Today, I’m proud to announce the 2.0 release of the Mono Accessibility project. Spanning a year of intensive work and fixing over 500 bugs, this is truly our best release ever.
This release enables all types of users to access System.Windows.Forms and Silverlight applications from Linux using Orca and other ATK-based Assistive Technologies (ATs), as well as access Linux applications from UI Automation (UIA) based ATs.
What’s changed since version 1.0?
Added:
- UI Automation provider support for Moonlight
- UI Automation to ATK bridge for Moonlight to allow Moonlight applications to be accessed by Linux ATs
- Complete implementation of the UI Automation Client API, facilitating access to System.Windows.Forms, ATK-based applications and Silverlight controls for UI Automation Clients.
What is Mono Accessibility:
The Mono Accessibility project enables Winforms and Silverlight applications to be fully accessible on Linux, and allows Assistive Technologies (ATs) like screen readers and test automation tools that depend on UI Automation APIs to work on Linux.
Mono Accessibility is released under the MIT/X11 license.
Get it!
Mono Accessibility is available for a variety of Linux distributions, including:
A Note About at-spi2
Accessing GTK+ applications with the UIA Client API requires the most recent development version of the new dbus-based at-spi2, which is known to cause system instability.
In Fedora, at-spi2 repeatedly causes GDM to segfault. If you do not need this feature, do not install the latest at-spi2 and atk, or our packages which depend on them, which are at-spi-sharp and AtspiUiaSource.
We are working hard to identify these issues and hope to aid the GNOME Accessibility Team in stabilizing at-spi2 in the near future.
Find out more
Navigate to our homepage for all the latest information, and ways to contact us.
Browsing foundation-list recently, I was honored to see Snowy (and Tomboy Online) hosting mentioned as one of the GNOME CEO goals (scroll to the bottom) for 2010! Unfortunately, the pace of Snowy’s development has slowed in the last few months, due in part to both Sandy and my schedules. Despite that, we wouldn’t want Stormy to get a bad reputation because of our slacking, so we’re going to change that.
We’re hosting an IRC meeting in the #snowy channel on irc.gimp.net on Saturday, 23 Jan 2010 at 11:00 AM EDT (16:00 GMT, other time zones) to get ourselves organized, and to recruit your help.
So, if you are a graphic designer that wants to help beautify an awesome open source project, if you’re a hacker who knows or wants to learn Django, or even if you’re just interested in Snowy, stop on by!
See you there!
As part of Novell‘s Hack Week starting today, a few of us will be hanging out on #snowy working on new features and polish, so if you’d like to join in on the fun, drop on by. Also, if you want to contribute, now is the perfect time to get help or for us to review your work!
Ever since Alex let Tomboy see the light of day, I’ve been aching for some way to sync the catalog of musings and information that I’ve accumulated between the various computers I interact with on a daily basis. In particular, I’ve been complaining about this to various friends (especially Sandy) for years and, aside from boring them nearly to tears, I haven’t done anything about it.
Unlike many ideas that I kick around in my head, this one wouldn’t give up the ghost. When Sandy was in town recently for work, we turned whining into action and started scheming and hacking on a way for Tomboy notes to be synced and viewed on the web. We call this project Snowy.
What is Snowy?
Snowy is Tomboy’s best friend on the web. Snowy is an online service that allows you to view, edit and share the notes you create in Tomboy on your desktop computer.
Snowy leverages Django, a powerful (and pony powered) python-based web framework, and is based upon several powerful Django applications, among them: django-reversion, django-evolution and django-piston. This has allowed us to get a rough structure up in an incredibly short time (you can look at the commit logs for yourself!), and leveraging proven, scalable components like we have will hopefully allow us to continue at this breakneck pace.
Tomboy synchronizes with Snowy using the new Tomboy Web Sync Service Add-in developed by Sandy. We’ve defined a solid REST API to allow Snowy and Tomboy to communicate, and also to allow other folks to develop their own apps based upon the same kick-ass synchronization add-in.
Much like Tomboy, Snowy attempts the same innovative design ideas by starting you off in editing mode with an unobtrusive contentEditable-based WYSIWYG editor. Hate save buttons? No problem. Snowy will auto-save your note every 4 seconds so you don’t lose a word.
Everyone has a smart phone nowadays, so Snowy will feature an interface tailored to the iPhone and Android style of devices. This will likely be read-only as neither browser allows contentEditable divs.
And, in addition to allowing you to host your own instance of Snowy if you’re so interested, we plan on hosting Snowy as a service called Tomboy Online.
Caveat Emptor
Unfortunately for those of you who want to use this yesterday, much of what I’ve mentioned is still in progress. Snowy is currently under heavy development, and is not ready for production use. Like any good K9 companion, Snowy will file your taxes improperly, reconcile with your ex-girlfriends and burn risotto if not watched carefully.
If you want to teach Snowy some new tricks, we could use the help. Django experts and designers are especially welcome, but folks who want to provide input, test, document or translate Snowy are warmly invited.
Getting it
Snowy’s code is hosted on GNOME Git. Please check out our handy INSTALL guide to get started.
Getting in Touch
We’re just now setting up much of the infrastructure for Snowy, so you’ll need to bear with us. For right now, Sandy and I hang out in #snowy on irc.gimp.net, and I can be reached via email at brad (at) getcoded.net.
Ed: Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get reCAPTCHA up this evening so that I could open up comments to anyone. I’ll try to do this for future posts though. If you have feedback, please shoot me an email or join #snowy.
