Issue 70

February 7, 2010

This week… 1643 commits, in 181 projects, by 231 happy hackers (and 348 were translation commits).

  • Quinten Lansu provided a patch for Eye of GNOME to make it possible to select a random image from the collection.
  • Banshee dropped both his glade and libgnome (well, gnome-sharp) dependencies. (GNOME bug 589705 and GNOME bug 587320)
  • David Zeuthen implemented Expansion for Linux’s MD RAID, there are even screenshots.
  • Vinagre got the necessary support to specify an username for SSH connections. (GNOME bug 603736)
  • Thanks to Jorge Silva a spanish keyboard layout got added to Caribou, the new onscreen keyboard (GNOME bug 608744)
  • Accounts-dialog got a better password strength indicator.
  • GNOME-PackageKit got support for the InstallPrinterDrivers command.
  • The GVariant serialiser has been merged into glib.
  • Kupfer gained the possibility to load plugins at runtime.
  • In Nanny Cesar Garcia Tapia added a new dialog to update custom filters, and support for packaged filters configurations.

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Issue 68

January 24, 2010

This week… 1900 commits, in 191 projects, by 249 happy hackers (and 339 were translation commits).

  • Epiphany now has page cache enabled, as all critical bugs have been fixed and it now needs real world testing.
  • Huzaifa S. Sidhpurwala added TLS-Remote support to the NetworkManager OpenVPN plugin. (GNOME bug 455142)
  • Cheese has been changed to limit webcam framerate to 30 frames per second, as the developers really do not want webcams that claim to support huge framerates to slow down everything. (GNOME bug 607238)
  • Enrico Minack updated the Invest applet to connect to NetworkManager to react on network changes. (GNOME bug 605739)
  • GNOME Color Manager gained the ability to find and select ICC profiles on mounted volumes from other operating systems (both Mac OS X and Windows). (GNOME bug 607390)
  • Jesse van den Kieboom fixed bugs in the smart converter encoding guessing of gedit and added test cases.
  • The GNOME Disk Utility got drive emblems, used to mark RAID and LVM2 “drives”.
  • A new workspaces view, matching latest design has been commited to the GNOME Shell, the default workspace view is now a scrollable horizontal list, with a control to switch between it and the previous grid view. (GNOME bug 593844)
  • Toms Baugis added the possibility for Hamster to run as a standalone application, instead of being a panel applet.
  • The accounts dialog of Empathy gained an extra column in the treeview displaying the status of each account (GNOME bug 605309).

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Issue 67

January 17, 2010

This week… 2106 commits, in 195 projects, by 235 happy hackers (and 348 were translation commits).

  • Behdad Esfahbod added the possibility to save the content of a terminal. (GNOME bug 24457)
  • Vinagre feature to share a desktop over Telepathy has been ported to the latest Telepathy API, removing the requirement on Empathy to dispatch tubes.
  • A new accounts-dialog module has been imported, talking to a new accountsservice service to manage accounts; Matthias Clasen announced it on his weblog: Old Promises.
  • Parallel to those developments Milan Bouchet-Vala continued hacking on the accounts management in system-tools-backend and GNOME system tools, improving both backends and user interface.
  • XChat-GNOME got rid of libgnome and libgnomeui (GNOME bug 584887); the GNOME Panel also got rid of them.
  • gdm has been fixed to not display a different message for user unknown versus a failed password for a valid user, to avoid revealing which user names are valid without authenticating. (GNOME bug 606703)
  • Andrea Cimitan speed up the Murrine engine in RGBA mode, fixing the way webkit windows were handled along the way.
  • Alexander Larsson added support for lazy loading of giomodules to GLib.
  • Thomas Wood worked on the evolution of the control center, moving to a single window approach, in the single-window-shell branch, read his weblog for more info.
  • GNOME Disk Utility got a first cut at LVM2 support, with support for creating Logical Volumes; support for setting up striping and mirroring will come later.
  • Bastien Nocera added cropping capability to the chooser widget of Cheese. (GNOME bug 606730)
  • Toms Baugis improved the hamster applet so it will now adapt automatically to theme colours.
  • Epiphany “find on page” feature has been improved to wait a little bit before searching for one or two character strings, which slowed down things. (GNOME bug 598322)

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Issue 62

December 13, 2009

This week… 1522 commits, in 153 projects, by 200 happy hackers (and 121 were translation commits).

