I’m sure a lot of you have updated or soon will be updating to Ubuntu 10.04. With this new release the default theme has changed from the old Human theme to the new Ambiance theme, and along with that the default icon theme has changed to ubuntu_mono_dark, which gives your indicator applets a really sleek look. Sadly, Caffeine doesn’t really blend in all that well with those nice monochrome icons.

That’s why I have gone ahead and created two sets of new icons to be used with the two new themes included with Ubuntu 10.04! Read the rest of this article »

After a few months of hard work (mostly by Isaiah, as of lately), Caffeine for Linux has now reached adulthood with its 1.0 release! With this release, we finally feel like Caffeine is stable enough to be used on a day to day basis, and should fix most situations where the screensaver is being mischievous. It is our hope that this release will somehow make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, but of course maintainers of other distributions are more than welcome to include Caffeine in their repositories as well.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Caffeine is a tiny little applet that sits in your system tray and uses magical caffeine to keep your computer from going asleep or activating the screensaver. This could be helpful when you’re giving presentations, playing full-screen games or when you’re watching flash videos.

Read the rest of this article »

This is old news! Caffeine 1.0 has been released. Go check it out!

I know you have all been waiting impatiently for this ever since we released Caffeine 0.2, but now it is finally here - Caffeine 0.3!

For those of you with short memory, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

This has been in the making ever since we released 0.2. The biggest change for me is that we now have another - extremely productive and skilled - developer working with us. His name is Isaiah Heyer, and he has really been the driving force behind this release. Many, if not most, of the new features are written by him.

What’s new in Caffeine 0.3?

Our main goal with this release was to completely rewrite the code in a neater fashion - to make future development easier. Because of Isaiah’s work, this was completed rather quickly, and thus we decided to include some more features that we were originally planning to release in version 0.4.

Read the rest of this article »

As the developer base for Caffeine has grown larger, we’ve realized that we needed some place to organize information and hold development discussions. Launchpad is great for hosting code, keeping track of bugs, organizing blueprints, etc. It even works as a front-end for translators. But it really lacks a place for proper discussions and there’s not really any space for end-user information.

Therefore I went ahead and created a wiki for our project!

The Wiki is powered by MediaWiki and is hosted at Levonline (who are graciously providing hosting for this blog). Setting it all up was very easy, and probably took less than half an hour. If you’re looking to set up your own Wiki, I highly recommend trying MediaWiki.

→ Here’s the link to our project wiki.

There you will find any and all information about Caffeine.

After a few weeks of frantic coding by me and Brad Smith, the original author of the Caffeine Linux port, Caffeine 0.2 is now officially released! If you have somehow forgotten what Caffeine is, or if you never read my blog post on it at all, here’s a link to it.

In a nutshell, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

Any new features for the 0.2?

There sure are!

• New icons. Although I’m not so very happy with them. They might receive a makeover for the 0.3.
• Full support for gnome-screensaver and Kscreensaver
• Support for the old notification system as well as the new one.
• The ability to choose a time interval from a list, and have Caffeine be active during that time.
• The ability for the user to set the duration for the interval freely.
• Mutiple bug fixes.
• A new project page at Launchpad.

Sweet! Where do I get it?

We actually have a PPA now, so it’s easy as pie. Just follow these steps to add our PPA to your list of repositories, and then download and install Caffeine:

sudo bash -c "echo 'deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/bnsmith/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main' >> /etc/apt/sources.list"

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys B7DEAC3C

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install caffeine

Of course if you’re not running Ubuntu or another distribution that doesn’t make use of the Debian package format, you can get all the files you need by running this command:

bzr branch lp:caffeine

Depending on your distribution, the process for having Caffeine automatically start when you log in is different. But here are instructions for Ubuntu:

1. Goto System → Preferences → Startup Applications
2. Click on Add
3. Enter “Caffeine” in the Name entry and just type “caffeine” in the Command field (the command should be in all lower case letters).
4. Log out and back in again, and Caffeine should be running in your system applet!

For instructions for other distributions, either consult your distribution’s support forum/IRC channel/Mailing list. Or shoot me or Brad an email. My email address can be found on the contact page, and Brad’s can be found at his blog.

What are the plans for 0.3?

The plans aren’t set in stone, but we’re hoping to rewrite the entire application and make it a bit more organized and  overall easier to work with. We’re also planning on making use of GtkBuilder to separate the graphical stuff from the logic. That will also allow us to use Glade, which will make creating the user interface a million times easier.

We also want to get proper support for Xscreensaver as well as stand-alone DPMS. Getting DPMS support is actually fairly trivial, but we have to create a preferences dialog first - as there’s no way to detect whether or not DPMS is running on its own or being managed by another program. Xscreensaver is a little bit trickier, so we’ll see how that goes.

As always, we’re interested in hearing your thoughts, ideas and your criticism. If you have tried Caffeine out and have something to say about it, you’re more than welcome to either leave a comment here or on the announcement post at Brad’s blog. I’m sure Brad would like to get some love as well. After all, it was he who started the development of this application!