Thomas Wood

I’ve recently been working on a new background chooser for GNOME, which supports multiple “sources” of backgrounds. Today I used libsocialweb to integrate support for browsing the user’s photostream from flickr.

The UI is still a work in progress, I’m hoping to land it before the feature freeze at the end of the week.

I’ll also be at Guadec this week, but only for the 28th and 29th. See you there!

For the new Control Center in GNOME 3.0 (or System Settings, as it will be known), I’ve been working on a settings panel to allow people to set their timezone, date and time. This means there is a new date and time mechanism dbus service provided by gnome-settings-dameon, and a new UI to configure it with. The latest UI is available in gnome-control-center git and looks something like this:

It still needs a lot of testing and I’d also like to add support for using NTP services, although finding a method of applying this for different distributions will probably be tricky.

Mx is a widget toolkit using Clutter that provides a set of standard interface elements, including buttons, progress bars, scroll bars and others. It also provides useful interfaces and utilities, such as Clipboard and Icon Theme support. Styling is achieved using a CSS style configuration file. It is used to implement the user experience shell in MeeGo Netbook.

• This is the first release in the unstable development series.
• As this is a development release, it should not be used in production environments.
• Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Mx.

Some of the new features include some visual changes:

Shadows in MxEntry and MxScrollView:

New MxModalFrame for a window modal container, which darkens and blurs the window:

News

Changes since 1.0.0:

• Updated documentation
• Fix compilation with recent versions of GTK+
• Require GTK+ 2.20
• MxWidget: Move padding into the correct struct
• Reduce the libtool version age to indicate ABI change
• Fix GtkLightSwitch size and remove labels
• Focusable: don’t accept focus on hidden actors
• Allow spacing to be set from CSS in MxTable and MxBoxLayout
• MxOffScreen: Add “redirect-enabled” property
• MxOffScreen: Add accumulation buffer capability
• MxOffScreen: Provide an accessor to the fbo
• BoxLayout: add “scroll-to-focused” property
• Add MxSettings and support for reading xsettings
• Use CoglSubtexture rather than internal subtexture implementation
• ScrollView: add shadows to the inside of a scrollview when scrolling
• Viewport: respect fill, alignment and padding properties
• Window: respect ClutterStage:user-resizable property
• Improvements to MxIconTheme
• Support pixel (px) and point (pt) font size values in CSS
• MxModalFrame: new widget to implement modal dialogs

Updated Translations:

• Turkish (Ahmet Özgür Erdemli)
• Asturian (astur)

Many thanks to:

• Chris Lord
• Neil Roberts
• Thomas Wood
• iain

Sources

Sources are available from clutter-project.org:

http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.1/

or from git:

http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/

git clone git://git.clutter-project.org/mx.git

Documentation

Documentation for the unstable branch of Mx is currently available at:

http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/unstable/

Bugzilla

Issues and feature requests should be filed in bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx

Jon McCann was recently working with the accessibility folks to come up with a new design for accessibility settings in GNOME 3.0. The results of the discussions are linked to on the Settings/Universal Access wiki page.

To help clean up some of the current settings panels, I have been implementing the mockup that Jon worked on. The current state is available in the latest Gnome unstable release, which is available in Rawhide for people running Fedora. Unfortunately Ubuntu have decided not to ship development packages of this Gnome release for people to test, so here are some screenshots of what is available so far:

Some features will need integration with the new Gnome Shell, and these are “grayed out” for now. Clearly there is some work to be done to make sure it conforms to the new Human Interface Guidelines and generally looks visually appealing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a large team of people working on Control Center right now, so it would be great if anyone can help out testing, fixing and improving! If you think you may be able to help out, the best way to get in touch is to pop in to the #control-center channel of irc.gnome.org. If you feel like diving straight in, the UI file for Universal Access is here. Send any changes back to the mail list or pop by IRC!

There’s no comment facility on Federico’s blog, but it’s a shame he didn’t notice my post from a few weeks ago about how to set custom prompts in jhbuild shells. No patches needed, and a much more entertaining environment variable is already available!

I use “jhbuild shell” quite a lot to allow me to have separate build and testing environments when developing software. I also have multiple JHBuild environments and it can sometimes be hard to know which environment I am working in. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to modify the command prompt to let you know that you’re in a jhbuild shell. I have something similar to this in my ~/.bashrc :

if [ "x$CERTIFIED_GNOMIE" = "xyes" ];
then
PS1=”[\u@\h \W (jhbuild)]\\$ ”
fi

I’ve added some quite interesting features to Monet recently. Monet is my effort at a replacement for Gtk+ theming, and also a generic widget drawing architecture using cairo that can be used by different toolkits.

The first thing is a new MnConfig object, which is responsible for loading configuration files for Monet (i.e. “themes”). These are written in XML format. It’s fairly similar to SVG, but with several extensions to make it easier to identify the various widgets and states.

For example, the following code:

<widget type="button">
 <rect x="0.5" y="0.5" width="-1" height="-1" stroke-width="1" stroke="#988c7c" corner-radius="4">
   <gradient x1="0" y1="0" x2="0" y1="50">
     <stop color="#fcfbfa" position="1"/>
     <stop color="#e7e2da" position="0"/>
   </gradient>
 </rect>
 <rect x="1.5" y="1.5" width="-3" height="-3" stroke-width="1" stroke="#fff" corner-radius="3"></rect>
</widget>

renders buttons that look like this:

Obviously the XML format is not complete yet, and there support needs to be added for expressions such as x=”width / 2″. I also want to keep the drawing aspect as close to SVG as convenience allows.

As far as API goes, there are currently two important objects:

• MnStyle implements drawing all the widgets. It includes all the top level widget drawing, such as mn_style_paint_button. It will also have a set of more generic drawing operations to implement stylised shadows, lines, arrows, etc.

• MnConfig will load a description of how to draw the widgets (as described above). This will allow theme designers full control over the look and feel for widgets. By using a XML based description it means that theme authors no longer have to understand C and GTK+ before they can write themes! Hylke has volunteered to look at writing a visual editor too, which will be really important for wider adoption.

There is still a way to go before Monet is production ready, but there is a GTK+2 theme engine available to test it out with. For now this provides a compatibility layer, but I hope in the future, many toolkits will be able to use Monet directly.

If you want to check out the progress, all the code is available in the monet-xml branch of the git repository at git.gnome.org/monet, but do bear in mind it still needs a lot of work before it’s ready for every day use!