Issue 57

November 8, 2009

This week… 2027 commits, in 180 projects, by 252 happy hackers (and 403 were translation commits).

  • Totem got (on-disk) buffering support for downloads, Bastien Nocera blogged about it: No more stuttering.
  • The gvfs webdav backend has been changed to remember cookies while it’s running.
  • Carlos Garnocho made the SPARQL API of Tracker fully asynchronous.
  • Postr (the GNOME Flickr Uploader) has been improved to allow direct editing of title and description, when double clicking (or pressing the Return key) on the photo. (GNOME bug 562162)
  • Xavier Claessens added support for some IRC slash commands to Empathy, the currently supported commands are /clear, /topic, /join, /query and /msg. (GNOME bug 573407)
  • Also in Empathy Guillaume Desmottes added the display of an error message when codec negotation fails. (GNOME bug 581789)
  • The GNOME screensaver got a D-Bus method to show a message on the locked screen, to be used for notification of auto logout.
  • In GNOME Shell Dan Winship started a message-tray branch, with some minimal Telepathy support, it has a notification popup for messages and avatar icons.
  • Brasero got gobject introspection support for its libraries. (GNOME bug 589073)
  • libsoup has been fixed to not change HEAD to GET on 303 redirect.
  • A new Google Translate plugin has been added to Kupfer (the command tool inspired by Quicksilver).

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 55

October 25, 2009

This week… 1781 commits, in 178 projects, by 250 happy hackers (and 298 were translation commits).

  • A fullscreen mode has been added to xchat-gnome (GNOME bug 445638).
  • Jonh Wendell added the ability to use JPEG compression (thus lossy encoding) to vinagre. (GNOME bug 573272)
  • Evince has been changed to always use a different process for every document.
  • Eog got support for animated images, it plays animated images as supported by GdkPixbufAnimation (GNOME bug 335093).
  • gnome-pilot was ported to GtkBuilder, and removed most of its usage of libgnomeui.
  • Empathy removed its applets (megaphone, nothere) and Python bindings of libempathy and libempathy-gtk, on the premise they were unused and applications should use telepathy-glib, and a future telepathy-gtk, via gobject-introspection.
  • Colin Walters updated the GNOME Shell to use a stable ordering for well-known icons in the notification area (volume, battery, network…). (GNOME bug 598313)
  • Brasero got changed to no longer store some settings with GConf anymore (like window size or position of widgets) but to save and load them using GKeyFile instead.
  • Thomas Thurman worked quite a lot on the “cowbell” metacity branch, to allow styling of window borders using CSS, he also posted a status update.
  • Ray Strode made DeviceKit-power optional in gdm.
  • GNOME Disk Utility got handling of LUKS volumes.
  • Martyn Rucell updated the Totem tracker plugin to the new (0.7) tracker API.
  • Paolo Bacchilega added PackageKit support to File Roller, so it will now prompt for new packages when opening archives that require an uninstalled tool.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 51

September 27, 2009

This week… 2610 commits, in 209 projects, by 286 happy hackers (and 539 were translation commits).

  • The Perl bindings written by Emmanuel Rodriguez have been merged into libchamplain.
  • A branch by Alexander Sack reworking NetworkManager menu has been uploaded (it is named “menu-rework”).
  • Mark Kasik added support for the ‘auth-info’ attribute to the CUPS print backend of GTK+ (GNOME bug 566522).
  • Deprecated GTK+ symbols have been removed from gok (GNOME bug 572686).
  • Ryan Lortie published a gsettings branch of Devhelp, demonstrating the conversion from GConf to GSettings.
  • GNOME Shell has been updated to not treat 1024×600 as widescreen (GNOME bug 596375).
  • The GNOME Volume Control has been changed to allow going up to 150% for output volume (GNOME bug 591285).
  • Brasero has been fixed to not leak the CD drive device file descriptor, that kept the drive locked. (GNOME bug 596241)
  • Evolution has been changed to use Message-ID instead of Message-Id, for increased compatibility with other applications (GNOME bug 596157).
  • Ross Burton switched evolution-data-server calendar to D-Bus instead of Bonobo, in the “dbus-calendar” branch.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 50

September 20, 2009

This week… 2699 commits, in 227 projects, by 271 happy hackers (and 1213 were translation commits).

