benzaiten_dev

I've upgraded my desktop to Ubuntu 11.10, using Unity. Benzaiten works as expected, but the notifications of updates on the friends page don't show up in the notification area. I'm busy working on that, porting the notifications to the new appindicator library.

Right now, I get an error on the call to the 'lastn'-method on LJ. Clearly, this is an error, but I don't know when it will be fixed -- this is up to LJ. Until they do fix it, editing the last few entries won't work.

Checking for updates on your friends page does not work on Dreamwidth. The method I use ('checkfriends') has been disabled on DW. There is an alternative, but that works exclusively with XML-RPC -- and I use the flat interface. Supporting that new method will take a complete rewrite of the backend, and I'm not sure I feel up to it. I can't even reliably get the reflection to work -- anyone have any pointers?

Also, I'm looking for someone who can create icons for the application itself and the notification icon. Right now I (mis-)use LJ's pencil for the notification, but I'd rather have something more generic.

I've done the upgrade dance today, and my machine is running Ubuntu 11.04 -- Natty Narwhal. I'm pleased to announce that Benzaiten works without any modifications on the latest version of Ubuntu.

Just upgraded my machine to Ubuntu 10.10, Maverick Meerkat. Benzaiten still works and looks better than ever with the Ambience theme.

While I'm at it, I might as well release 0.8.2, which fixes some bugs in 0.8.1:

- Fixed a bug that not correctly loaded Last.fm account details
- Fixed a bug that gave an error if you have not yet logged in
- Implemented clipboard functions across the whole interface

(Yes, that last one means you can use the keyboard shortcuts in any part of the interface, not only in the entry textarea.)

Release is here.

I'm sorry for the buggy experience. I'm using you as my beta-testers: some things I stumble upon myself, but I don't hit all the possible situations.

Scrapbook integration is a bit of a pain, so I haven't really gotten any further with that. But getting feature requests from users have spurred me on to put a bit more polish on Benzaiten, which resulted in this release, 0.8.1.

You can download the release here.

New in this release:
- Menu item under 'File' to refresh the account information. Will refresh the list of icons, tags and recent entries. So if you have just uploaded a new icon through the website, you don't have to quit Benzaiten to start using it!
- I added a button for an LJ Cut to the toolbar. The icon is courtesy amberkitsune.
- Changed the text entry widget to GTKSourceView2, because the original GTKSourceView is not available in Ubuntu 10.04 anymore.
- Added a photo to the Login and About windows. This is the roof of the Benzaiten temple in Ueno Park in Tokyo, with cherry blossoms.
- Added a button to the About window that will direct you to this community.
- Added music detection functionality through Last.fm.
- Added a preview functionality.

About the music detection
The music detection works through Last.fm -- so if you use a media player that scrobbles through Last.fm (I use Spotify myself), you can have the music you're playing at the time of posting automatically detected and added to the entry.
However, Benzaiten makes use of pylast, a Python module that is not installed in Ubuntu. In fact, there is no package for it, so you will have to install it manually, unfortunately. To get the module, issue these commands on a commandline:
svn checkout http://pylast.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ pylast-read-only
cd pylast-read-only
sudo python setup.py install

You must restart Benzaiten and enter your Last.fm account details in the Preferences dialog. If you check the Autodetect box, the music will be detected when you post an entry, just before it's sent to the server. You can also manually detect the music with the button 'Detect Now'.
If you don't have pylast installed, this functionality will simply be disabled -- Benzaiten will still work.

About the preview functionality
The preview functionality builds up a local HTML page with your entry as it will appear on the site and shows that in your webbrowser. It currently works through a template file, and I have used my own journal style to create this template. I might make this configurable in the next release, so that you could create your own template based on your own journal style.
Through some Javascript trickery, the LJ Cuts even work: the contents are displayed when you click on the cut.

As always, your comments and bug reports are greatly appreciated.

Today, I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04, Lucid Lynx. After the upgrade, Benzaiten did not properly run, because the GtkSourceview package has been removed and replaced by the GtkSourceview2 package...
I'm updating Benzaiten to work with this new version. Has anybody else experienced problems?

Today, I visited the Benzaiten temple in Ueno Park in Tokyo. I offered some incense in hopes of writing better software. :) I also took some pictures that I expect to be able to use to make the log-in screen a bit more visually appealing.

Thank you for your continued support!