Variety 0.4.13 was released yesterday. This release focuses predominantly on fixing bugs and polishing some rough edges, so there are relatively few changes visible on the surface. This version is a highly recommended upgrade.
Many bugs fixed
Several potential freezing situation addressed, some issues with the thumbnails bar fixed, some edge cases which prevented proper startup addressed, some issues on XFCE and KDE resolved, etc. etc.
First translations added
This is the first release to include some of the user-contributed translations from Launchpad, specifically Spanish, Russian and Bulgarian. A big “Thank you!” to all the translators who contributed, and I hope more people will join the translation efforts so that future releases ship with more languages included. To run Variety in one of these three languages either set your Ubuntu language preferences globally (a restart might be needed), or launch using a similar command:
LANGUAGE=ru /opt/extras.ubuntu.com/variety/bin/variety
Better Remove functionality
In Variety 0.4.12 it was quite easy to remove an image source by mistake with no easy way to get it back. I personally made this mistake several times. Removing a source now shows a popup menu which offers two options: to remove the source, or to remove both the source and the downloaded images. This also makes it much harder to remove sources by mistake.
Avoid “hammering” the servers
Variety is getting more popular and with more people using it, we are getting close to the Flickr API usage limits. We are also collectively putting a bit too much stress on the other wallpaper servers. There are changes in this release targeting this problem. Also the minimal interval between downloads was increased from 30 seconds to 1 minute.
Better protection when changing the download location
Variety allows you to specify a custom download location, and also to set a limit for its size. Making a mistake with these two could mean you could lose files, so version 0.4.12 had a measure against this – when changing the download location, it disabled the limit. This was not enough, so now Variety has stronger measures against data loss – if you specify an existing folder, Variety would use a subfolder inside it instead of working directly with it.
Pressing Enter works in dialogs
Dialogs can now be much more easily operated with the keyboard only – pressing “Enter” in the dialog serves the same as clicking “OK”.
I wish you many pleasant moments with Variety,
Peter Levi