We’re on the verge of a whole lot of new CSS media queries becoming available. But if you’re a developer that wants to get a head start and try them out, you’re out of luck. Browsers are prototyping them one by one before making them available and we as developers have to wait.
Open source updates
It’s been a while since I’ve written about a bunch of my open source projects, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still being maintained. Trimage, Grafico, F.lux and SenCSs are all still actively worked on. Read on to find out what’s been happening with them.
SenCSs
When last written about, SenCSs was at version 0.7. We’re currently at version 0.8.1, with a bunch of vertical rhythm fixes, mostly for form elements, and added support for HTML5 elements. You can now add it to the list of “HTML5 CSS frameworks”. ;) Though, “framework” it is not, so I decided to just rename it to what it is: a Baseline.
Get more info at SenCSs.kilianvalkhof.com
F.lux for Ubuntu
After releasing F.lux for Ubuntu this summer, It went from 1.1.1 to 1.1.8 mostly improving stability and making different parts of the application (such as the preview button) work more like users expect. I’ve also been working on KDE/XFCE support, which was kind of finnicky due to the way I select the indicator applet icon. Version 1.1.9, which will be released soon, will hopefully bring this support. After that, it’s onward to 1.2, which will include the ‘turn off for an hour’ functionality.
Get more info at stereopsis.com/flux/linux.html
Trimage
After announcing Trimage in March of this year, I’ve gone from 1.0.0-beta to 1.0.5, with a slew of added functionality in between. I’ve gotten a lot of help from people such as Tarnay Kálmán and Thomas Lété in adding cool new functions. Here’s what has changed since 1.0.0:
- Correct unicode support for all filenames
- Adding a notification area icon
- Using a threadpool for processing (much faster)
- Showing more statistics when compressing
- Window geometry and last opened directory are now remembered
- Ability to drag in entire folders
- Prevent Trimage from overwriting already smaller images
- Add PNGcrush to get even better compression
- Miscelanious speed improvements
A while ago I tried getting Trimage into Debian via debian-mentors. This was unfortunately a very opaque process and in the end no-one wanted to sponsor Trimage despite numerous changes to the build system. I’d still like to get Trimage into the main repositories, so if anyone wants to help me out, that would be greatly appreciated.
For 1.1, Paul is going to update the command line options and generally use his python-fu to improve stuff.
Get more info at trimage.org
Grafico
Announced at the beginning of this year, Grafico has seen a bunch of cool improvements. Within a week, Jan Paul Posma implemented stream graph functionality (after I mentioned the math was much too hard for me, ahem…). Since then, David Parry added stacked bar charts, Rémy Coutable greatly improved my hover code while Jaap van der Meer improved the control of text in the hovers, Menno van der Sman implemented an awesome axis-value algorithm and a lot of options have become much more customizable. Most charts now support negative values as well as positive values, and I’ve done a whole slew of bug fixes and speed improvements.
Get more info at Grafico.kilianvalkhof.com
All in all, a whole bunch of work by a whole bunch of awesome people!
Hi, I'm Kilian. I make Polypane, the
browser for responsive web development and design. If you're reading this site, that's probably
interesting to you. Try it out!