourself – packages are ready in BuildService and we are looking forward to feedback from you. See http://en.opensuse.org/Mango for more info and installation instructions …
We decided to restructure and cleanup the games projects in the openSUSE Build Service. Before the change we had 8 projects for each game genre (action, adventure, arcade, board, puzzle, roleplay, strategy/realtime, strategy/turn-based) and one separate project for game libraries (so you can play games even on older distributions with obsoleted libraries).
This situation was causing more harm than good, so now we will only have one “games” repository with all game genres together. If you have already added old game repositories, please remove them and add the brand new one located at http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/games/ and then the directory of your distribution. The old URLs for the individual games repositories will no longer work.
If your favorite game is not yet packaged you can add it to the Games Wishlist at openSUSE wiki. Or even better, you can try to package it by yourself and when you are finished contact me and we will add the game to the repository. You can also ask on the opensuse-packaging@opensuse.org (subscribe) mailing list you have any troubles with the packaging.
Game On!
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