November 20, 2011

3.2.0b1 is out! Go get it!

This has been another release with more work on the backend than cosmetic changes. The cosmetic changes that are making an appearance have to do with configurability. You can now turn off search-as-you-type which will make the search button in the search toolbar reappear. The statusbar can also be turned on like the old 1.5.x series. The kanji tooltip is now more intelligently placed when it is off the screen on the bottom or left sides.

For the backend the dependancies have changed. gWaei now requires gtk+-3.2 to run (along with the dbus dependencies that come with it.) waei avoids requiring dbus by sticking to particular functions. libunique is no longer required and mingw32 is now detected automatically. This all means that the only configure option that remains is --without-gnome for only compiling libwaei and waei. gWaei will now give a descriptive error if you do not have the libwaei preference schemas installed instead of failing silently. gsettings-desktop-schemas is required for gWaei to run.

The backend has been rewritten to more fully utilize the gtk object framework. The windows now extend GtkWindow which allows passing them directly in signals. The number of lines in each dictionary is no longer counted at startup which should make the program start much quicker and be easier on I/O. Because of how the backend search was rewritten, the threshold for the max results that gWaei can display has been increased.

Sorry Windows users. Windows support is put on hold again until gtk3 3.4 because the library just isn't there yet. Furthermore, the dbus port to windows is only just starting to mature. By then hopefully the MSWindows theme will be updated for gtk3, too.

July 17, 2011

3.0.2 is out! Go get it!

It's been a little bit since I updated my website thanks to my busy life. gWaei has skipped having a version 2 so that its numbers can be made to reflect which Gnome versions they belong with. Which also means that the 3.0.x series is meant to be compiled against gtk3 instead of gtk2. With gtk3 comes a new look and a more dynamic interface.

The code of gwaei was split into 3 parts: libwaei (the backend code), waei (the console search code), and gwaei (the gtk frontend) so I can keep my sanity compiling it on my netbook. (Thank you libtool!) Everything is much better separated and a lot of complexity has been removed thanks to this.

gWaei now uses GRegex instead of straight C regex for better portability. This in particular became an issue on the *BSDs and Windows platforms where the base implimentation doesn't support perl style syntax. The BSD guys would have to manually fix the code for their system and on Windows you would have to download and compile against a special gnuregex library.

Libsexy was dropped since it wasn't ported to gtk3 and so gWaei now has its own internal implimentation of the same functionality through direct calls to enchant. If gWaei doesn't find enchant, it disabled spellcheck automatically. Not all features from libsexy spellcheck have been reimplimented, but the basics are there.

Whats left? Well the plugins interface hasn't been implimented yet. It's just sitting there disabled in the preferences drawing attention to itself. I am also thinking of adding some more preference options to gWaei when I have a chance.

January 10, 2011

A new gWaei release for the new year! 1.5.2 is out! Go get it!

Updates of the website have been sparse, but development of gWaei has continued regardless. A number of bug fixes have made it in again, and finally I am going around making updates to the README documentation again. gWaei 1.5.2 should be good an ready for package maintainers when Gnome 2.31 comes to their machines and when Gnome 3.0 is finally released.

• Searches when using & in the query work again instead of being truncated as you type.
• The interface is now more responsive when a search is carried out by edits to thread locking.
• Exact matching for the console version of gWaei was readded because it is truly needed there
• The sandboxing issue caused by gtk-update-icon-cache for the package maintainers.
• The README has been updated as it was woefully out of date.

November 4, 2010

Release of the first Public Binary of gWaei for Windows! Go get it!

Real progress has been made on a usable native gWaei binary for Windows. It still needs some love, but it means the worst of the port is over. I am currently looking for someone who wants to be a Windows port maintainer. If you are interested and ready to learn, I would be happy to have you aboard. Just contact us through our IRC channel or email me.

What is still missing from the Windows version are:

• Spellcheck support through libsexy/enchant
• Preferences which will become possible once the code is ported to GSettings from GConf
• Proper multithreading during searches
• Various polish issues

Otherwise, the program is working pretty well and it is exciting seeing gWaei make it to more platforms.

May 10, 2010

Version 1.4.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

A fair amount more background reworking had went into this release, and much of the interface has been tweaked to be smaller, easier to maintain, and prettier.There is a revamped no results page where you can search for the word online or in another dictionary with just a click. There is also functionality to search for a word in a new tab by right clicking it.

The command line now show download progress as a dictionary is being installe,d, and has recieved some basic maintenace.

