It is with a great pleasure that I announce the release of my pet project BillReminder! The road to 0.3 has been a very educational journey for me, and looking back when I first decided to port my original code written in C# to Python just so that I could learn more about Python, I can say that I have learned quite a bit. I have also met some fabulous people along the way, some of them very responsible for me keeping the project going. I can trully say that whenever I find the time to work on this project, I lose track of time. Whenever I feel insecure about my own skills (or when people make me feel that way) I take a look at what I have done so far… it may not be the best piece of software out there, but it is mine… written from scratch!
My plan was to release BillReminder on February 15th, in honor of my second daughter Kate’s first birthday. But unfeortunately time wasn’t on my side, as work and my personal life caught up to me. I want to sincerely thank all of those who took the time to test it and send in feedback and even patches! I want to specially thank my friend Luiz Armesto for sticking around and sharing the same enthusiasm at creating something from scratch and having fun while at it!
So what is new with this release? A lot actually:
This was a massive rewrite of the entire application, and instead of listing all files that have been changd, I’ll try to highlight the most important changes and features instead.
GLADE: BillReminder 0.3 was entirely re-written in order to remove all glade files and dependencies. The initial idea was to simply get rid of the dependency, but it also served as a learning process for me (and I believe the other contributors will agree with this as well). DBUS: The DBUS layer received a bit more love from Luiz Armesto, breaking it down into the proper calls so to separate the ‘engine’ per se from the client. UI: The user interface has also gone a series of changes and (hopefully) improvements. It is probably not 100% HIG compliant yet, but we’ll gladly accept suggestions. Bug management: Towards the last 8 weeks of development we’ve adopted the habit of filing bug reports prior to fixing the issues that we encountered during the development cycle. Translations: All prior contributors promptly replied to my email asking them to update their translations:
- de.po: Sebastian Haselbeck
- es.po: Gilberto J. Miralla
- no_NB.po: Tommy Mikkelsen
- no.po: Tommy Mikkelsen
- pt_BR.po: Fábio Nogueira
- sv.po: Daniel Nylander
You can download the source code for BillReminder here, as well as Ubuntu Hardy and Fedora 8 packages, courtesy of Luiz Armesto. Foresight users playing with the newer alpha 4 can install it using conary… Mandriva and Arch Linux packages should be coming your way soon too!
Please send your constructive feedback, comments, and patches to us via our tracker.