The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

Jason Smith, a long-time GNOME Do contributor, has written a nice summary of all of the great work that has gone into Do for the upcoming 0.6 release. You may know Jason from such hits as “The Blinged-Out Do Themes” and the elusive “Window Manager Plugin,” but these hits pale in comparison to the more recent changes he has committed and the features he has planned for the near future. Soon after we released 0.5, I moved across the country and started real life as a prototype engineer at Idealab, a tech incubator focused on renewable energy and Internet companies, where I’ve spent the last month brainstorming ideas for cool new companies and working on some of them. Preoccupied with my new home and job, I asked Jason to try his hand at managing the next release of Do. I was worried about handing the project over, but Jason quickly made my worries vanish. Empowered with trunk builds of the Mono debugger and profiling tools, Jason went to town on Do’s internals, optimizing every performance-crucial piece of code he could find. The result is the fastest version of Do ever, plus a lot of other nice improvements to the results window, pure text entry mode, and more. So, please read Jason’s announcement, and help us prepare for 0.6 by downloading our 0.5.97 beta release and reporting any bugs. Incremental releases will be made each week until 0.6 is ready in about a month.

Congratulations to Jason, Alex, Chris, Rick, and everyone else for taking Do beyond anything I could have imagined when I wrote those first few lines of code almost one year ago.