At this blog you will be able to follow the development of Costa. Every now and then I will post about the current status of the project, tell news about Costa, and talk a little about future goals. Atom feed is available, for those who want to keep posted.
Yesterday I released a new version of my long-time hobby coding project, Costa.
There’s not much new to see. I added a “Tip of the Day” dialog, and some new icons for you to choose from when creating desktop links, but mostly it’s all about bugfixes and improved stability.
Over the past couple of years I have been using Open Source software increasingly. More and more of the applications I use everyday have been replaced by open source alternatives, and I now only have a handful of proprietary software left. Even my operating system has been replaced by Ubuntu Gnome.
Since I am using so much open source software, I figured I would live up to this ideal by releasing the source code to one of my own pieces of software, The Costa GUI.
Wow, it’s definitely been a while since I last updated! Even though my career in the navy has taken a whole lot of my spare time, I’ve been able to work a little on Costa every now and then on weekends. Since my last post I’ve ironed out quite a few bugs and rewritten a lot of code. Visually the interface looks the same, but all executables have been reduced in size and improved in performance. Good stuff!
I’ve also written the second accessory for Costa (the first one being the theme switcher).
I spent today working on the theme selector. It’s as good as done now, and I think it turned out pretty well. Unlike the previous versions of Costa you don’t have to type the filename of the theme. Now you can browse the themes - with previews of each theme - and choose the one you like. The changes will take effect immediately. In fact, all changes you make to configuration files will take effect right away.
Since I’m hoping to get user submitted themes, all theme files contain theme name and author, which is shown in the theme selector.
I’ve finished the “Customize desktop link” dialog, and I’ve also added a run dialog to the desktop. I’ve also tested the desktop for bugs, and so far I haven’t found any. I’ve learned from my mistakes in the past and have taken a lot of measures to avoid a crash if an error should occur. Every single computer program probably has bugs in it, but I haven’t found anything so far. I’ll release a test version before version 1.0 to make sure anybody else doesn’t come across a bug.
It took me less than seven days to make the desktop, thanks to my GUI toolkit which really simplified making buttons, dialogs and other UI related parts of the desktop.