  • This is the week before the 2.28.0 and translators are working like crazy, Maithili support literally jumped from 43% to 55%, Asturian also jumped, progressing of 8 points; Galician, German and Hungarian all reached 100% of UI strings translated.
  • Brasero got event sound support, sounds will be played when a CD finished burning. (GNOME bug 594954)
  • A new WebSharing extension has been added to F-Spot.
  • Ryan Lortie added a D-Bus service for dconf (GNOME bug 595479).
  • Epiphany gained back its context menu, thanks to the new WebKitHitTestResult support in WebKit.
  • Nemiver gained support for editing breakpoint condition.
  • Evolution got rid of its dependency on libgnome and libgnomeui, Matthew Barnes blogged on how Evolution is now 100% Bonobo free. (GNOME bug 567283)
  • Screen locking on suspend or hibernate has been fixed in gnome-session (GNOME bug 595154)
  • XChat-GNOME got an option to hide its statusbar (GNOME bug 524030).
  • GNOME Shell has been updated to make the run dialog and “looking glass” debug console work in the overview. (GNOME bug 595116)
  • David Zeuthen added GObject introspection support to PolkitGtk.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 49

September 13, 2009

This week… 2529 commits, in 212 projects, by 272 happy hackers (and 838 were translation commits).

  • We are approaching the 2.28.0 release and with freezes in place translators are now the heavy contributors, highlights of this week are the Serbian and Catalan teams, increasing their completion status by over five percents, and the Portuguese and Spanish teams, achieving 100% translated strings for the UI.
  • A new “Auto DJ” feature has been contributed to Banshee, it will add new randomly selected tracks to the play queue when it gets empty (GNOME bug 565767)
  • Kupfer, a simple launcher in the style of Gnome Do, added a new Calculator plugin and a new “Rename To…” action.
  • Vincent Untz updated gnome-menus and gnome-panel to work with the new X-GNOME-FullName .desktop key.
  • Rygel added support for publishing thumbnails of media items. (GNOME bug 590702)
  • Alexander Larsson did some GObject performance work (in the glib gobject-performance branch), improving the speed of instance creation for classes that do not have properties, and the interface lookup algorithm.
  • Brasero got a new “introspection” branch where support for gobject introspection is developed.
  • The display order of files in Eye of GNOME, that was broken for some locales, has been fixed by Felix Riemann. (GNOME bug 594403)
  • The adblock Epiphany extension has been updated to work with Epiphany/webkit, Xan Lopez blogged this and other Epiphany features. (GNOME bug 562762)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 48

September 6, 2009

This week… 2207 commits, in 200 projects, by 262 happy hackers (and 654 were translation commits).

  • Michael Natterer added support for layer trees in Gimp, the UI still needs to be improved but there is now a Folder button in the layers dialog. (GNOME bug 86337)
  • Totem browser plugin now overrides the HTTP user-agents for Quicktime and Windows Media Player, this fixes playback of the Apple trailers. (GNOME bug 375867)
  • David Zeuthen started a “new-ui” branch to rework the UI of libgdu-gtk and palimpset.
  • Brasero has been fixed to not use readcd (-clone) to copy audio CD, as it doesn’t keep CD-TEXT. (GNOME bug 580813)
  • Epiphany gained back its “view source” command. (GNOME bug 503968)
  • A new g_mkstemp_full() function has been added to glib, to expose more parameters than g_mkstemp(), allowing more flexibility when creating temporary files. (GNOME bug 594034)
  • In Gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow added handling of ODF import/export of surface plots originally created in Excel. (GNOME bug 594041)
  • Matthew Barnes updated the “mailing-list-actions”, “save-calendar” and “publish-calendar” evolution plugins to the bonobo-liberated Evolution.
  • On the same topic Lucian Langa started porting evolution-rss for the new Evolution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 40

July 12, 2009

This week… 1769 commits, in 177 projects, by 216 happy hackers (and 351 were translation commits).

  • Seahorse, and many preferences windows from the control center migrated from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • gtk-doc has been updated to also look for dblatex for PDF generation, as it seems to work much better than using fop.
  • Cody Russel published a new “client-side-decorations” branch for GTK+.
  • Jorge Pereira added a system of plugins to vinagre, based on the gedit one.
  • Brasero saw the last bits and pieces of HAL support removed, it will only rely on gio from now. (GNOME bug 581742)
  • Gnome Power Manager was updated to port all the code to using PolicyKit1 rather than PolicyKit.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 38

June 28, 2009

This week… 1811 commits, in 183 projects, by 217 happy hackers (and 226 were translation commits).

