When is now 2.0! 🎉

[almostearthling]

Some years have passed now since I started thinking of what would be version 2.0 of When. The main goals were:

1. 🐧 to stop depending on a certain distribution of Linux, and be able to run on many distributions, without having to heavily retouch the application code at every release of a certain distro and, possibly, across distros;
2. ✂️ to detach a more streamlined and generic core of the automation tool from the UI, in order to simplify the maintenance of both components and to be able to design different UI editions suitable for different contexts: in fact, in the old days, there was a wizard-like interface that was easy to use for configuration, but it still required the full application to be effective;
3. 🚌 to make the core react to DBus events in a generic way, so that handling a particular event would be just a matter of configuration instead of having such events hardcoded in the application;
4. 🎯 the possibility to directly investigate DBus properties, in addition to reaction to events, for the purpose of retrieving session and system properties and activate conditions on circumstances that depended on those properties;
5. 📂 an easier to maintain code base: this involved splitting a monolithic single Python file that contained the whole application into smaller ones.

In the meantime I started working on Windows as well, so I thought that just having Linux as the target OS would have been too restrictive, especially considering that Python is conceived as a cross platform tool, and that this is one of its strengths. I still was thinking that both the core and the UI, eveng being two different applications, should have been implemented In Python.

Today all the goals in the list above have been fulfilled. First of all, the core is an application and the UI is another one: in fact two UI applications are available, one of which is very basic and suitable for systems with very low resources, while this one, When, has nearly all the features that the old monolithic application had. Both the core and the UI are not just cross-distribution, but effectively cross-platform. Even though some features are not available on all supported operating systems, most of them are, and the UI implements a set of predefined tasks, conditions, and events that is quite consistent across all supported platforms: this is done by using the features of the whenever core that are available on the host, namely the ability to react to DBus and WMI events respectively on Linux and Windows, and to query the same subsystems in order to investigate the system status, obviously in addition to commands that whenever can always use for any purpose.

And it should be not forgotten that whenever, the core automation tool, is implemented as a native lightweight executable, which makes it more reactive and less resource-hungry.

The UI has been redesigned from scratch in order to avoid the use of "visual" UI design tools that depended on the desktop environment, and now it uses the GUI framework that is available on almost all Python setups, and which runs on all desktop platforms, while maintaining an interface that is similar to the one used in the former version of When - although with a slightly more modern design and the ability to use a dark or light color scheme depending on the system one.

🎶 That's all, folks, but I think that it is enough to say that it's time to (finally) go 2.0...

⏰ If you enjoyed the older version of When, give this one a try!

You can find a guide on how to install it in the Documentation.