May 9, 2010

Version 1.3.1 and 1.2.3 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This fixes corrupt dictionary installs because the whole file wasn't being written to disk. If you have gWaei crash right at the end of searches, it is most likely this bug. Install the update, reinstall the dictionary, and you should be fine. (Alternatively, install the dictionary then quit to force the whole file to be written. Then searches should be fine.)

May 6, 2010

Version 1.2.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

But if you have 1.3.0, don't get it! This is a bug fix release with minimal changes for distrobutions using ths e 1.2.x series. This should remove crashes that appear when using a version of gtk+ greater than 2.16.

March 19, 2010

Version 1.3.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Now supports tabs. A lot of code rewritten. New ncurses interface for the console version. Many bug fixes. Simpler preferences dialog.

October 25, 2009

Version 1.2.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

I was planning on releasing on Friday, but work became really busy so I couldn't do my baseline testing, but now it's here!

There are a number of new features this time around. The first thing you will notice is new formatting for searches that is easier to skim quickly. There are new installable dictionaries. Many people asked for the examples dictionary. There is also a German, French, and Spanish one, too.

A number of bugfixes went into this release. Noteably, a memory leak in the Radicals Search Tool and symbolic N parsing problems for the romaji->hiragana converter.

This release also removed the deb folder for deb file generation. This is being taken care of the debian folks for official inclution in the Debian repositiories. If you still need to make a deb, there is information in the README, or you can always do a "checkinstall."

Libunique is a new dependency of gWaei. It is a "GNOME blessed external dependency." With it gWaei has been made single single instance. The future plan is to make a single instance manage multiple windows to allow less memory usage and more control. For example, the Quit button will act less like a close button.

October 9, 2009

Version 1.1.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

If you have problems, please come by the IRC channel at irc://irc.freenode.net/gwaei

Offical 1.1 release! A bunch of changes made it into the program. Much of the main interface has been rethought out. Bugs squashed, code reworked. Much of the program has been documented using doxygen, a new IRC help channel setup, and links to the homepage from the program.

This release requires Gnome 2.26 level dependencies. This would be about Fedora 11 or Ubuntu 9 level.

October 9, 2009

Version 1.0.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Another release. The most important fix in this bugfix release is where the romanji->hiragana conversion engine would convert "ge" as "ke". Most othe bug fixes have to do with building the program on different archintectures. If you have the program and it is working fine for you, you may want to wait until gWaei 1.1 releases in a week or so.

June 14, 2009

Version 1.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Yay! It finally happened. This will be the stable version for a while. I'm a bit sad that I had to drop support for Debian 5.0 (Lenny) though. Fortunately, it will be compatible with the next version. The next stable version of gWaei will be 1.1. If you want to see something fixed for it, please submit a bug report! gWaei 2.0 will have new features, a reworked interface, and hopefully be all around better and more polished.

May 27, 2009

Version 1.0rc1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

There were some small tweaks to the progam's code to get it to compile under Windows correctly. There was also a small memory leak when opening the help menu. This will be the last revision before 1.0!

May 16, 2009

Version 1.0b3 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Small changes. Radicals have been reordered and some holes filled. The number separators for the radicals have been made red to make them more visible. RPM building has been slightly reworked. Libgnome is no longer a dependancy.

April 25, 2009

Version 1.0b1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Most important thing fixed in this release is a minor buffer overflow that caused the program to crash on Ubuntu 9. I have made some headway on MS Windows support, but still am not 100% there yet. The last important change is that when gnome is turned off in the configuration for the build, GConf is no longer a forced dependancy.

Onward-ho to 1.0!

March 29, 2009

Version 0.15.4 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release brings some small changes and fixes. I have to thank all of the contributors who helped. I have never had so many people helping by submitting bugs, translations, and fixes. Thank you all!

The major notables this time are a reworked Radical Search Tool window and a fix so that Mac OS X users should be bale to compile the program.

I want to eventually release a 1.0 version of gWaei so that people have something stable to use. In order to do this, I want to squash the last of the large bugs and make the program usable on MS Windows in the basic sense. If anyone wants to help, email me or contact me through my blog.

March 14, 2009

Version 0.15.3 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This was a quick bugfix release. There were a number of things that were horribly wrong, so this update is recommended for everyone. Particularly people who search when using a non-japanese locale and who need to install dictionaries through the built in mechanism.

Fabrizio also offered an updated Italian translation (thanks fabrizio!) and the internal error system has been further upgraded windows support improved somewhat.