  • Evince was changed to output straight PDF for printers supporting PDF natively. (GNOME bug 585442)
  • Evolution gained an inline view of application/mbox attachments. (GNOME bug 464131)
  • A problem with RSA key size that were not a multiple of 8 has been fixed in gnome-keyring. (GNOME bug 576700)
  • A new theme, Moblesse, has been added to the experimental GTK+ CSS theme engine.
  • Milan Crha fixed several issues and improved the performance of the evolution-data-server CalDAV backend.
  • Philippe Rouquier commited a new layout for the Brasero user interface: the medium selector is still inside the main window and on clicking burn a dialog appears to set the session burning options
  • In both libgoffice and gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow improved Open Document Format support (number style output, scientific number output, time and date styles, import of currency symbols, and much more).
  • F-Spot Adjust Time dialog, and gnome-session windows, have been ported from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • A Python binding for libbrasero-burn has been added to gnome-python-desktop.
  • As explained in his Data about Data weblog post, Alexander Larsson added metadata support in gvfs, and already made Nautilus use it.
  • Empathy has been updated to use gnome-session instead of gnome-screensaver to know when the session is idle.
  • Benjamin Otte did some research on the GTK+ file chooser performance
    (explained in a tale of waiting message in the
    gtk-devel-list, be sure to also read the followup messages), and pushed a new “filesystemmodel” branch to publicize his work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 33

May 24, 2009

This week… 2349 commits, in 189 projects, by 255 happy hackers (and 298 were translation commits).

  • John Carr published his syncml branch of conduit, adding SyncML support for contacts and calendar items.
  • Gnumeric got support for more styles in its ODF export (cell, paragraph and text styles).
  • Niepce Digital got an initial UI shell and basic gphoto support.
  • krb5-auth-dialog added a gconf key to disable its notifications.
  • f-spot date range dialog got ported from libglade to gtkbuilder; rhythmbox also replaced libglade by gtkbuilder.
  • The graph component in goffice gained support for formatted editing of graph limits that are dates and times. (GNOME bug 574681)
  • Evolution search bar got improved, to more closely resemble Firefox. (GNOME bug 580925)
  • Rhythmbox status icon has been made into a plugin, with additional capabilities, some aspects of the status icon and the notification popups are now a bit more configurable.
  • Willie Walker continued his numerous improvements to the speech generator in Orca, porting Pidgin, Gecko and Thunderbird to the new generator.
  • In gnome-utils gsearchtool got rid of its libgnomeui usage. (GNOME bug 573670)
  • Brasero gained the possibility to span data across several media. (GNOME bug 438858)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 27

April 12, 2009

This week… 1245 commits, in 160 projects, by 183 happy hackers (and 277 were translation commits).

  • The 3.0 platform cleaning plan was announced and already beared a lot of results : baobab, hamster-applet, gcalctool and glchess got ported to GtkBuilder; brasero, the toolbar editor in libegg and yelp got rid of their glib and GTK+ deprecated symbols; gnome-mag migrated to gio/gvfs; and eog incorporated all it needef rom libart_lgpl, thus removing its dependency (GNOME bug 577940, GNOME bug 578219, GNOME bug 571868, GNOME bug 578304, GNOME bug 517732, GNOME bug 573023, GNOME bug 556808 and GNOME bug 556807, at least).
  • Also Matthew Barnes killed the deprecated html-editor component from gtkhtml2, getting rid of bonobo (GNOME bug 571743).
  • Several gnome-games (aisleriot, gnibbles, mahjongg, and iagno) were updated to use g_timeout_add_seconds where sensible. (GNOME bug 564202).
  • Vincent Untz improved his gnome-session patch, and commited the fix so that reboot and shutdown also leave the session properly, by letting apps exist before doing the real reboot/shutdown.
  • The GVFS FTP backend saw several fixes (including GNOME bug 520399, GNOME bug 573349).
  • Ignacio Casal Quinteiro added source code completion to GtkSourceView.
  • pygtk was changed to use numpy instead of Numeric, that was no longer maintained (GNOME bug 387544).
  • Empathy added a new presence selector widget, that incorporates a text field for quick setting of custom messages (GNOME bug 569449).

Read the rest of this entry »