Issue 94

July 25, 2010

This week… 2276 commits, in 205 projects, by 233 happy hackers (and 504 were translation commits).

  • Handling of contacts in Empathy has been switched to use libfolks, this will enable future enhanchements, such as support for metacontacts. (GNOME bug 623714)
  • Carlos Garcia Campos ported the byzanz applet to use the new D-Bus based panel applet library.
  • Gtk-vnc has switched over to use GIO for socket connections and DNS resolution.
  • Giovanni Campagna contributed a base API for system status indicators in GNOME Shell. (GNOME bug 621705)
  • James Liggett implemented a tags pane in the Anjuta git plugin.
  • In the ongoing transitions, Nautilus has been ported to GSettings, Eog has been switched to GTK+ 3, and accounts-dialog is being ported to gdbus.
  • Preliminary support for adding new annotations (at the moment only Text annotations are supported) has been added to Evince. (GNOME bug 168304)
  • Toms Bauģis changed hamster search to use SQLite full text search.
  • David Pellicer contributed a few more keyboard layouts to Caribou.
  • The function name completion tooltips used in Gnumeric have been improved by Andreas J. Guelzow.
  • Evolution-rss default renderer has been switched to be WebKit.
  • Nate Stedman merged his branch adding suport for themes in Ease.
  • Benjamin Otte continued stripping GTK+ of old GDK drawing functions and classes (GdkPangoRenderer, GdkGC…).
  • Richard Hughes split off a new libcolor-glib library out of gnome-color-manager.
  • Totem youtube plugin has been updated to work after the latest Youtube page format changes.
  • In GSOC land Jamie Nicol has added to Rhythmbox the possibility to scrobble to both Last.fm and Libre.fm, Michal Hruby ported zeitgeist-datahub to Vala, Karlo Jež added a hover menu for quick task manipulation in Getting Things GNOME, and more…

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Issue 92

July 11, 2010

This week… 1620 commits, in 162 projects, by 206 happy hackers (and 232 were translation commits).

  • Yuvaraj Pandian T enhanced the speed of swtiching to the effects brower in his Cheese three-point-oh branch.
  • Shaun McCance added a (roughly) topological page sort for Mallard documents.
  • Evince, GNOME Shell, Brasero and Empathy all have been switched to GTK+ 3.
  • Jakub Steiner commited new symbolic icons, forcopy, cut, paste and more.
  • Support for non-GObject fundamental objects has been added to gobject-introspection; it is mostly interesting for being able to support GstMiniObject’s which are extensivly used in GStreamer.
  • Peter Bloomfield has added support for older IMAP servers, that do not advertise the “RIGHTS=” capability, to Balsa.
  • Robert Ancell added support for enumerations in dconf-editor.
  • Johan Dahlin pushed a llvm branch into pygobject, he explains the purpose on his website, in Using LLVM to speed up function invocation in a dynamic language binding post.
  • A backend for tasks has been pushed into evolution-couchdb.
  • Enrico Minack added currency support to the Invest applet. (GNOME bug 339127, GNOME bug 609547).
  • The feature_backup2 branch of glom got created, which adds support for making backups, and restore, of glom databases.
  • Aaron Bockover added handling of Amazon MP3 store music previews and samples to Banshee.
  • The ability to sort by image/video dimensions has been added into gthumb.
  • Last, the summers of code are still making improvements, for example Luca Invernizzi started working on both a remember the milk and a couchdb plugins for Getting Things GNOME, and Michal Hruby spent time improving Sezen, etc.

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Issue 90

June 27, 2010

This week… 2629 commits, in 209 projects, by 282 happy hackers (and 315 were translation commits).