March 13, 2009

Version 0.15.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

A number of tweaks have happened. A lot of polish has been added to the console interface. There is still a large bug that I need to take care of that I noticed today. (Read more about it on my blog.)

Debian users can now compile gWaei without hacks. Also, MS Windows compatibility is coming along...but still isn't there yet. 4pack donated a Spanish translation to gWaei which is very nice.

March 1, 2009

Version 0.15.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Bug fix release! This should fix the issue some people were having doing searches that contained kanji.

Other changes include gconf being abstracted out. It is possible to compile the program withotu gconf available...though it isn't recommended. Also, the deb installs and uninstalls now exit cleanly with no errors.

Last, an updated italian translation has now been added! (Thanks Fabrizio!)

February 28, 2009

Version 0.15.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

The newest version of gWaei has finally arrived! This version took so long because it was edging on being a total rewrite. Many of the dangling variables that I had floating around are now neatly put away into C structs.

On the front end, there is a link saying "Where can I get other dictionaries?" This is meant to help people find other dictionaries that may work with gwaei.

Last, and the most interesting, gtk support is now OPTIONAL in gWaei. You can access most of the program's features through the terminal now! The program creates a symbalic link called waei on installation that can be used to access all of this console goodness.

January 26, 2009

Version 0.14.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

New features! The preferences dialog has recieved an options boost. There is a new advanced tab. On of the most interesting options is the ability to adjust the highlight colors.

The search engine has been upgraded a bit. Bugs fixed, works better with NetBSD, does better sorting of Japanese searches.

Last, the japanese locale requirements have been loosened. They aren't as important as I had once thought. Though it is nice because it makes gtk antialias the japanese text on my systems.

January 19, 2008

Version 0.13.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a another bugfix release. It looks like I didn't fix the startup problem some users experienced last time. This time I managed to get some help testing and the problem should actually be gone. I'm finally starting to understand how the setlocale command works, which helps a lot.

The dictionary terminology gossary has been separated out from the general help section. It was just different enough not to fit in. It now has it's own menuitem in the Help menu.

That's about it.

January 17, 2008

Version 0.13.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a release focusing on fixing bugs. The most noteworthy of which was an infinitely loop on startup that some computer encountered. (It it still is not fixed, someone please email me.)

There was a crasher when attempting to print only one highlighted line in the results. The back and forward buttons have been coded better against race conditions on slow hardware because the back/forward button's wouldn't become insensitive quick enough to stop repeted executions. The highlight colors have been chosen to work better with dark themes than they were. Fixed a crasher when users would go back/forward after switching dictionaries.

There have been a few minor features added as well. alt-left and alt-right will go back and forward in the search history much like a web browser. Shift-tab will cycle backwards through the dictionaries. The colors for highlighting have been switched around and varied more. The previous red just wasn't really compatible with any of the other colors I tried with it. It is now possible to optionally compile the program without libsexy.

January 13, 2008

Version 0.13.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

What's changed? There is a new libsexy dependency for gWaei. It allows spell checking in the search entry which can be very handy sometimes.

The Preferences dialog has been switched around. There is no longer a separate Places install as it is actually a subset of Names. The new gWaei code downloads just the Names dictionary and splits the Places dictionary out of it manually. This has some nice side effects in that the Names dictionary becames smaller and faster, and less bandwidth is used when downloading files. Plus, rsync will now keep the Places dictionary up to date, unlike before.

The documentation for gWaei has had a large overhaul. The help manual is a bit more complete, and the README gives better directions.

The grey highlighting was a BAD idea in 0.12.0. Talk about giving migranes. I disabled it, but he code is still there just in case.

January 9, 2008

Version 0.12.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

The most important changes this time are portability fixes. Testing has gone into making sure that NetBSD and Fedora works. Particularly testing with NetBSD exposed some deficiencies in the code. Even though libgnomeui was dropped as a dependancy, I forgot to remove it from configure.ac, meaning the program was still compiling against it. This apparently broke localizations on BSD based Oses.

As requested by Jim Breen, there is rsync functionality for updating most of the installed dictionaries. This is much easier on their servers than reinstalling the dictionary completely.

In localization land, my good friend Fabrizio Sabatini contributed the Italian localization of gWaei. (Thanks Fabrizio!) I have also translated the rest of the Settings dialog into Japanese. It's my first attempt, so it may not be perfect. It is a good start though.

