Archive for March, 2003

GTK2 has always run on Windows, but it’s never has the look and feel of native windows applications, so I didn’t think of it as a viable toolkit for building cross-platform GUIs. But now there’s a theme engine for GTK that makes it look just like a native windows app, even under Windows XP! It’s called Wimp (short for Window Impersonator). Could PyGTK be the future of cross-platform open source GUIs?

I’ve been looking for a Python indexer and search engine that I could for Hep, and I think I found one: Lupy. Lupy is a port of Jakarta Lucene 1.2 to Python, licensed under the LGPL. I’ve been playing with it, and so far it’s working great. This is really exciting stuff.

1. A few weeks ago, Dean Allen releases Textile, a tool for translating plain text documents with very simple markup to HTML.
2. I think “That would be just the thing for translating text to HTML in Hep. Maybe someday I’ll have the time to port it to Python.”
3. Today Mark Pilgrim announces PyTextile, his open source implementation of Textile in Python.

This is why working with open source software is fun.

My productivity as a coder has gone way up over the past week. I’m not sure why. Maybe because the temperature outside is finally above freezing. Anyhow, I’ve been working on getting the Hep 0.4 codebase to the point where it will read your configuration files and run, so I can check it into CVS. And I’m happy to say that it’s almost there (I’m posting this from Hep 0.4, as a matter of fact). This is not to say that Hep 0.4 is almost ready for release – that’s at least a month away, and maybe longer. There are still some major parts not working. But the core is up and running, and I’m very happy with it.

Haystack is a graphical information manager being developed at MIT.  It looks extremely interesting – news, email, IM, document management, and a calendar, all in a nice-looking GUI.  No downloads yet, or information on the licensing.

What’s the hardest thing about switching to Hep from Radio (or any of the other popular RSS aggregators)?  Having to add all your RSS feeds by hand.  Fortunately, now you don’t have to, thanks to this handy script (originally written by me and improved by James Strachan).  Not as pretty as it could be, but it’ll let you get all your existing news sources into Hep in a jiffy.