• 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.

• 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)

• The Git migration happened, and 84 commits were about doap files, and 44 about .gitignore files.
• gnome-netstatus, empathy and gnome-dictionary (from gnome-utils , GNOME bug 577943) all switched to GtkBuilder.
• libgdata added support for ETags, to allow for versioning when querying, updating and deleting entries . (GNOME bug 578661)
• A new plugin has been added to eog, to order images randomly in slideshow mode . (GNOME bug 562135)
• Libchamplain got support for more advanced markers, allowing to set many properties on markers, allowing features such as attached image or text and how if should be displayed (wrapped, ellipsized, etc .). (GNOME bug 576055)
• Matthew Barnes updated gnome-video-arcade to make game play back work again with recent MAME releases.
• Sabayon was updated to use Xephyr instead of Xnest.
• Xan Lopez fixed backwards search in Epiphany Find Toolbar.
• Empathy got a new “join chatroom” dialog, which will only load the room list when the rooms are displayed.
• Seed imports system was changed to match the one in gjs, making it easier to port applications between them. Robert Carr posted details in some Seed updated.

• British English is the first language to reach 100%, there is now eight languages with over 99% of the UI strings translated, sixteen with over 95%, and 39 over the 80% mark (used to be listed in the release notes).
• There are three new modules in Subversion this week: Gnome Format, a GNOME media formatter, developed by Michael Kanis, gpointing-device-settings, a program for touchpad and trackpad settings, developed by Hiroyuki Ikezoe, and gio-strigi, a GIO wrapper for Strigi, developed by Philip Van Hoof.
• Davyd Madeley started preparing the stage for the 2.26 release notes.
• Following on last week work, Alexander Larsson worked on trusted desktop file launchers in Nautilus.
• Rhythmbox got a D-Bus interface for adding and removing DAAP shares . (GNOME bug 570115)
• GParted added detection of the BRTFS file system.
• David Zeuthen added a –device option to gvfs-mount.
• Support for taking a screenshot of an user-defined selection landed in gnome-screenshot . (GNOME bug 155061, opened in October 2004)
• Lucas Rocha merged his session-saving branch into gnome-session trunk.
• Epiphany (webkit) started using SoupProxyResolverGNOME, so it gets support for GNOME proxy settings through libproxy.
• Bastien Nocera announced the fork of bluez-gnome that is now available in gnome-bluetooth.
• Orca got support for notify-osd (the new Ubuntu notification daemon).

• After support for icons has been added in GTK+ last week (and I forgot to note it), Matthias Clasen added a section in the documentation on porting from SexyIconEntry.
• libgnome dependency got removed from sound-juicer, libgnome/libgnomeui from gfloppy, and bonobo from the Anjuta toolbar.
• Nemiver variable inspector widget now remember history of the variables . (GNOME bug 536259)
• Evince got its printing system reworked, making the GUI responsive during printing, with progress information . (GNOME bug 482770)
• The system log viewer in gnome-utils has been rewritten by Cosimo Cecchi.
• Metacity got the “Maximize” shortcut to act as “Restore” for maximised windows.
• Epiphany/gecko got some Gecko 1.9.1 fixes, and Epiphany/webkit can now open new links in new tabs thanks to the new Policy Decision system in WebKit.
• The new GNOME Volume Control got a few alert sounds (bark, drip, glass and sonar).
• Rhythmbox switched to a normal GtkTooltip, rather than a custom arrangement of widgets in a SexyTooltip

• Many modules saw development releases for 2.25.1.
• The libgnome dependency got removed from gnome-power-manager, and gnome-utils (dictionary, screenshot, logview) removed it as well as the dependency on libgnomeui.
• In the same vain, seahorse-plugins removed its gnome-vfs dependency.
• William Jon McCann commited a new volume control using PulseAudio, deprecating the old gst-mixer one.
• Behdad Esfahbod worked quite a bit on gnome-settings-daemon and blogged about the improved login time he achieved.
• Benjamin Berg added a Clearlookstest theme, as he proposed on desktop-devel-list several weeks ago, it is not enabled by default though.
• Seed, GObject-Javascript bridge, was finally revealed by Robert Carr on gtk-devel-list.
• brasero got a nautilus extension, based on current nautilus-cd-burner.
• John Carr commited support for git mirrors to jhbuild (support for bzr mirrors coming soon).

I asked Robert Carr some questions about Seed, and its relation to GJS, as they both bridges gobject and javascript, using the mighty gobject-introspection infrastructure; he confirmed he had been in contact with the GJS developers and pointed out some differences:

[Seed is different than GJS] Notably how we handle inheritance (GJS doesn’t). Also “out” arguments from functions we set properties on objects passed in, while GJS returns arrays. Then there are also some other differences with exceptions, signals and a few various things. In addition Seed does some stuff GJS doesn’t (uses libffi to box JavaScript functions into C function pointers, for functions like pango_fontset_foreach), and I’m sure GJS does some stuff that Seed doesn’t.

So compatibility would be an awkward issue at this point in time, so it seems to me like it’s best for both projects to continue development at this point, and once things are more fleshed out, it might become clear what approaches make more sense.

We’ve definitely talked about implementing a common embedding API though, and maybe after one more release it would be good to look at compatibility more.

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