Issue 43

August 2, 2009

This week… 2195 commits, in 186 projects, by 288 happy hackers (and 328 were translation commits).

  • Now that gnome-doc-utils and yelp both have support for Mallard documents, Milo Casagrande converted gnome-hello documentation to the new format.
  • After some discussion on the gnomecc list the default toolbar style has been changed to “Text beside items”.
  • Sabayon was changed to use Xephyr instead of Xnest, as Xephyr supports the “new” X extensions.
  • gnome-session has been fixed to not exit when the system bus restarts. (GNOME bug 583345)
  • A new “ssh” plugin appeared in vinagre, which is becoming a universal tool to access remote systems.
  • Robin Stocker added to Totem the functionality to remember the current position of a stream when pausing or closing. (GNOME bug 164918)
  • After Hylke Bons posted some thoughts on the font viewer Thomas Wood started implementing the proposed ideas, in the “font-viewer-revamp” branch of the GNOME Control Center.
  • Anjuta Git plugin gained an option to initialize new repositories. (GNOME bug 566698)
  • Finally, during this 10th week of the summer of code, students were hard at work, some noticeable advancements:
    • Paul A. Bellamy successfully implemented syncing and a properties dialog for MTP devices in Rhythmbox;
    • Neil Loknath added streaming to Banshee using Telepathy, you can now stream a contact’s music after downloading their library info;
    • Paulo Cabido merged the plugin engine with Getting Things Gnome main development branch.

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Issue 42

July 26, 2009

This week… 1598 commits, in 174 projects, by 230 happy hackers (and 302 were translation commits).

  • An example displaying geotagged photos from Flickr has been added to libchamplain.
  • A “Share My Desktop” feature has been added to Empathy, it allows a contact to share his desktop over an IM stream. (GNOME bug 589091)
  • The mousewheel action on Rhythmbox status icon has been made configurable, it can be made to switch to next/previous tracks, and to modify the audio volume. (GNOME bug 376863)
  • Orca has been extended to prepend “mispelled” to the words marked as such in Mozilla text areas. (GNOME bug 588910)
  • Anjuta Git support has been modified to show the active branch in the status bar, and to provide “git stash” features in the UI.
  • gnome-power-manager removed the CanSuspend and CanHibernate D-Bus methods as there is now a patch available for gnome-session, to make it so it handles them directly via DeviceKit-power.
  • Bastien Nocera added profile switching support to the volume control, and blogged about it.
  • Zhang Sen, who is working on Telepathy Tubes support for the Sudoku game in his GSOC, added saving and undo/redo support.
  • In another GSOC, to create a D-Bus mail service, Ian Marcinkowski commited his IMAP parser.
  • GNote added a D-Bus interface mimicking the Tomboy one. (GNOME bug 581030)
  • Eye of GNOME gained an option to have the detailed metadata list widget shown on its own notebook page in the properties dialog, so the dialog is smaller and fit on smaller displays. (GNOME bug 566810)
  • Finally Matthew Barnes ported gnome-video-arcade from libglade to GtkBuilder, and Felix Riemann converted zenity. (GNOME bug 578393)

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Issue 41

July 19, 2009

This week… 1954 commits, in 172 projects, by 279 happy hackers (and 293 were translation commits).

  • Amitakhya Phukan added Assamese translations to a bunch of modules.
  • Pierre Wieser rewrote much of the foundations of nautilus-actions, and ported to GtkBuilder along the way.
  • Along the same line Felix Riemann removed the last bit of libglade from gnome-settings-daemon (GNOME bug 582502); Jaap Haitsma ported gnome-nettool (GNOME bug 580149), Christopher Taylor did gnome-screensaver (GNOME bug 463010), and Javier Jardón migrated the GTK+ wizard of Anjuta.
  • A target to generate PDF files have been added to gtk-doc exposed targets.
  • Several release team scripts, and jhbuild, have added support for SHA-256, to replace MD5 checksums with a better hashing algorithm.
  • Thanks to Thibault Saunier, libgdata gained support for the Google Documents service (GNOME bug 587073); this is an important step in his Nautilus: Add support to Google docs for GNOME GSOC.
  • Evolution got a rewrite of its calendar cache, backends will be migrating to it after some more testing.
  • Working on GtkTreeView performances Benjamin Otte looked at Epiphany location bar and changed it to set a fixed width on its cell renderer.
  • Murray Cumming published a toolpalette branch for GTK+, implementing a new tool palette container widget, with groups of toolbar items that can be shown as a grid of icons or a list of names (GNOME bug 567729).
  • Also in GTK+ Michael Natterer added a bunch of API to access sealed flags or members, as they are necessary for applications to port applications to a GSEAL-enabled GTK+.
  • Banshee added support for WebOS, used in the Palm Pre (GNOME bug 585112).
  • Ray Strode ported the GDM greeter to PolicyKit 1.0, and made it so, that in case of duplicated names, it appends the username to differentiate the entries.
  • After discussing the matter with designers at GUADEC, William Jon McCann patched libgnome to disable icons on menu items and buttons (GNOME bug 583352, GNOME bug 557469); guidelines on the proper usage of icons should now be published.

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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.

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Issue 39

July 5, 2009

This week… 1811 commits, in 184 projects, by 224 happy hackers (and 268 were translation commits).