January 3, 2008

Version 0.11.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

It was a month in coming, but I had to enjoy my Christmas vacation a bit ;-). Happy new years peoples! Some of the nice changes of this release are some memory leak fixes, an improved "No results found" screen, and automatic searching for hiragana/katakana versions of results when possible.

Other things are improvements in the rpm and deb generation. Doing a distcheck on the tarball no longer requires root privelages. In general, the install process was made more portable.

December 5, 2008

Version 0.10.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has a number of bug fixes and a majorly tweaked installation system. The Japanese translation has been update again. The results text has been reformatted again too. Previously, there was 2 pixels of padding above and below each line that made it difficult to visually group results. Results are now throttled to not go about ~150. There is now a "Show less relevant results" menuitem in the view menu. Last, the "No Results Found" page has been updated to be more interesting.

December 1, 2008

Version 0.9.1 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

I know I know. I released 0.9.0 just a few days ago. I had some stuff I wanted to add though and there was an important bugfix included.

gWaei no longer has a dependancy on the obsolute libgnomeui! A bug where I dereferenced gconf too many times has also been fixed. The worst problem the bug caused was the toolbar toggle and font size changing would cease to work

In other news, I finally fully translated the main window and the kanjipad window in Japanese. I avoid doing translations for things I have strong feeling I won't be able to do adequately enough, which is why it took so long. The interface has a nice consistant feeling in Japanese which I really like now.

In an attempt to introduce regular expressions to users in a non-scary way, new buttons have been appearing in the interface. The would be the Boundary, Not-Boundary, and Unkown buttons. With 0.9.1, And and Or also make an appearance. None of them are all that complicated, but they add a nice crutch.

Last, I re-added the category header for the less relevant results. It has been done better this time, so it should stay around. I am still hoping to improvie it's appearance though.

November 29, 2008

Version 0.9.0 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has some major bug fixes and and new features. Finally, the program should work on locales that are not ja_jp.utf8...which means a majority of users probably had a problem. (Sorry guys! My bad!)

Other changes include Kanjipad integration. It is no longer a separate dependency. The integration brings handiness because it will past your drawn letters directly to the search input box.

Another large change is that the install source of dictionaries is changable. This means that you don't need an internet connection do do installation if you're prepared.

There have been a fair number of other fixes too. gWaei now coerces metacity to remember the window position and size settings a bit stronger.

Read my blog to find out more about the work that went into this release (with pictures!)

November 25, 2008

Version 0.8.2 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This is a major bug fix release. I did some testing using Ubuntu and found some really really bad bugs that made the program uninstallable. Even if the user somehow managed to force the installation, gWaei would still crash during searches and freeze the GUI during dictionary installs among other problems. I want to thank Fabrizio for the heads up and getting me to fix them. Because I'm a Gentoo users, in many ways I had my head in the sand. :-)

November 23, 2008

Version 0.8 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

Getting the program code to work with Automake was a huge pain in the butt, but it's finally done. This is a released that had a lot of code reorganization.

There have been a number of bug fixes. There used to be a crash when doing a search after pressing the back button. After opening Kanjipad, a number of buttons would also stop functioning. There are fixed now.

I made a few mistakes on the interface I backtracked on from the last release. The toolbar is now hidden by default. When it is shown, the interface gets cluttered and starts to look a bit too much like a web browser. With history search items now appearing in the history menu, nothing has really been lost when with this change of defaults. I also removed the "Most Relevant results" and "Other results" headers from the results pane. The results are still organized in that fashion, but they are now easier to read without the blaring red text.

Tell me if you have any problems with this version through my email or my blog.

November 18, 2008

Version 0.7 of gWaei is out! Go get it!

This release has a lot of polish applied. Things like a new icon go a long way. On the technical side, searches now finish about twice as fast! Also, help documentation has been moved to the standard Gnome help window. Tell me if you have any problem through my email or my blog.

November 15, 2008

Version 0.6.1 of gWaei is out, go get it!

I fixed a small crasher with the radical search tool. Also, this is the first version to be released with both rpm and deb versions. Tell me if you have any problem through my email or my blog.

November 14, 2008

I'm releasing a new version of gWaei (0.6)! This version is actually fit for public consumption. The print button now works (for at least a page anyway.) I fleshed out the make file so it has the standard install, remove, and clean options. Speaking of which, the install option does a real install. The program is even added to the applications menu like it should. Last big change is that the work needed for enabling localization has been done. There is even a half done Japanese localitation already included.