Issue 79

April 11, 2010

This week… 2112 commits, in 176 projects, by 296 happy hackers (and 263 were translation commits).

  • Martin Szulecki added detection of the ipad to gvfs AFC backend (GNOME bug 615039).
  • Rhythmbox has been updated to use webkit to display HTML episode descriptions of podcasts. (GNOME bug 320507)
  • Flickr authentication code has been unified in gthumb, removing duplicated code.
  • In Rygel Andreas Henriksson added basic support for serving subtitles in Samsung custom DIDL-Lite and HTTP extensions. (GNOME bug 606305)
  • The Totem Youtube plugin has been fixed to work again with latest youtube.com pages changes. (GNOME bug 614679)
  • Tomas Bzatek changed the GTK+ file chooser so that it initializes search engines on demand. (GNOME bug 614971)
  • Banshee for Meego saw another major panel UI overhaul, to reflect the latest Meego look and feel, and better organize some of the features.
  • Ray Strode added support for relocatable .gnome2 directory to both gnome-games (GNOME bug 613634) and yelp (GNOME bug 614029), this is done via the GNOME22_USER_DIR environment variable.
  • Joanmarie Diggs added to Orca support for the detection of mispelled words in OpenOffice.org. (GNOME bug 364772)
  • libsoup has been updated with a fix for proxies that close the connection after returning a 407 error code (Proxy Authentication Required) on a CONNECT request.
  • Florian Müllner added introspection support to gconf (GNOME bug 613247)
  • Philip Withnall improved cancellation support in libgdata, it is now using libsoup message cancellation functionality, rather than checking for cancellation ourselves at arbitrary points during operations.
  • GNOME Shell support for IM notifications has been moved to use Telepathy. (GNOME bug 608999)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 78

April 4, 2010

This week… 2655 commits, in 255 projects, by 325 happy hackers (and 661 were translation commits).

  • Empathy gained the possibility to undo the closing of a chat window or tab (GNOME bug 609832)
  • Robert Ancell added colours to gcalctool buttons (GNOME bug 157962).
  • Sergey V. Udaltsov added a gconf key to disable the display of the keyboard indicator status icon. (GNOME bug 612240)
  • Evince removed its internal copy of the infobar widget to use GtkInfoBar directly; also Carlos Garcia Campos fixed Evince so that compressed password-protected documents could be opened. (GNOME bug 613959)
  • Michael C. Urbanski created a new “podcast-ng” branch in Banshee, to hold much work being done on podcast support.
  • Matthew Barnes got rid of the ancient code (almost 6000 lines) in Evolution to support migrating from pre-2.0 versions.
  • GNOME Power Manager has been ported from DeviceKit-power to UPower.
  • Caribou has been changed to warn the user when accessibility is not enabled. (GNOME bug 608727)
  • Paolo Bacchilega added a flickr photoset imported to gthumb.
  • A “gnome3” branch has been created in gtk-engines, to hold the GNOME 3 theme work.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 76

March 21, 2010

This week… 2398 commits, in 234 projects, by 289 happy hackers (and 834 were translation commits).

  • The 2.30 release is approaching fast and translators are hard at work, French and Russian are already totally translated, and 30 teams are over the 90% bar. The most impressive progress this week has been the Lithuanian team, coordinated by Gintautas Miliauskas, that improved from 84 to 89%.
  • Banshee lyrics plugin got support for the lyricsplugin.com database. (GNOME bug 612958)
  • The GNOME Keyring has been fixed not to store session keyring on disk. (GNOME bug 612977)
  • Daniel P. Berrange worked hard on gtk-vnc, substanctally improving and modernising the code.
  • GNOME Volume Control got a speaker testing UI, Bastien Nocera blogged about it in Speaker testing. (GNOME bug 519438)
  • Yelp 3.0 branch got support for a basic “back” button.
  • Thanks to a patch by Marc Deslauriers GNOME Power Manager got support to communicate with GNOME Screensaver running as a D-Bus service. (GNOME bug 609031)
  • Andrea Cimitan added a new option to the Murrine theme engine to draw smooth separators.
  • The GNOME Shell has been changed to use a single button to toggle between linear and grid view. (GNOME bug 610801)
  • The VTE library got introspection support. (GNOME bug 604837)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 75

March 14, 2010

This week… 2144 commits, in 230 projects, by 307 happy hackers (and 681 were translation commits).