  • The Client Side Windows branch has been merged into GTK+, Alexander Larsson posted a status update on gtk-devel-list. (GNOME bug 318807)
  • Cheese dropped its copy of GEditMessageArea in favour of the new GtkInfoBar that was introduced in 2.17.2. (GNOME bug 586545)
  • When there’s a DVD menu showing in Totem, it’s now possible to use the arrow keys to navigate around, and the Enter key to select (GNOME bug 580351).
  • Snowy (the Tomboy companion web service) added OAuth endpoints, and the requirement for OAuth for accessing api/* URLs.
  • Richard Hughes removed the HAL dependency of gnome-power-manager, making everything going through DeviceKit; he blogged it as HALectomy of gnome-power-manager complete.
  • Gustavo Noronha Silva merged his content sniffing work in libsoup, the implementation is based on the draft spec on Content-Type Processing Model. Soup now provides a SoupContentSniffer session feature, which hooks into the message I/O, and delays emissions of the got-chunk signal to be able to figure out the Content-Type of messages from the actual content received, in some cases. GIO is also used to sniff content, whenever the spec allows further sniffing.(GNOME bug 572589)

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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.

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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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Issue 36

June 14, 2009

This week… 1743 commits, in 187 projects, by 195 happy hackers (and 381 were translation commits).

  • Alexander Larsson is still working on client side windows in GTK+ and posted a status update.
  • A new API to draw routes and lines has been commited to libchamplain. (GNOME bug 572377) (example)
  • file-roller has been updated to use new GtkEntry icon support, instead of SexyIconEntry. (GNOME bug 584810)
  • gthumb changed from libgphoto to the gphoto gvfs backend. (GNOME bug 583796)
  • The gnio rewrite of gvfs FTP support made it so idn/punycode is now supported. (GNOME bug 567871)
  • libgnomekbd switched to use single GTK+ includes. (GNOME bug 563629)
  • The Hamster applet got the possibility to export reports to CSV. (GNOME bug 549604)
  • Support for Adium themes (using WebKit) has been merged in Empathy. Various themes were already tested, and they are listed, with known issues on awiki page (GNOME bug 522069)
  • Banshee gained a weighted random mode, to play highest rated songs more often. (GNOME bug 544680)
  • Telepathy “tubes” support landed in vino, allowing to share the desktop with Empathy contacts. (GNOME bug 584840)
  • Many of the patches Milan Bouchet-Valat created with regards to GTK+ file chooser issues were finally applied.

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Issue 35

June 7, 2009

This week… 1950 commits, in 167 projects, by 242 happy hackers (and 218 were translation commits).

  • Banshee gained a “shuffle by album” option (GNOME bug 348582)
  • Epiphany support for Python extensions has been removed, the supported language for extensions other than C/C++ is now JavaScript through Seed.
  • Support for publishing geolocation information has been merged into Empathy (GNOME bug 571666)
  • Milan Crha added a folder emblem to show new mail arrivals to Evolution (GNOME bug 323037); also Evolution dropped support for CDE (GNOME bug 582939).
  • Support for the JPEG 2000 image format has been added to Gimp (GNOME bug 111409)
  • GTK+ gained a new GtkInfoBar widget, similar to GeditMessageArea and similar widgets in Firefox. Its API is inspired by GtkDialog, with a content area and an action area. The message area uses symbolic colors for different background colors for warnings, errors, informational messages, etc. (GNOME bug 555344)
  • Rhythmbox track change notification bubbles gained a “Skip” button (GNOME bug 331272)
  • Shaun McCance created a new “mallard” branch for Yelp, to add support for the new Mallard document format.
  • Christian Persch made a few HIG improvements to the NetworkManager connection editor (GNOME bug 584223)
  • JHBuild GUI was rewritten to be totally awesome (and to not require libglade).
  • PyBank, the bindings for GIRepository, got handling of structs as return values.
  • Most importantly, Anjuta splash screen got rewritten from the obsolete libgnomecanvas to straight cairo (GNOME bug 571740).

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Issue 34

May 31, 2009

This week… 1881 commits, in 190 projects, by 250 happy hackers (and 279 were translation commits).

  • DBus support has been added to gjs. (GNOME bug 580948).
  • gnome-power-manager went back to use the original idletime code to fix backlight bugs, Richard Hughes explained in his commit that “The new IDLETIME code from gnome-session is very buggy, and the old code was much easier to understand. This should fix random DPMS off blanking and the fade-up-down-up on session resume.”
  • In Empathy Pierre-Luc Beaudouin added support to display the locations of contacts on a map widget (provided by libchamplain). (GNOME bug 571667)
  • Vinagre gained a new “read-only” toggle button in its toolbar. (GNOME bug 583230)
  • Johannes Schmid removed the remaining libglade bits from anjuta, that is now using GtkBuilder. (GNOME bug 530740)
  • gdl, the GNOME Docking Library, removed its dependency on libgnome (GNOME bug 580860) and dropped libglade in favour of GtkBuilder (GNOME bug 582511).
  • xchat-gnome got rid of the deprecated GTK+ symbols it was using (GNOME bug 572239).
  • More than five years after it was first reported, thanks to the migration to WebKit, Epiphany will now set the Referer header when opening links in new tabs. (GNOME bug 120341)

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