aKu 1.0 beta1 released!

Oh, finally a new aKu release!

A lot, lot, lot of bugs fixed and some new features.

Please test and report bugs!

You’ll find two Konqueror/Dolphin Services Menu, a simple previewer for audio and image files archived and an early support (only opening and some basic operations) for zips and tars.

Download the source here,

# cmake .

# make

# make install

Requirements:

• Rar binary
• KDE 4.1.x

Images from this version

- Francesco -

Polishing aKu… Part 2

Hi guys!!

This is the second part of the process of polishing aKu. This time I spent some hours in the night trying to make by code what Francesco suggested. After a long time testing, rewriting, trying, playing we got a very nice result.

Today we talk about the ratioWidget and the metaWidget.

We had some issues in keeping the ratioWidget in the list, it caused slowness in parsing the archive, so we picked the ratio and moved to meta. This allowed us to work more on the ratio trying to make it nicer .

Here is what we got:

Just some gradients to make the feeling of 3D. Do you like it?

Then we put that ratio in meta getting this result:

I feel it’s nicer than ever! It’s clean and gives good info about the selected file.

Ok this is what we got after some time of tries. Hope you like this. Your opinions are always welcome, so please, express yourself

Regards.

Alessandro

Polishing aKu…

Hello people!

Porting aKu to QThreads caused the messy state aKu is in. Many features broke but fortunately we are managing in debugging and fixing broken parts. Btw, having some relax, I spent some time in polishing some aKu’s interface features getting what I think is a quality gain in usability .

I’ll let two pictures talk in place of me; here they come!

This is the new aKu’s error dialog. A little bit more usable with that Close Button and a little bit coloured with the Warning Icon. Nothing more, just keeping its functionalities making it graphically cool!!

Ok, here comes the akuViewer instead:

Finally ported to KDialog, some code was cleaned. What you can see is the slider on bottom (inspiring from the amazing Gwenview ) which allows you to resize the image keeping the window size. in aKu 0.99 you are allowed to resize the image only resizing its preview window (awful!!).

Well, that’s it guys, hope you’ll enjoy!!

Regards

Alessandro

Working on Services Menu

While porting aKu to Qt threads, we tried to create two really usefull KDE actions. As you can see from
these two pictures, aKu is now integrated in Dolphin/Konqueror. We need some more testing but it works

- Francesco -

aKu powered by openSUSE

Thanks to Carlos Goncalves aKu is now available as i586 and x86_64 packages for openSUSE 10.3. Check the Downloads section or directly install aKu from YaST!

aku-0.99-2.1.i586.rpm

aku-0.99-2.1.x86_64.rpm

giving toolTip+trayIcon to aKu

Hello again folks!

As promised yesterday I met Francesco and we gathered some ideas for aKu. There is some bugfix to do, some checks on password handling.. We’d appreciate a bit of feedback from you!!

BTW, let’s talk about toolTip as the title suggests! Happens that slow computers take a big amount of time to extract an archive (maybe big). In this case the extraction app becomes only an “another-window-on-the-screen” stealing precious space from your desktop! Here comes aKu’s new feature! You can send aKu to tray and continue doing something funnier than tracking the extraction progress!

Ok let’s have a look to some screenshots!

Here is what I changed in akuProgressDialog:

I’m still thinking about the tool button position.. Not sure if it stays well there. Please give me your opinion!

However here comes the screenshot of what happens when sending aKu to tray:

When you hover the icon with your mouse that tooltip appears showing the current extraction state.

I don’t know if something is missing, I thought about the icon of the current file but I wouldn’t be repetitive of what already appears in the extraction dialog.

When clicking the icon aKu is restored and the icon disappears from the tray.

Ok, that’s all! Comments, suggestions, bug reports are really really welcome!!

Regards.

Alessandro

Ale::workOnaKu();

Hello everybody!!

This is my first post here. I’m Alessandro, one of the two crazy guys behind aKu. Hope you like it!!!

After a long long (almost a month) pause my work on aKu starts again, better than ever (I do really hope!! ). I’ve been really busy with university. There also has been a meeting about open source software at my university and we’ve been asked to talk about aKu. Unfortunately I can’t provide photos of the event.. There’s just a video but I still have to make it digital!!

Ok, let’s go back in-topic and talk about aKu and what I’m workin’ on.

The first major thing I’m working on is moving to threads while handling the RAR process. Doing so will really speed up aKu. I’ve had some testing time with a first implementation of threads. Things really went better than synced timers (as we did before). Using threads the extraction/creation process can execute alongside aKu’s main thread without undergoing slowdowns.. However things are a bit more complicated because of some choices we made in handling rar processes. But work is still in progress and things should get better… Now aKu’s code is really messy, we don’t have a public svn domain, but if you’re crazy enough you can ask for code and I’ll be happy to provide it.. Maybe if I encounter enough requests I could give some code snapshot on this blog.. This idea has just come to my mind.. Got to think about it.

Tomorrow morning I’ll meet Francesco. We will think about some changes in aKu, low level changes maybe.. We have to clean something before the release 1.0 and then gather some ideas for next releases.. I have something in mind but I won’t tell you before talking to Fra!!

So stay tuned and keep ready for the next release!!

Regards. See you guys!

Alessandro.

aKu 0.99 released!

We are proud to announce the first release of aKu! It’s a 0.99 version.
So, please, test it, report bugs and use it!

aKu will ease (we hope) the management of your (and our) RAR archives, but we wish to ease its installation too. So please, if you have some time, try and make some distribution-specific packets! Download the source,

# cmake .

# make

# make install

What is aKu?

Another Kompression Utility

aKu – yes the K stands also for KDE application – is a rar – the compression command line utility – GUI. With aKu you can decompress rar files and create new archives in a very simple way. It is developed by Alessandro Diaferia and Francesco Grieco.

a sample archive opened with images preview enabled

aKu is a KDE application, so if you can compile it on Windows or MacOSX, and if it works, please send us the binaries.

If you like it, please provide us feedbacks and bug reports.

This is a GPLv3 software developed with the KDE and QT framework (they’re amazing!)

Features supported

• Support of rar and unrar
• Creation of new archives in a very simple way
• Advanced rar extraction options
• Adding files or directory to existing archives
• Deleting and renaming files archives
• Preview support
• Password – opening and creation of archives with header or files password
• Comment – visualization and creation
• Locked archive – opening and creation
• A beautiful preview metabar for images

Features not yet supported

• Split archive – opening and creation
• Drag and drop from the main window
• Brute force attack for password archives :=)

Requirements

• Rar or Unrar binaries – with unrar a lot of options are, of course, disabled
• KDE 4.1.x

Known bugs and Issues

• Full extracting of big size archives with many files is very slow (hard work in progress for it in these days!!!)
• Columns ordering for size and packed is not correct