  • In Epiphany Carl van Tonder added a gconf key to control the search engine used in auto-search.
  • GNOME Terminal got support for more proxy settings, exposing environment variables such as ftp_proxy or https_proxy, taken from the GNOME Proxy Preferences. (GNOME bug 596688)
  • Federico Mena Quintero changed the Display Preferences tool to automatically turn on outputs which support Mirror Screens. (GNOME bug 590823)
  • Andrea Cimitan pushed a lot of updates to the Murrine theme engine, including support for theming the GtkExpander widget.
  • Support for per-monitor backgrounds has been added to the control center, Nautilus and libgnome-desktop. (GNOME bug 147808)
  • Holger Berndt added support for panes in Nautilus, to provide a new split view mode.
  • Johan Dahlin added introspection support to ATK. (GNOME bug 592146)
  • Palimpset, from the GNOME Disk Utility module, got a “connect to server” dialog, to manage disks on a remote server.
  • File Roller has been updated to use AES256 as encryption type when creating zip files with 7zip.
  • In the GNOME Icon Theme Lapo Calamandrei updated a lot of icons, including a new set of navigation icons.

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Issue 60

November 29, 2009

This week… 1770 commits, in 169 projects, by 229 happy hackers (and 274 were translation commits).

  • The GtkToolPalette widget, which provides a tool palette with categories, has been merged into gtk+ (GNOME bug 567729).
  • Ke Wang added D-Bus support to the Java ATK wrapper, so it can work with the new AT-SPI
  • Thorsten Sick added complete documentation to many of the (lib)seahorse files, and seahorse-plugins migrated from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • Federico Mena Quintero added handling of the XF86RotateWindows hotkey to gnome-settings-daemon, to rotate a laptop display; this is for tablets that have a “rotate the screen” hotkey. It finds the laptop’s built-in video output and rotate it to the next available rotation.
  • Colin Walters ported GNOME Shell “AppWell” and panel to CSS. (GNOME bug 602131).
  • Anjuta and Brasero both moved code to use the GtkInfoBar widget introduced in GTK+ 2.18.
  • The way message parsing and escaping is handled in Empathy has been reworked to handle more cases of URL and smileys replacements.
  • The one-canvas branch of the GNOME Icon Theme has been merged to master, many impressive icons in there! (unfortunately it still needs a proper build system, see GNOME bug 602988)
  • Alexander Larsson commited GConverter to glib master, it is a generic interface for stateful conversions of data, it is a generic interface suitable for things like IConv, compression, decompression and regexp replacement. He posted to gtk-devel-list about it: GConverted commited.
  • Totem gained support for playing DVDs from images, it now shows mounted archives in the Movie menu.
  • David Zeuthen cleaned up the user interface of the SMART dialog of gnome-disk-utility. screenshot of cleaned up UI.
  • And Gian Mario Tagliaretti wrapped the API added in GIO 2.22 in pygobject.

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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.

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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.

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Issue 47

August 30, 2009

This week… 3183 commits, in 208 projects, by 294 happy hackers (and 1032 were translation commits).

