[jokosher-devel] Docs, Categories, Effects and Help!

["David Corrales" <corrales david gmail com>]

Hi everyone :) Happy new year!
During the last days of 2006, and with the help of John Kelly, the docstrings were completed! There's some TODO's and CHECK's here and there but they're 95% complete and standarized. If you contributed code to the project, please check them for accuracy. If they need to be corrected and you're too lazy to do it, just tell me about the changes and I'll do them :)
The /trunk/doc/api folder has been updated to match the new doc strings and the new Jokosher/Tango theme! No more of that horrid palette!!! I'm really glad that pink/grey is gone... forever.

Speaking about effect categories, it was finally decided that we'll keep a list to sort the effects. I already started said list, and should probably be complete in a few days. This will allows users to have a much... MUCH better time, when picking out the effects they want. I set up a spec here: 
http://jokosher.python-hosting.com/wiki/EffectCategories (which btw, I have to update a bit) to explain it.

Another point that was brought up in the last few days is the effects dialog. Currently it's lacking in several areas like: effect reordering, name label display, widget is unintuitive and the effect combobox from hell. I decided to make a mockup and have been refining it during these days, looking to solve these problems. I really need to thank 
vdepizzol for sprinkling his design magic over my raw design, as it made coal into something beautiful. Please check it out here and do comment on it: 
http://img369.imageshack.us/my.php?image=effectsdialog9eg1.png
Some things about it:

• The images are placeholders. The idea is to have a distinctive icon for each category, allowing users to quickly know if "BananaSplit" plugin is an equalizer or an amplifier simulator. That's why the categories ComboBox has a small speaker, just like the type one on the right list (active effects).
• The image is from a running glade file, so it's representative of what it would look like if we decide to implement it.
• It's compliant with the Gnome HIG (vdepizzol :D)

If the new effects dialog does indeed get approved I'll start to work on it asap, so it can get proper testing.

I pretty much finishing my yelp-integration spec. Please try it out for bugs! It should work system-wide and locally via the Help menu item. I still have to work on the manual though, which I already merged and it's on docbook now. There's a wiki page to discuss the manual contents here: 
http://userdocs.jokosher.org/ManualContents

It is now possible to build a useful source dist tarball with setuptools. Go into trunk and type 
python setup.py sdist. A folder dist, containing a file jokosherX.Y.tar.gz will be created.
This tarball can be used to install Jokosher in a fresh system. Untar it and run, as root, 
python setup.py install. Jokosher will then be installed system wide and its help file registered in the Yelp directory. I've tried it on Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mandriva and Fedora successfully. Suse failed miserably though, and installing Jokosher there looks like a pain.

Finally, I'd like to discuss the spec for distro-independent-installation since I've been doing installation duties also. To unify efforts and testing :)
Well, that's it for now hehe (check the docs :P) -David