PDF Mod 0.8

Contributors
Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca, Bertrand Lorentz, Gabriel Burt

Features

• Add * to beginning of window title when unsaved
• Can select more than one file in Open dialog
• shift-ctrl-z now also works for Redo
• Online docs now hosted on library.gnome.org
• Add Invert Selection action

Bugs Fixed

• Launching with relative filepaths in args works

New Translations
Bengali, Czech, Japanese, Russian

Translators
Alexandre Prokoudine, Daniel Nylander, Jorge González, Kris Thomsen, Łukasz Jernaś, Marek Černocký, Mario Blättermann, Og B. Maciel, Petr Kovar, Runa Bhattacharjee, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, Takeshi AIHANA

More Info
See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

Banshee 1.5.1

After another 4.5 months development, including contributions from 51 people, we have released Banshee 1.5.1!

Shuffle Modes
Shuffle by artist or album let you listen to everything by an artist or on an album before jumping to a new random artist or album.

Shuffle by rating or score lets you shuffle through your songs, with higher rated or scored tracks being more likely to play.

Thanks to Elena Grassi for her patch for the rating shuffle mode that got the ball rolling. Alexander Kojevnikov wrote more about the new shuffle modes on his blog.

Auto DJ
This new feature gives you the option to keep your Play Queue filled with endless music. It builds on the shuffle modes work, letting you fill the queue randomly in artist, album, song, rating, or score mode.


As ever, you can manually add, remove, and reorder songs in the Play Queue — even while in Auto DJ mode.

Alexander, the mastermind behind this new feature, wrote more about the Auto DJ on his blog.

More Info
Other notable new features include keeping the playing song visible, showing tooltips for ellipsized text in the main grid view, and support for WebOS and Samsung Galaxy devices.

There were over 130 bugs fixed and 20 other enhancements added since 1.5.0. Read about them on the release notes. Visit our download page to try it out!

The Secret About Amazon's API it Doesn't Want Distributed

Amazon's Product Advertising API (PAA) lets you search pretty much everything they offer. But on August 15 they started requiring that all requests to the API be signed with the developer's Private Key.

Any client-side software using the PAA directly, including website scripts, Firefox extensions, and desktop applications, would have to distribute their Private Key to all their users to sign the requests. But as you would expect, the license agreement for the API states

a private key...is for your personal use only and you must maintain its secrecy and security.

Others have written about how the PAA license agreement bars its usage on mobile devices. But in fact, it bars it from any client-side software on any device.

Or at least from software you want to distribute.

You can work around this by hosting a server to sign requests for your users, keeping your Private Key private. But anybody could use your service, pretending to be your client software if necessary. And you could wind up signing requests for half the Internet.

The signing requirement benefits nobody. It impedes developers, turning them off from creating applications to serve users and send customers Amazon's way.

Amazon should acknowledge its mistake with this policy and reverse it.

Thanks to James Vasile for reading drafts of this.

PDF Mod 0.7

Contributors
Romain Tartière, Bertrand Lorentz, Robert Dyer, Andreu Correa Casablanca

Features

• View Fullscreen option
• User docs translated into ca

Bugs Fixed

• Build fixes for *bsd
• Update recent files list after opening a document
• libdir expansion issue fixed in Hyena, depends on 0.2

Translations

• es (Andreu Correa Casablanca)
• pt (Filipe Gomes)
• sv (Daniel Nylander)

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more. I'd like to thank Bertrand Lorentz for doing the actual release!

PDF Mod 0.6

Contributors
Łukasz Jernaś, Sandy Armstrong, Igor Vatavuk, Bertrand Lorentz



Features

• Open in Viewer action that launches the default app (usually Evince)
• Remembers last folder a doc was opened from
• Remembers if the toolbar was hidden
• Remember accelerator customizations

Bugs Fixed

• Uses the XDG cache dir for storing tmp files
• Does a better job of cleaning up tmp files
• Fix bug with installing to custom prefix
• Fix some zoom inconsistencies
• Got rid of bundled binaries; Hyena is needed at build-time

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.5

In the spirit of releasing early and often, here is PDF Mod 0.5, a quick three days after 0.4.

Contributors
Bertrand Lorentz, Michael McKinley

Features

• Password-protected PDFs can be opened
• Page labels shown in tooltip, eg A-10, or iii
• Undo/redo have descriptions, eg "Undo Move 5 Pages"

Bugs Fixed

• Loading document doesn't block GUI thread
• Desktop file validates
• Process name set to pdfmod
• Parallel make (-jN) works
• make distcheck passes
• icon-theme-installer included in tarball

See the website for links to tarballs, git, packages, the mailing list, irc, bugzilla, and more.

PDF Mod 0.4

Patch Contributors
Julien Rebetez, Igor Vatavuk

Features

• Insert external documents via menu/toolbar
• Drag pages between open documents
• Export images (jpg/png) working
• Beautiful new icon from Kalle Persson
• UI translated into 10 languages:
  da de es fr hr lt pl pt_BR sv ta
• User docs translated into 5 langauges:
  de es hr pl sv

Bugs Fixed

• No longer jumps to top on zoom or delete
• Error messages are shown to user in popup
• Scroll when dragging near the top or bottom
• Clicking on select matching button works

See the wiki for information on the mailing list, IRC, downloading, git, filing bugs, etc.