I spent a bit of time this weekend hacking on the Xfce panel. The result is that you can now install programs by dragging a URL from a web-browser into the Xfce panel's launcher dialog (much as ROX users do with AddApp). This makes it easy to put ROX applications into your panel; just drag the links from the Zero Install software index to the dialog, as in this screenshot:

My current plans for ROX-CLib are:

• 2.1.8. This was done in March 2006. The major new feature: internationalization support. The messages in ROX-CLib are now translatable, there is a .po file, the .mo files are generated and stored inside the AppDir, and are used when found. Apps get their .mo files loaded if found.
• 2.1.9 was released November 2006. This includes:
  • More support for menus, simplifying the code that needs to be in the app.
  • Extended attribute support.
  • Support for building against GTK 2.4 using Zero Install.
  • 0compile support
• 2.1.10 sometime in the future, including:
  • Improved system tray interface
  • xxmlrpc for communicating with ROX-Session
  • libglade interface similar to that in ROX-Lib.
• 2.2.0, hopefully this will be 2.1.10 deemed stable.

Fix another bug in install of MIME handlers when using the injector.

Fix bug in install of MIME handlers when using the injector.

The ROX CVS repository has been converted to subversion. CVS is now locked and won't accept further commits (but you can still diff against it).

To checkout a module (e.g., Edit) using subversion, use this command:

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/rox/trunk/Edit

For more information on using subversion, see the SF.net instructions.

Implementation of slot_available signal was missing under new DBus interface.

• Fix problems relating to cancelling fetches.
• Increase maximum buffer size.
• Added install section on options, to help those that are expecting it to do something when run.

ROX-Session has been rewritten in Python. This should make it more maintainable, and also less likely to crash every time a new release of D-BUS comes out (and this version supports more D-BUS versions than the previous release).

Some configuration settings don't work anymore and there may be some rough edges. We're making a release now because a lot of people have upgraded to a new D-BUS and had everything some working. If you're one of these people, please try this version and report any bugs you find!

Updates for current ROX-CLib practice: use libdir to find ROX-CLib,
use rox_init_with_domain(), add Zero Install target to Makefile.

May need to explicitly link against libX11, added configure test.

Don't use guchar for strings, just causes gcc warnings.

Add injector feed. Fix parsing of options. Added support for menu
shortcuts.

Version 0.18 of 0launch was released yesterday. Notable new features include:

• Signatures in XML comments. This allows us to present feeds nicely in a web-browser, as discussed previously.
• FTP support (not just HTTP).
• Support for extracting from RPMs.
• As an added layer of protection against bugs in tar and cpio, the extraction process is sandboxed using plash, if available.

You can see all these features in action by trying the sample Tgif interface. This interface can be viewed in any web-browser that supports XSLT, and when run it downloads an RPM using FTP, extracts it with plash for sandboxing and then runs it.