As you might have noticed, news coverage has been a bit lacking, or at least slow lately, due to various Get-E staff being busy with other things. So we are a bit behind the times when it comes to covering the various E17 development and community related news. Anyways, I can't help feeling a bit nostalgic. It's now a bit over a year since the current E17 codebase was committed to CVS (it was rewritten a few times). The Slashdot can still be found here. As someone who has used E17 as the main window manager ever since it was added to CVS last november, it's amazing to see how much progress the window manager, the EFL libraries and various EFL based programs have gone through.

I'll first try to present a small roundup of all the things that have happened in the past month or so, but we haven't covered. I'll probably miss some important things here, so I apologise in advance. Let's start with the window manager itself:

• E17 now has GUI panels for configuring the window manager behaviour, including modules. This means that the old, often repetitive way of configuring modules, is now history. Every panel has two modes: basic and advanced. This makes E17 easy to use for those new to Enlightenment and/or Linux/UNIX. A screenshot demonstrating most of the various dialogs can be found here.
• The E17 control panel is slowly coming together. There are also new integrated tools for switching the background or theme for example.
  
• The integrated file manager has some new effects, in particular the new focus effect is worth checking out. EFM is still in early development though, so it is not recommended to use it for handing any important files! Data loss may occur, so be careful.
• Too many bugfixes, optimizations etc. to list them all here.

The EFL have also been under heavy construction. I'm not really qualified to tell much details, since I am personally not a coder at all, but I think these points are safe to make:

• ETK has been dramatically improved and all the critical widgets are now there (depends on your definition of "critical"). It also has its first demo application, Exhibit. More on that later though.
• EWL has also been under heavy work, and has improved a lot lately. Work has also been continued on Entropy.
• Evas no longer depends on Imlib2, so the dependencies if you just want to install E17 itself have changed a lot. The details can be found in our (slightly outdated) user guide.
• There's been various bugfixes, optimizations and so on.
  

It has also been busy on the application front:

• Hisham 'CodeWarrior' Mardam Bey's Exhibit has been uploaded to CVS. It can be found under "e17/proto/entropy". Note that it requires ETK from the same CVS directory. So, what is Exhibit? Some of you might be familiar with a highly popular image viewer GQView. You might see a few similarities, but there are also many features unique to Exhibit. Please note that Exhibit is still under early development though - it was only just committed to CVS a few weeks ago. Despite that, Exhibit is already quite usable (very usable for such a young application) - I've been using it a lot personally. One neat touch that you probably haven't seen, or don't know about, is the support for tabs. Just try pressing control+t in Exhibit :)
• Well, this point is also related to E17 itself, but anyways... Christopher 'devilhorns' Michael has done some major work concerning the various modules (both for the ones included with E17 itself, and other modules too). They are now, as mentioned, configurable via GUI panels, just like the window manager itself. He has also added some new features to certain modules. In particular, the flame module now has a few new palettes (Matrix and Ice for example), and you can select custom palettes too. Actually to be more specific, he's committed tons of various updates in the last few weeks. Too many to list them all here - the point being; great to see E17 getting another very active developer.
  
• Work has also continued on Entropy and Engage, for example.
• Last but not least, Simon 'MoOm' Treny has started rewriting Eclair for ETK - we'll keep you posted.

I'd like to stress that these are just some highlights noticeable from a users perspective; many other developers have also contributed to various E17 components. It's also a bit difficult to write this after all this time, so as I said, I probably missed some things in that list.

And now to address the present. The user guide is a bit outdated right now, but most of it is more or less correct. I personally think E17 isn't that far off anymore (this is NOT anything official, so please don't quote me on this), so I'll wait a bit and see if E17 stabilizes soon. If it does, then we're hoping to have a little documentation crunch period to finalize all the documentation. The translation situation is also looking good: there are a lot of translations coming up, you'll see soon.

As you may have noticed, this site used to be quite sluggish to load during the last few weeks. This was due to, well, more traffic. In particular, it seems like someone linked to us via a +5 modded comment on Slashdot, and that seemed to bring the site to a crawl. We now have three mirrors though, so the site is responsive again. Huge thanks to the volunteers who provided the mirrors. 

This comes a bit late, but happy holidays to everyone! On behalf of the Get-E team, I would like to thank all the E contributors, developers and of course you for reading this. It's been a great year, and things are now looking very nice. This year has seen E17 evolve from a "bare bones only" technology demo to a fully usable (depends on your definitions of the words of course) and feature-rich desktop shell. This doesn't mean E17 is almost ready of course, there is still a lot of work to be done, and the window manager is in alpha stage, but it's slowly coming together. I know this sounds bad, but I really believe 2006 will be the year of E17.  In addition to all this, I have to admit I feel a bit nostalgic for this site too. Those readers who have followed the site since the beginning know we have transformed into something we originally did not (at least I did not) expect to become. It's great to have the core community infrastructure more or less ready for E17. All this doesn't mean our work is done of course, there are still plenty of things we want to, and will try, to do. Another corny line: our work has only just begun :) We hope we'll be around to continue supporting E17 and beyond.

In a nutshell: thank you all.

PS: Enlightenment.org is back up! To quote Ben Rockwood's blog:

"Excellent news! Enlightenment.org is back online and the domain name is secure. The fun began last month when the domain expired. We had a grace period but Mandrake, who owned the domain, vanished without a trace. (I'm still worried about his well being, so if you hear from him please let me know!) Due to anti-squatting laws we were going to just have to wait and hope we could buy it back in time. Then, just in the nick of time, we were saved by President & CEO of EasyDNS Mark Jeftovic. Apparently he saw the domain expiration and knew who we are and figured it had to be a mistake. He brought the domain back up and is going to transfer it to one of us for safe keeping. On top of that, I offered to pay up the domain for a couple years but he offered to donate the registration and DNS services on the name! EasyDNS RULES!!! I"m thinking about switching all of my domains over to them. All hail EasyDNS! Thanks Mark!"