Today I’ve released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.10, and after 10 releases (since August 2009), I’ve been looking at the package downloads statistics for the last 8 months (I moved hosting in June 2010, and I lost the stats in the process).
Although log parsing is not the most scientific way of tracking this things, I can get some points from this graph:
I have more Ubuntu/Debian downloads than Fedora downloads. Far more, although Fedora is my development platform and deb packages sometims lag behind the source/rpm release.
Version 0.03 is not 0.03, but a symlink to the latest version available. A guy wrote a blog post saying how awesome was Nautilus Flickr Uploader, but he linked directly to the 0.03 deb file. To make things worse, that post was copied and pasted several times, so despite being released on September 2009, there’s people still downloading 0.03 (sic).
Fedora people tend to download the newest version, which is good. About half of the downloads are using the repositories, which is better than good.
I’m not tracking source code downloads, because it’s not the kind of user I want to focus today. Some other guy wrote a blog post pointing to the deb package and saying at the same time that the application was easy to install if you knew Perl (?). I guess that everybody using Firefox has a pretty decent level of C++ programming.
I think that packages are the way to go, and although having your software included in the different distributions is very good for the spreading of your application, it’s not perfect if you’re releasing early and releasing often (I’ve released 0.10 after 7 days of 0.09 release, and I think the changes are worth updating).
Updating software using repositories
The problem installing third party packages in your distribution is that you don’t get updates, because… who bothers to check if there’s a new version available? If the stuff you installed works OK, you probably won’t, and if it’s not working, you’ll move into a different application.
That’s when repositories are the key: if you use a third party repository, you’ll get updates like with the packages supported by your distribution and, at the same time, you’ll get the benefits from the release early, release often.
That’s why the main way to get rpm packages for Nautilus Flickr Uploader is using a repository (I provide F13 and F14 packages, thanks to Koji).
Right now I have both strategies: deb packages without repository, and rpm packages with repository; although I’d like to have more Fedora users to make the comparison more effective ;).
What do you think? Are you using third party packages or repositories? Which strategy do you prefer?
There are lots of cool features, but my favourite is:
Easy application support. With the integration of D-Bus support in GIO, we could finally add a GtkApplication class that handles a lot of the platform integration aspects of writing an application, such as keeping track of open windows, ensuring uniqueness, exporting actions, etc. This is still a bit of a work in progress, and will be expanded during the 3.x cycle.
The bug fix was related to privacy settings, or how dumb I can be sometimes, because I got it wrong since the beginning, and although one user commented me the issue through Twitter, until recently (thanks to a proper bug report) I couldn’t manage to understand what the problem was.
Basically my implementation was missing some privacy combinations (public, private, and private with family and/or friends), and I didn’t notice it because I upload public content only.
The only other change in this version is the possibility to open a file chooser as an alternative to add pictures to the upload list. Basically I added this feature after some testing with the upcoming Gnome 3, because drag and drop doesn’t look as easy to do as in Gnome 2, and because one of the UX changes in Gnome Shell is to have less focus in browsing.
So now we have 3 ways to add photos to upload:
Selecting the pictures from Nautilus and then, with right click, open the files with the application. This is the original way I thought when I started developing the tool.
Dragging pictures from Nautilus or one of the picture viewers included in Gnome, with the limitation of Nautilus Flickr Uploader not understanding some of the special URIs (such as gphoto://).
NEW: just click on “Add” button and use the file chooser.
Again, because my use case is mostly drag and drop from one of the picture viewers of Gnome, I didn’t notice that it would be interesting to add pictures using an internal browser in the application.
So far, so good. I’ve updated the Fedora 13 & 14 packages, and if you’re using the repository, the update will be pushed eventually in your system. I’ll try to provide DEB packages as soon as possible.
We’ve been running Squeeze pre-release for some time at work, and it kicks ass. But that’s not the main reason why I think Debian 6.0 is a such important release.
It looks like Debian is catching up. Most projects have slowed down development and today is less important to use a distribution that follows a 6 month release cycle to have a state-of-the-art desktop environment.
Debian 6.0 can be the perfect place for Unity and Gnome Shell refugees.
Today I released the 0.08 version of Nautilus Flickr Uploader, and it fixes a bug that has been around since 0.03 (more than one year ago!).
The short explanation is ‘there was a race condition while uploading the pictures that affected to fast machines only’ (really), and the long one would be a quote from the great Jamie Zawinski:
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use threads.” Now they have two problems.
Zawinski never said that, but it’s my favourite version of the two problems original quote. Anyway, the problem is fixed!
I’ve included the Russian translation kindly provided by Anaart, and I’ve rebuilt the Fedora repository to support specifically Fedora 12, 13 and 14 (thanks to Koji), and you’ll have to download and install the new repo file (sorry for the inconveniences!).
According to Flickr, the application has +600 registered users, so go and upgrade!
