Wednesday, November 7, 2012

MetaData Extractor 0.3 in KDE Review

Hi all,

since a week I have moved the current MetaData Extractor into KDE Review and tagged it with 0.3. As you might have read, Jason moofang already blogged about his anime changes in the extractor plugins.

A few things that changed in my side since the last release:

  • Limit the background processes that will fetch the data at the same time
  • Disable the Nepomuk2::Service on first run.
    This means the user has to activate it in the KCM to make it work and it won't fetch data for all files once it is installed
  • Allow to specify which resource types should be used in the automatic fetching (documents, videos, music)
  • Add a general configuration KCM to the system settings module
  • Save not processed queries on kde shut down and start them again next time
  • Added a docbook to explain most parts of the UI
  • Fix several bugs and crashes
  • Allow to restrict online searches to preferred plugins only and not fetch all the other plugins if the lookup failed
 

In its current state the extractor respects the users privacy as much as possible and can still be configured to do all its magic in the background. Beside the service changes it is always possible to start the extractor from the Dolphin service menu manually.

Another thing that will change is the name of the program.
When I've started this project (mostly as a helper for conquirere) there was already a project named Nepomuk WebExtractor in playground. As it seems this project is dead, the name will be available again.

The name MetaData Extractor might be misleading too. This program does not extract information from files (other than filename analysing for better search parameters) but only  rather find additional data on the Internet.

So possible new names are:
  • Nepomuk-WebExtractor
  • File Metadata Extractor 
  • File Metadata Retriever
  • File Metadata Miner

If you like to test the latest changes, you can find the in kdereview

Monday, November 5, 2012

KCM Wacom Tablet 1.3.7 & 2.0 Beta 1 (1.99.2)

I'm posting this on behalf of Alexander Maret-Huskinson who did most of the work in the latest release.

It's been a while since the last update, but today we released two new versions of KCM Wacom Tablet. Version 1.3.7 which is another update of the stable 1.3 release and 2.0-beta1 (1.99.2) which is the first testing version of the upcoming 2.0 release.
The 1.3.7 update does not contain any new features but adds support for some additional tablets and fixes a bug where the tablet was rotated in the wrong direction when auto-rotation was enabled.

Unfortunately the beta version does not contain any new features either, but still a lot of work has been put into this upcoming 2.0 release. We rewrote the whole backend to make it more manageable and prepared it for the long awaited libwacom support.
With the new architecture we can now easily support different subsystems which allows us not only to support libwacom but also any other configuration tool like for example the Intuos 4 Led project. Support for these projects is not yet included but will be added in one of the next releases.

Although we put much effort in testing, there are probably still some bugs left which we did not catch. We also have only a very limited number of tablets available, which is why we ask everyone to thoroughly test this beta and report any bugs we missed.

You can download the source from http://kde-apps.org/content/show.php/wacom+tablet?content=114856 or (K)Ubuntu packages for 12.04 and 12.10 from these repositories:

1.3.7: https://launchpad.net/~maret/+archive/wacom
2.0-beta1 (1.99.2): https://launchpad.net/~maret/+archive/wacom-unstable