  • In gnome-disk-utility David Zeuthen landed the new ATA SMART user interface.
  • Rhythmbox gained support for downloading cover art from discogs.com and MusicBrainz (GNOME bug 410684).
  • The libchamplain map widget gained support for keyboard shortcuts, to navigate and zoom the map. (GNOME bug 582872)
  • Ekiga switched to boost for both smart pointers and signals (GNOME bug 575005)
  • The “kill-bonobo” branch of Evolution is now the “master” git branch, this marked 45 old bugs as fixed.
  • gconf-editor has been ported to PolicyKit 1.0. (GNOME bug 585596)
  • A shutter sound will now be played when taking a screenshot (GNOME bug 592372).
  • Gnome Shell improved the way it displays search results, it now has bigger fonts and brighter colour for the headings, and more padding.
  • Daniel Elstner worked on the C++ bindings so they could get their API references published on library.gnome.org.
  • Jean Bréfort moved gnumeric to use GooCanvas instead of FooCanvas.
  • Finally devhelp has been ported to make use of libunique.

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Issue 44

August 9, 2009

This week… 1813 commits, in 179 projects, by 261 happy hackers (and 401 were translation commits).

  • Totem has been updated to use its new logo in both the browser plugin and main player (GNOME bug 480200), and to display embedded cover images in audio streams (GNOME bug 581249).
  • Marek Kašík added SVG support to GtkPrintBackendFile, this allows printing to SVG 1.2 files. (GNIME bug 357655)
  • Gimp got a palette export script which allows exporting palettes to .css, .php, .py, .txt and .java by adding a Export to menu item in the palette context menu in the Palettes dockable. (GNOME bug 304399)
  • Paolo Bacchilega imported his “ext” branch to gthumb, that refactors much of it into a system of extensions.
  • In GNOME Shell Marina Zhurakhinskaya enabled hot corner for triggering the overview mode; to enter and leave the overview mode by just moving the mouse to the top left corner of the screen,
    and Owen Taylor added a desktop file, to allow making GNOME Shell the desktop default by adding it to the auto-start items
  • Empathy was changed so dragndropping contacts will move them from group to group, instead of duplicating them in both groups. (GNOME bug 585443)
  • David Zeuthen added a first usable version of the Create RAID Array dialog to GNOME Disk Utility.
  • A new display-configuration branch has been created in gdm, to pursue GNOME bug 536355, to get back the ability to start and stop displays dynamically.
  • Xan Lopez reimplemented a password viewer for Epiphany, that fetches the data from the GNOME keyring, which is where WebKit stores it. (GNOME bug 579217)
  • In his Summer of Code project Guillaume Beland ported gnibbles to Clutter 1.0, fixed a collision bug and added some nice animations and effects.

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Issue 37

June 21, 2009

This week… 2062 commits, in 182 projects, by 247 happy hackers (and 281 were translation commits).

  • In the “content-sniffing” branch, Gustavo Noronha Silva started to implement content sniffing in libsoup, including the HTML5 algorithm that sniffs content served as “text/plain” by web servers.
  • Hubert Figuiere fixed a bug when printing date/tome values with 0 micro-second, making gnote timestamps compatible with tomboy. (GNOME bug 581844)
  • File Roller gained support for lzip and xz compression formats (GNOME bug 579467, GNOME bug 582237).
  • The “Palimpset” Disk Utility now uses the new GtkInfoBar to show job progress, there are two screenshots available ((1) and (2)).
  • Stefan Walter started working on a DBus API to gnome-keyring secrets, it is currently developed in the “dbus-api” branch.
  • Shaun McCance merged Mallard support into both Yelp and gnome-doc-utils.
  • GTK+ gained support for special icons for XDG user dirs, this will allow themes to provide different icons for the Documents, Downloads, Music… folders. (GNOME bug 541276)
  • Paul Cutler applied a serie of patches to GNOME User Docs (both User Guide and Accessibility Guide), fixing typos and updating them to match the current desktop reality.
  • Rhythmbox command line control program (rhythmbox-client) got support for song rating. (GNOME bug 583108)
  • Support for touchpad parameters has been added to gnome-settings-daemon (GNOME bug 578444), it still needs a matching patch to be applied in the control center to have a new Touchpad tab in the Mouse Preferences (GNOME bug 154029)

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