The Open Sourcerer

Specto 0.1 released2 min read

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by

Jeff
in ,

This release sports the basic set of features that you can expect from Specto’s goals. We consider this release an ALPHA release. That means Specto works very well for us and we are providing this to you in the hope that it will be useful to you, but we are not guaranteeing that it it will be perfect just yet. At the time of this writing, there are seven (7) known bugs in the bug tracker (one of which really matters). Expect the functionality to work, but it may feel a bit… Edgy!

Indeed, this project has existed for some time now and, since it is quite feature-complete, we decided to do the first release in time for Ubuntu Linux’s “Edgy Eft” release (october 26th). This way, “edgy” users can provide us with some feedback.

What works in this release:

  • Watching email (POP3, IMAP and gmail) accounts, websites (static pages or syndication feeds), files, folders.

  • Notification when something happens

    • libnotify “toasts” (optional) as notifications

    • Sounds (optional) as notifications

    • The tray icon turns from blue to orange and vice versa

  • “Clearing” watches (telling Specto that you know they have been updated)

  • Refresh/Stop button, adding and removing watches, modifying existing watches

  • Sorting the watches displayed in the notifier window

  • Debug mode: logging, searching the log, exporting the log

  • Translations: the user interface can be partially localized in your language. If your language is missing, you could help translating.

Known issues in this release:

  • Importing and exporting your watches.list will not work using the graphical user interface. You can do it manually however.

  • Watches that take a long time to check will hang the process, and make the user interface unresponsive. This is the major annoyance of this release, and if you have the will to fix it, your help would be much appreciated.

  • There is not much information provided. You will not know who sent you an email, or what exactly changed in a website. This will come eventually. Or maybe sooner than we expect if someone wants to tackle the challenge!

  • Certain parts of the user interface are not translated: these are the parts that were done in Glade, and we don’t know how to handle them yet.

  • We have some really hacky/ugly code. Feel free to correct us 🙂

  • Bugs #53193, 59462, 49616, 54276, 59460, 65608, 66326
Jeff
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