  • GSettings ports again, nautilus-sendto, gcalctool were both switched this week to use GSettings. nautilus-sendto has also been ported to GTK+ 3.0, and Rygel as well.
  • OpenID support has been added to Snowy, the web companion of Tomboy.
  • Daniel P. Berrange added support for colourmap based pixel formats to gtk-vnc, his patch implements full support for rendering from colourmaps, this should improve performances in low bandwidth situations.
  • The notification-daemon got support for multiple screens and monitor changes (GNOME bug 622552)
  • Christian Persch ported the SVGZ support in librsvg so it can use GZlibDecompressor instead of libgsf. (GNOME bug 621699)
  • Damon Chaplin worked quite a lot on a new API for goocanvas, in the new-api branch of goocanvas…
  • GNOME Shell got support for icon buttons in notifications, thanks to Matt Novenstern. (GNOME bug 621014)
  • Morten Welinder fixed the excessive memory usage of gnumeric related to column styles when reading xslx files. (GNOME bug 622365)
  • Michael J. Chudobiak switched the documentation of gthumb to Mallard.
  • In Empathy support for importing old Missing Control 4 accounts has been removed.
  • Bastien Nocera ported the sound preferences dialog to be a panel in the new control center; and Richard Hughes ported the preferences dialog of GNOME PackageKit.
  • The GNOME Panel got support for gobject-introspection, for its panel applet library. (GNOME bug 622341)
  • In Vinagre Jonh Wendell implemented the “take screenshot” command for the SSH connections.
  • In the land of GSOC students Jamie Nicol finished off the profile view (screenshot), Stéphane Maniaci added some informations about the photos imported from Flickr (titles, descriptions, authors), Michel Hruby started a Totem plugin to allow searching for recent media, and other students were also hard at work.

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Issue 89

June 20, 2010

This week… 2299 commits, in 199 projects, by 257 happy hackers (and 362 were translation commits).

  • This week again a few modules were ported to gsettings, this is the case for GNOME Shell, Brasero, Empathy and the GNOME Bluetooth nautilus-sendto plugin.
  • girparser, from gobject-introspection, got support for an introspectable=no attribute, to replace the hackish pre-filter for varargs with a much more generic mechanism. (GNOME bug 621570)
  • Robert Ancell made dconf-editor understand and display configuration schemas.
  • Jonh Wendell added the possibility to specifiy an alternative ssh port when doing tunnels in Vinagre. (GNOME bug 621809)
  • Matthias Clasen ported accounts-dialog to be a control-center panel, this is done in the control-center-panel branch.
  • Maxim Ermilov added animated display of startup notifications to GNOME Shell. (GNOME bug 598349)
  • Totem has been ported to the new libpeas for plugin handling. (GNOME bug 604830)
  • Garrett Regier added support for gobject introspection to gedit (GNOME bug 621549)
  • F-Spot has been switched to use bilinear scaling for thumbnails. (GNOME bug 621881)
  • Stef Walter fixed a deadlock on secure memory usage in gnome-keyring.
  • Around the Summer of Code projects, Stéphane Maniaci added a basic flickr fetcher to ease, to grab pictures from flickr, Luca Invernizzi added a new two-way synchronization engine to Getting Things GNOME, Alexander Saprykin implemented GIO async read/write support to his totem chapter plugin, and other students also did much work…

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Issue 88

June 13, 2010

This week… 2432 commits, in 191 projects, by 260 happy hackers (and 292 were translation commits).

  • Many modules started adopting GTK+ 3 (GNOME Desktop, GNOME Settings Daemon, GNOME Color Manager, GNOME Power Manager, GNOME Control Center, Goocanvas, Totem), sometimes keeping compatibility with GTK+ 2.x, (like VTE, gucharmap, GNOME Games, librsvg and GNOME Terminal).
  • Shaun McCance added “Copy Code Block” and “Save Code Black As” to code snippets in Yelp, he wrote about the feature in Yelp and the DOM.
  • The volume control “applet” has been changed to use symbolic icons (GNOME bug 614212), to complete this Jakub Steiner added such icons for microphone levels. (GNOME bug 621175)
  • Johan Dahlin added a “promise” module to gjs, to provide a better API for supporting asynchronous code. (GNOME bug 608450)
  • Grilo got a gravatar plugin, it is used to distribute an artist-avatar/author-avater attribute if either “artist” or “author” fields contain a valid email.
  • Totem has been updated to use a dark theme and symbolic icons. (GNOME bug 617921)
  • Ryan Lortie added dconf-editor to the dconf module.
  • Jonathan Matthew implemented the MPRIS D-Bus specification in Rhythmbox (GNOME bug 618520), MPRIS defines a common D-Bus interface for media players.
  • Harold Schreckengost contributed a new F-Spot topic based help.
  • Felix Kaser added a new “EmpathyLiveSearch” widget in Empathy, used to dynamically filter the main window contact list.
  • In GNOME Control Center Thomas Wood converted the display capplet to a settings panel.
  • Andreas J. Guelzow added a search function to the function selector of Gnumeric. (GNOME bug 495776)
  • In the GNOME Shell Florian Müllner added a fade effect when overing over items of the dash. (GNOME bug 620782)
  • Abderrahim Kitouni added a plugin to support Vala to Anjuta. (GNOME bug 620757)
  • William Jon McCann improved the performance of the GDM greeter (GNOME bug 621045)
  • In Summer of Code land, Alexander Saprykin wrote a tiny parser for CMML files, so libcmml won’t be necessary for chapter support in Totem; Yuvi Panda made photo, video and burst modes of Cheese work in his Vala port; Michal Hruby wrote a Rhythmbox plugin using Zeitgeist; and more.