Update: you know Debian/Ubuntu packages lag behind Fedora’s because I haven’t found someone to maintain them. Good news, a twitter fellow updated the DEB package to 0.08! Have I found a maintainer?
It’s surprising. I think the translation isn’t easy at all, mainly because of the weather conditions. Even in my mother tongue, some of the translations in other weather applications sound weird to me, because that’s not the way it’s said in my region (for example: aguaceros).
With the UI translated to Spanish, Polish, Galician, French and Italian, today I decided to do a release, and I wanted to make packages available for Fedora.
Currently I’ve used Python distutils to install from sources with more or less success (I’m a newbie too), and packaging it for Fedora has been quite difficult… because I’m not sure of doing it right.
First of all I was installing application data in the wrong place, and I’ve realized it because I’ve started to use a x86_64 laptop for first time. I wonder how many times I’ve been that 32-bit-centrist.
It was easy to fix, but I still have a problem with the server file for Bonobo, that it’s supposed to be installed on /usr/lib/bonobo/servers. But, how can I make a noarch package that must install a file in a different place depending on the architecture?
Finally I’ve chosen to install it on $PREFIX/lib/..., regardless the architecture (Bonobo finds it anyway). rpmlint complies, but I can’t see a better way to do it.
Another issue is Fedora 12: the application was developed almost 100% in Fedora 12, but now the package doesn’t build on Koji (it does for Fedora 13 and Fedora 14), and after some time looking at the problem, I must confess I’m clueless and already too tired to keep trying.
So I’ve setup a repository for Fedora 13 & 14, although there’s no reason to not use the applet in Fedora 12 (it works, I swear!).
Btw, I was expecting to not find the Bonobo interface for Gnome panel in Gnome 2.32 (bug 572131), but I was apparently wrong. Ah, too much confusion for a single hacking day!
As you may know, we moved to Reading (Berks) one month ago. Before that we where living in Exeter (Devon), and moving implies a lot of difficulties: you’re in different city, and you don’t know where’s anything (from shops to pubs, including all the city services) .
But there’s one thing you never expect: the weather applet in your system doesn’t support your new city (tragic music cue).
I checked about current status of the weather applet in Gnome, and I found an interesting proposal dated two years ago, but nothing that shows progress.
I suffered this exact frustration some time ago when I was living in my home town, and now, after years living in different supported cities… does it mean my luck is over? Not necessarily: I know Python and I’m prepared to use it!
So after a couple of weeks hacking form time to time (whenever I had free time, not that much lately), Oraje Applet was born.
It’s not the best API ever (in fact, there’s no easy way to find a location without knowing the associated code, called WOEID), and sometimes the updates lag behind reality (AKA it’s raining and your applet says it isn’t), but overall it’s what I was looking for.
In the project page there’s a tarball with the first released version (0.1), and there’s a lot of work to do, but I think it’s kind of usable if you want to give it a try.
I’d like to package it for Fedora, but I didn’t have the time yet (any volunteer for that would be welcome!).
Update: you can find a WOEID using the Yahoo! GeoPlanet™ API. I need to check it deeply, because at first sight there are a couple of things I don’t like very much.
Yesterday I released Nautilus Flickr Uploader 0.07 with just one new feature: photo title editing.
It was a really easy to implement feature, that I don’t know why I hadn’t implemented until now, because it’s very useful.
In fact, I pushed the changes to GIT repo about two weeks ago, and I found myself using the development code instead the previous public version that I had installed in my personal laptop. I was used to setting the photo titles in the Filckr website after uploading, but now I feel it’s more comfortable doing it in the application.
I know it’s a very small enhancement, and I released 0.06 less than one month ago, but I really think it’s worth it, so it’s the only noticeable change.
That fast release cycle made me think about updates. Currently there are +550 Flickr users that have authorized the application, and I’m curious: which version are they running? Do they upgrade when there’s a new version?
Because of that I’ve decided to give better support to upgrades providing a Fedora repository (when I have some spare time, I’ll try to create a PPA for Ubuntu/Debian).
I know it implies certain responsibility, because maintaining a repository means that any new release will be installed automatically. Starting with 0.07 I’m going to sign the RPM packages with my GPG key (EA112704), although I expect people to have good practices such as checking the packages that are going to be installed in every update.
And now you can yum udpate (if you’re already using the application), or yum install nautilus-flickr-uploader if you’re a new user.
Besides that, yesterday I recorded a screencast showing 0.07 in action. It’s just couple of minutes, but anyway… it might be worth watching if you don’t know the application.
This is mainly a bug fix release, with a new translation added (Arabic, that’s nine translations already in Transifex!), and I moved from the deprecated Gtk2::SimpleList to Gtk2::Ex::Simple::List.
About 6 months ago I was celebrating 100 authenticated users according to Flickr, and today I just realized that right now there are 504 authenticated users. How amazing is when someone is using something you did and shared, isn’t it?
I’ve updated the Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu packages, and you can get them all from Nautilus Flickr Uploader website (as usual).
