Acire Hacking

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This afternoon I took a little time to work on some changes in Acire; my little graphical front-end to a library of Python Snippets. I wanted to share this work as I think it will continue to help Acire be a useful little tool.

Today I added a new feature that helps you tie online documentation with a snippet. So, if you take a look at this screenshot:

You can see that in the snippet information (which I have changed the layout on a little) there are now a couple of link buttons. If you click on one of the buttons it will load up the documentation in your web browser. This documentation is added to the snippet like this:

[SNIPPET_DOCS: http://www.website.com, http://www.anothersite.com]

Acire will then grab the title of those sites and display the buttons underneath the snippet. This is a great way of including a link to the manual page for a given feature, tutorial links or anything else with a snippet. This is just a first cut of the feature and I am sure there some bugs to irk out, so merge proposals are welcome.

In addition to this I added some additional fixes and features:

  • Alphabetized Lists – the list of categories in Acire and the list of snippets in each category has now been alphabetized which makes navigating available snippets much easier.
  • HIG improvements – thanks to Matthew Pirocchi fo contributing a branch for helping Acire to fit in with the GNOME HIG better. The changes are subtle but really sleek.
  • Number of snippets – the number of snippets that are currently available are now shown on the status bar.
  • Link to how to add snippets – Acire is nothing without python-snippets, so I added a link in the Help menu to this page which explains how people can contribute snippets.

The python-snippets project which provides the library of snippets that Acire uses has been seeing some wonderful contributions across a range of categories. Here is a quick screenie showing the range of categories that we have snippets in now:

So, I am planning on doing a little more bug-fixing and then rolling a 0.5 release of Acire.