Subject: XFaces-3.0 Beta Announcement

From: Chris Liebman <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 8 Feb 1994 23:11:35 -0500 (EST)

Hi,
   Over the past three to four weeks I have been adding support in
XFaces for a number of faces features. (An excerpt from the CHANGES
file is at the end of this message) And I am now ready to release a
Beta version that has most everything that I received comments about.
(If you send me mail and did not receive a response I apologize as my
computer has to share me with my day job and my Wife :^)  Anyway I
would like anyone who can to try this version to give it a go and 
let me know what works, what does not work, or what features you think
are still missing.

   There are a few areas that I know still need work (these are from
the TODO list in the XFaces beta distribution:

- Add some label features to annotate images with count etc. for mail
  items (currently in place for user command based lists)

- Add another pattern binding to allow shell commands to be executed
  when the pattern is matched. Then when you had mail you could have
  yourself paged. :^)

- Search performace.

   And as I noted in the TODO file these are my next priority.  Anyone
who feels that they want to take a stab at any of the other items on
the todo list should drop me a line to prevent too many people from
working on the same problems.

   I am also looking for volunteers to help improve the documentation.
Anyone who feels they may want to take a stab at is is welcome to try.
(should propably drop me a line too.)

   Currently the beta release is available via ftp from ftp.clark.net
in the /pub/liebman directory.  There are four files of interest:

xfaces-3.0Beta.tar.Z	- The XFaces sources.
compface.tar.Z		- James Ashton compface library. (optional
			  X-Face header support)
netaudio-1.1.tar.Z	- Network audio server. (optional audio support)
xpm-3.3.tar.Z		- X Color Pixmap support library. (optional
			  color image support)

To edit xpm files you should retrieve pixmap2.2.tar.gz from the
/contrib/pixmap directory of ftp.x.org.

------------- From the changes file --------------
       The major changes were to add compatibility support for
    Rich Burridge's "faces" program:

	- X-Face: header support.

	- facedb image/sound search. (the way faces finds
	  images)

	- User list commands.

	- Labling of images for user list commands.

	- The following faces options are supported:
	      -f <facedbPath>
	      -e <listCommand>
	      -p <update time>
	      -c <# of columns>
	      -h <image height>
	      -w <image width>
	      -s <mail spool file>

	- POP mailbox support. (still primitive with respect to
	  user authentication but functional!)

	- A new Tiled widget so that the image list can be N 
	  columns and to allow for the "Rows=nnn Cols=nnn" line 
	  from a user command.

	- Full control of the order and imagetype/paths of searches.
	  The search types are:

		- beforeImage,
		  afterImage,
		  beforeSound,
		  afterSound: 	These are regular expression searches
				on the mail headers.
		- resource:	Lookup image/sound in X resources.
		- facedb:	Lookup image/sound in "faces" style
				database.
		- x-face:	X-Face: style header.

	- Much improved shape support.

------------- End from the changes file --------------

		-- Chris
Chris Liebman		Work			Home
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