  • Banshee got a new Youtube extension (GNOME bug 576666).
  • Nautilus has been changed to load tracker/beagle at runtime. (GNOME bug 589345)
  • Support for GObject introspection has been added to gnome-menus (GNOME bug 598406)
  • gnome-settings-daemon got its code to eject removable media rewritten to use gio (instead of spawning the eject command). (GNOME bug 580779)
  • GNOME Shell has been updated to support and require Clutter 1.2 (GNOME bug 610679)
  • Yelp, in its yelp-3-0 branch, got a new ocation dropdown, with two-line entries, displaying both title and description. Shaun McCance blogged about this change in More Yelp 3.0 Location Entry.
  • David Zeuten added rudimentary support for loop files to GNOME Disk Utility. (screenshot)
  • To follow up on the usabiltiy report Empathy was changed to sort contacts by state and to show offline contacts by default (GNOME bug 612338).
  • Milan Bouchet-Valat added support for password (un)locking to system-tools-backends.
  • Dan Williams modified the network manager applet to handle and show access technology for GSM connections (GSM, GPRS, UMTS, etc.)
  • Evince has been updated to use monitor height instead of screen height to calculate page scale in presentation mode; this fixes the presentation mode in dual head setups. (GNOME bug 608924)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 72

February 21, 2010

This week… 2115 commits, in 218 projects, by 260 happy hackers (and 629 were translation commits).

  • Colin Walters optmized function invocation in gjs (GNOME bug 604076).
  • Also in gjs, Johan Dahlin pushed the beginning of a module wrapping cairo.
  • In GNOME Shell Floran Müllner added fading out of the desktop icons when showing the overview. (GNOME bug 600999)
  • Gnumeric got a fix on the way it uses to store floading point values in ODF. (GNOME bug 610372)
  • Tomas Bzatek fixed gvfs to correctly store ssh/sftp passwords in the keyring, when requested. (GNOME bug 580024)
  • gparted has been changed to indicate required software packages if unable to read file system (GNOME bug 576908)
  • gcalctool documentation has been rewritten in the new Mallard format.
  • Rygel has been updated to support uploading, this works in both standalone and Tracker backends.
  • Lapo Calamamandrei added the last two missing navigation icons (home and jump) to the new GNOME Icon Theme.
  • Kupfer got a plugin that makes it able to look inside compressed archives.
  • Alexander Kojevnikov implemented support for the media art storage specification to Banshee (to be honest, a simplified version of the proposal). (GNOME bug 520516)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 58

November 15, 2009

This week… 1612 commits, in 180 projects, by 213 happy hackers (and 293 were translation commits).

  • Banshee was migrated to the Last.fm 2.0 API. (GNOME bug 541227)
  • A general search feature has been added to Rygel, including Tracker.
  • The GtkNotebook widget got an “action area”, to be used for things like having a single close tab button to the right of all tabs. Johannes Schmid wrote about it in his weblog: GtkNotebook action widgets. (GNOME bug 116650)
  • Totem gained an on-screen display when in fullscreen mode, Bastien Nocero announced it in A little OSD. (GNOME bug 600985)
  • Simon van der Linden added the possibility to import wrappers from pygi to pygobject.
  • The GNOME Shell got presence items added to the status menu. (GNOME bug 601458)
  • Behdad Esfahbod reverted a commit to vte, as not clearing the alternate screen caused issues with less.
  • Basic Mac OS X integration (menu, dock, bundle) has been pushed to gedit.
  • Empathy was fixed to ask for password when joining a protected room (GNOME bug 579341)
  • The View Properties dialog of Gnumeric was converted to be instant-apply.
  • William Walker added provisional support for GNOME Shell magnifier service to Orca.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 49

September 13, 2009

This week… 2529 commits, in 212 projects, by 272 happy hackers (and 838 were translation commits).

  • We are approaching the 2.28.0 release and with freezes in place translators are now the heavy contributors, highlights of this week are the Serbian and Catalan teams, increasing their completion status by over five percents, and the Portuguese and Spanish teams, achieving 100% translated strings for the UI.
  • A new “Auto DJ” feature has been contributed to Banshee, it will add new randomly selected tracks to the play queue when it gets empty (GNOME bug 565767)
  • Kupfer, a simple launcher in the style of Gnome Do, added a new Calculator plugin and a new “Rename To…” action.
  • Vincent Untz updated gnome-menus and gnome-panel to work with the new X-GNOME-FullName .desktop key.
  • Rygel added support for publishing thumbnails of media items. (GNOME bug 590702)
  • Alexander Larsson did some GObject performance work (in the glib gobject-performance branch), improving the speed of instance creation for classes that do not have properties, and the interface lookup algorithm.
  • Brasero got a new “introspection” branch where support for gobject introspection is developed.
  • The display order of files in Eye of GNOME, that was broken for some locales, has been fixed by Felix Riemann. (GNOME bug 594403)
  • The adblock Epiphany extension has been updated to work with Epiphany/webkit, Xan Lopez blogged this and other Epiphany features. (GNOME bug 562762)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »