Do you want to test GNOME Photos?

If you are interested in testing the latest version of GNOME Photos, now it will be easier than before!

Recently we made Photos available as a Flatpak application. This means that you can now run the latest, unstable version and help us to find regressions or general bugs. At this time to install the application you still need to use the command line.

See here for installing the Flatpak package, after that you just need follow the few steps described below.

Add the nightly platform and application repositories:

wget https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/keys/nightly.gpg
flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo/
flatpak remote-add --gpg-import=nightly.gpg gnome-nightly-apps https://sdk.gnome.org/nightly/repo-apps/

Install the nightly GNOME platform:

flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Platform master

Install the nightly GNOME Photos:

flatpak install gnome-nightly-apps org.gnome.Photos master

And when you want to update, just run:

flatpak update

Bug reports are appreciated! You can report them here (a registration is needed).

GNOME Documents collections dialog redone

Few days ago the new collections dialog for GNOME Documents landed in master. Since the last post the dialog received some improvements:

An empty view

gnome-documentsempty-view

When there are no collections, instead of displaying an empty list we show a special view to add your first collection.

A more polished dialog

gnome-documents-full-view

The border of the list was removed giving more view to the list’s content. Suggested buttons are indicated, so that the theme can colour them differently to give a hint to the user. Spaces between elements have been changed according to the GNOME HIG and now they are in increments of 6 pixels.

Animations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-C8ohMZTsE

When deleting a collection, the row now slides on the left to make room for the delete message with the undo button. If the undo button is clicked the collection row slides back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlR1weMETHo

When the undo button is showed a timer starts. If it is not clicked in time the collection is deleted and the row disappears.

My work on GNOME Documents as a Google Summer of Code student is over, but I have strong interest in continuing to contribute in this awesome community. I would like to thank again my mentor, Debarshi, for his guidance and help when things didn’t work; the GNOME design team for gave me a good mockup to work on; Lapo for the graphical tips he suggested me after the previous blog post and Emmanuele for his advice on GTK.

A new collections dialog for Documents

This summer, as a Google Summer of Code Project,  I’m working on implement a new collections pattern for Documents. Let’s discuss the changes made so far!

The current dialog has some problems because it hasn’t a clear way to add a new collection and it lacks on some features like renaming and deleting a displayed collection. Although the missing features aren’t reachable from the collections dialog, it is already possible to rename from the property dialog and delete from the selection mode.

The new collections dialog at this time looks like this:

gnome-document-collection2

The collections are displayed more clearly and a new one can be added more easily. With the new design we also gained the ability to prevent duplicate collections names since we can disable the “Add” button if a collection with that name already exists.

gnome-document-collection3

If a collection has just been deleted, it can be restored with the “Undo” button.

gnome-document-collection4

And when renaming a collection the other rows are disabled.

This is what I’ve done until today. It took me a lot of time to reach the current state and I would like to thank my mentor Debarshi for being helpful and available at all times, and for answering all my questions just a second after I ask them.

The work-in-progress patch can be found here. Feedback is welcome, if you have any please let me know!