Today I released the first version of shellshape, a tiling window manager plugin for gnome-shell. It’s definitely pre-alpha software, and currently requires a custom fork of the mutter window manager. I’ve had some trouble getting it running due to awful packaging things (I now know far too much about dynamic linking path resolution on linux), but it should work, at least on Fedora 15. Please give it a go if you use gnome-shell - and if not, there’s more information and a demo video at the above link.

It’s got a long way to go - there are certainly bugs, and some features aren’t done right yet. But it works, and that’s pretty exciting to me after working towards it on and off for about four months.

I just released daglink, a tiny program for managing your system configuration. The readme has most of the information, but as a quick overview daglink allows you to maintain symbolic links from well-known locations (e.g /etc/apt/sources.list.d/) into locations of your choosing (mine live in ~/dev/app-customisations/).

But more than just creating symlinks, it allows you to create the appropriate links based on tags of your choosing, for example distro, release and keyboard type (yes, I do actually have multiple of each of those that I frequently use).

I’ve seen others use git or puppet for this, and until now I just had a hand-rolled script and some well-named files. So I figured I might as well write something proper. Did I mention it has built-in support for zero install URLs instead of paths, if you’re into that sort of thing? I’m not sure how useful that is (or should be), but it could turn out useful for some very niche cases.

Over the holidays, I’ve finally had the time to rewrite my mocking library for python, mocktest.

The original version had what turned out to be a confusing distinction between mock anchdors, mock wrappers and raw mocks. You should no longer need to know about that distinction when using mocktest 0.5, as it takes a more traditional approach using global methods like when() and expect() to differentiate between setting up the mock object and actually using it.

Please check out the brand-new documentation if you’re looking into a mocking library for python - it works with the standard unittest infrastructure, so it’ll work just fine with your favourite test runner (nosetests, surely….)

Speaking of documentation, this is my first time using sphinx. I am very impressed, and really quite keen to properly document a lot of my other code, when I get the time.

After getting an android phone about a month ago, I finally got around to writing a workable pagefeed sync app. This app can handle share intents from any app (I use NewsRob mostly), and save that link to pagefeed on next sync.

It also downloads the links (not the content, this is a lightweight app) so you can delete links from the app and have them deleted from the webapp as well.

You can download the apk here (I haven’t signed up for the market yet). The source is also up on github.

Android as a platform

Overall, I found android frustrating to learn when dealing with some of the newer and less-documented parts (like SyncAdapters and how they interact with ContentProviders, for example), but overall I’m finding it to be a very well-designed system that is easy to write for.

For comparison (because I’ve written an iPhone app or two), this app could not exist on the iPhone because interaction with other apps (via intents) is crucial, as is background operation (which has only just arrived in OS4). It would also be a royal pain in the ass to obtain, store and validate user credentials - all of which android makes general and reusable (I am happily reusing the google-provided authenticators).

Oh yeah, and it’s written in scala! I seem to have an aversion to platform-specified languages, having used python for my biggest iPhone app. Of course, that meant that I had to void my warranty and only run on jailbroken iPhones. Android doesn’t care how you write your app, and that’s the way it should be.

savemytext is a tiny app engine webapp I wrote last night.

When you write text in it, it will save your text. When you come back, your text will still be there. You can have multiple text boxes. Since it’s an appengine app, you’ll need a google account to use it.

A trivial app, to be sure. But all too often I find myself writing gmail drafts just in order to get a persistent text box between computers. I figured, why not do it properly?

(I was going to just call it “textarea”, but someone already stole that name (and tens of similar ones, without actually having an app to put up. How rude))

PageFeed is a simple web service to help you organise the pages you’d like to read, but just don’t have the time (or desire) to read through right now.

If you’ve ever used Instapaper, or the newer Read It Later, Pagefeed will feel pretty familiar. The idea is that when you come across an interesting page that you don’t have time to read right now, you just save it to PageFeed via a handy bookmarklet. You can close the page, and PageFeed will remember all the pages you’ve saved for reading later.

Instapaper and Read It Later both have their own iPhone apps for reading stuff offline. Which is great, but it seems a little unnecessary - and it makes for yet another app you have to remember to open and sync every day. And you know what? There’s already a super robust way to subscribe to a stream of HTML items - it’s called RSS. PageFeed puts the HTML contents of your saved pages into your own private RSS feed. You can then use your favourite online / offline feed reader - you can take the content wherever you like and use it on whatever platform you fancy. You can also use the PageFeed home page for managing your list of saved pages away from your RSS reader.

PageFeed isn’t perfect; it can’t put HTML contents in a feed if it can’t parse the HTML page properly. And if there’s one thing the internet is good at, it’s malformed HTML. But it does pretty well, and if it can’t save the page contents then it will still keep the URL around for you to visit later.

PageFeed runs on AppEngine and uses google accounts, so chances are you already have an account.

The newest version (0.8) of GRiS (the RSS reader I wrote for the iPhone) has support for PageFeed - when you click a link in an article’s contents, you can opt for it to be saved to PageFeed instead of opened in MobileSafari. If you’d like to offer similar functionality in your RSS (or other) application, get in touch!