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Issue 83

May 9, 2010

This week… 2274 commits, in 184 projects, by 262 happy hackers (and 262 were translation commits).

  • Guillaume Desmottes and Sjoerd Simons merged their timestamp work into Empathy’s master branch. (GNOME bug 615976)
  • Nautilus saw changes in its bookmark API, including the removal of the deprecated gtnome-fs-bookmark* icon names, replaced by the folder icon, and the use of emblems.
  • Aleksander Morgado has been improving unicode support of tracker using libicu based word breaking to the parser-libunistring-review branch of tracker.
  • Meego improvements got merged into Banshee’s master branch.
  • Robert Carr started theming support and improved shapes capabilities in Glide.
  • Ekiga got support to work in 16bpp mode. (GNOME bug 611308)
  • gedit port to gsettings continued, with many plugins ported already.
  • Ross Burton has been working on Randr related improvements of gnome-settings-daemon for Meego. This is happening in the new randr branch of gnome-settings-daemon.
  • Yelp got basic printing support, and started being ported to gdbus.
  • Matthias Clasen layed ground for new work on GTK+ 3.0 as he made it parallel-installable to 2.x.
  • Matthew Barnes went forward replacing CamelObject by GObject in camel, evolution, evolution-data-server, evolution-mapi and evolution-exchange.

Many thanks to Dodji Seketeli who assembled most of this issue.

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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.

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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)

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Issue 74

March 7, 2010

This week… 2390 commits, in 220 projects, by 281 happy hackers (and 708 were translation commits).

  • Empathy made URL some people put in their contact status clickable right from the contact list (GNOME bug 525576)
  • Hiroyuki Ikezoe updated gpointing-device-settings to support a speed property.
  • The cairo branch has been merged into gjs.
  • Snowy (the webservice companion of Tomboy) has been updated to use UTC as internal time representation, to avoid dealing with different timezones.
  • Jean Bréfort implemented round rectangles, arrow heads for arcs and spline support for polyline and polygons in goffice canvas.
  • Jürg Billeter updated tracker to refuse updates when low on disk scape.
  • The libgnomekbd layout indicator has been changed to use the default font family and size, instead of hardcoding Helvetica. (GNOME bug 610544)
  • Richard Hugues pushed a color-management branch to GTK+, implemening an optional LCMS GIO module, and GtkColorEngine, GtkColorTransform and GtkColorProfile.
  • gcalctool has been changed to show bit editor for numbers not in base 10.
  • Jesse van den Kieboom implemented a new words completion word finder method in gtksourceview, as the previous version was buggy and a lot of bookkeeping.
  • GNOME Power Manager has been changed to play a sound loop if the charge of a laptop battery or UPS reaches a critical level.

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Issue 73

February 28, 2010

This week… 2327 commits, in 209 projects, by 299 happy hackers (and 739 were translation commits).

  • libgda got initial support for GObject Introspection, thanks to Daniel Espinosa.
  • Empathy conversation logger can now be run as a separate process (GNOME bug 518414)
  • Zenity got a –color-selection switch, to display a color selection dialog. (GNOME bug 540169)
  • GNOME Screensaver got a control center extension panel, but it got reverted, most likely for the next release.
  • Brasero drive selection widget has been fixed to be usable from GtkBuilder (GNOME bug 608170)
  • Some minimal support for checking certificates has been added to Epiphany (GNOME bug 600663)
  • GNOME Shell got notifications to point to windows demanding attention (via the urgency hint) (GNOME bug 610594)
  • gnote has been changed to allow user to decide if links are updated when renaming a note. (GNOME bug 584789)
  • gcalctool was chaned to allow hexadecimal numbers to be entered in lower-case.
  • Carlos Garcia Campos pushed a bonobo-less branch of the GNOME Panel, porting both gnome-panel and libpanel-applet to D-Bus. (GNOME bug 572131)

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