Planet Linux Mint

First of all, I’d like to thank all the people who participated in this RC, who sent us feedback and helped make Mint 15 what it’s about to be.

We’ve been very busy, and we’re still not completely done yet.. so I’ll be very brief :)

Here’s the RC in stats (at the time of writing this post):

• We went through 577 comments
• We didn’t keep a record of the number of bugs found, but we worked off a list (removing them as we fixed them and adding new ones as people reported them), and at some stage that list included 82 bugs :)
• We’re down to 2 bugs and they’re related to how we make the ISO, so we’re basically done with the bugs

I’d like to thank the team for the fantastic job they’ve done in fixing all these bugs so fast, and the community for identifying areas that needed more work.

As usual, we gave the RC our best shot.. we thought about it as a stable product.. and users proved us wrong :)

We’re exhausted but also extremely proud of us, proud of you, and of what we’ve achieved together this week. 82 bugs later, we’re looking at a much more stable set of ISOs.

We’re still on track for a stable release at the end of the month. Many thanks to all the people who helped us with this RC!

There are a few features of the new settings API I’d like to touch on, that may be less than obvious, but which might help you in this transition period…

Metadata Options

Every applet (and desklet and extension) has a metadata.json file – this, at minimum, has the uuid, the name, and a brief description of your applet.  You’re a busy guy or gal – you haven’t had time or the energy to stop what you’re doing and begin upgrading your applet to use this new API.  You can, however, begin to ease your way into it.

{
 "uuid": "foo@cinnamon.org",
 "name": "Foobar",
 "description": "This does something",
 "icon": "error",
 "external-configuration-app": "foobar-settings.py"
}

If you’ve already got a program you wrote for configuring your applet, you can define it using the  

external-configuration-app

 key in your metadata file.  Doing this will add a ‘Configure’ button to the applet manager in Cinnamon Settings, and allow the user to launch the configuration directly from that panel, the same way he could if you were using the API.  Just be sure to make this program executable before zipping it up, and be sure it’s in the applet’s directory.

Command line launching

No matter how your applet settings are implemented, be it natively or as described above, you can directly open either the settings page or your settings program from the command line, which can be handy to use directly from your applet:

cinnamon-settings applets foo@cinnamon.org

This will launch Cinnamon Settings, open the applets panel, and then go directly into the settings for your applet (or launch your external program).

 Transitioning…

Small things like this will help to ease the into the new features of Cinnamon 1.8.  Once you’ve fully adapted your applet, it can be a seamless transition from an external setup program to native configuration.