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…

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 86

May 30, 2010

This week… 2346 commits, in 184 projects, by 266 happy hackers (and 405 were translation commits).

  • Vincent Untz improved and merged Carlos Garcia Campos branch of gnome-panel that moves applets off Bonobo, to D-Bus. (GNOME bug 572131)
  • Shaun McCance landed a bookmarks editor in Yelp.
  • A Kupfer plugin that adds a quick access to tasks from Getting Things GNOME! has been contributed by Karol Będkowski.
  • The “Default Applications” capplet has been converted to a settings panel.
  • Support for devices with sector sizes of more than 512 bytes have been enabled in gparted (GNOME bug 607165)
  • Adel Gadllah contributed to GNOME Shell, with a patch to make sure the app switcher would always be displayed on the primary monitor.
  • XInput2 support has been merged in GTK+, enabling the use of multiple keyboards and pointer pairs. (GNOME bug 596725)
  • Both GNOME Color Manager and Evince have been ported to use GDBus.
  • Alexander Larsson added some initial support for dtrace and systemtap to GLib, the current set of probes is on allocation and free using g_malloc & friends, and g_slice, and gquark name tracking. (GNOME bug 606044)
  • Edgar Luna added a new lyrics parser, using darklyrics.com, to Rhythmbox (GNOME bug 525094)
  • Support for gobject introspection has been added to gtksourceview by Tomeu Vizoso, and to dconf by Ryan Lortie.
  • Morten Welinder added a non-linear solver to Gnumeric (GNOME bug 614865)
  • In their GSOC Yuvi Panda pushed the work he started to rewrite Cheese in Vala, Jamie Nicol updated the Last.fm plugin of rhythmbox to support the new authentication API, and Salomon Sickert has written the first part of a support library for his “TaskView” project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 84

May 16, 2010

This week… 2094 commits, in 204 projects, by 253 happy hackers (and 417 were translation commits).

  • Florent Thévenet added support for user preferences to solang, using gsettings.
  • libunique and gtkmm have both been ported to GTK+ 3.0.
  • Fabio Bonelli removed libbonobo from Galeon, it uses D-Bus now.
  • In pygi John Palmieri wrapped the GObject module, making it compatible with both the ancient pygobject attributes and new attributes exposed by introspection.
  • Roberto Majadas added initial support for ConsoleKit in nanny.
  • The dependency on libgnome-vfs has been removed from f-spot, it now uses GIO.
  • The class inheritance graph in anjuta has been switched to use cairo, instead of straight gdk draw.
  • Christian Persch ported Evince and GConf to GDBus.
  • Fridrich Strba pushed an initial implementation to have evolution as default mail client and mailto handler under Windows.
  • Introspection support has been added for the libnautilus-extension library.
  • GEdit unique instance mechanism has been switched from bacon to DBus.
  • In GNOME Shell Colin Walters implemented the initial application menu.
  • Last but not least Matthias Clasen merged GDBus in glib.

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 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 59

November 22, 2009

This week… 1637 commits, in 179 projects, by 248 happy hackers (and 285 were translation commits).

  • In the camel-gobject branch of Evolution, Matthew Barnes replaced Camel’s homegrown type system with GObject.
  • Brasero got Tracker support in its search pane. (GNOME bug 465660)
  • Simon van der Linden added a method to compare GIBaseInfo objects (GNOME bug 590527)
  • Pitivi got preliminary support for video mixing.
  • Brian Cameron added back Include, Exclude, and IncludeAll configuration options to GDM, to select which users should be visible; the option had been removd in the 2.22 rewrite. (GNOME 557553)
  • Florian Müllner improved the GNOME Shell to switch from the overview to the confirmation dialog some applications display before closing, when an application is closed from the overview. (GNOME bug 602532).
  • Also in the GNOME Shell, to support a message tray, Dan Winship added a notification daemon service.
  • After doing a first serie of commands two weeks ago, Xavier Claessens added support for the /nick command to Empathy. (GNOME bug 602066)
  • Evince has been modified to display files attached to PDF documents (it requires poppler from git master). (GNOME bug 601839)
  • The GNOME Icon Theme got special icons for XDF folders (documents, download, music, pictures…).
  • Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 56

November 1, 2009

This week… 1906 commits, in 181 projects, by 237 happy hackers (and 363 were translation commits).

  • A full screen mode has been added to emerillon (GNOME bug 599764).
  • John Wendell fixed several memory leaks in Vinagre and gtk-vnc.
  • A new “Document License” tab has been added to Evince, it can display license information embedded in PDF files (GNOME bug 349173)
  • In GNOME Games, gnometris got renamed to quadrapassel (due to trademark concerns), and same-gnome to swell-foop (due to “GNOME” in the old name).
  • Support for group profiles has been added to Sabayon, thanks to Scott Balneaves.
  • GTK+ was updated to use standard Mac shortcuts on Mac OS X (Cmd-X, Cmd-C, etc.). (GNOME bug 530351)
  • Ignacio Casal Quinteiro ported gedit to GSettings, in the appropriately named gsettings branch of gedit; this is still a work in progress.
  • Thomas Thurman added a first theme using CSS to the cowbell branch of metacity, the theme is named Sunshine.
  • Peter Bloomfield marked important items in the balsa toolbars, so they work better with the new “text besides icons” default.
  • Andreas J. Guelzow added ODF compability function “SHEETS” to Gnumeric.
  • Matthew Barnes started porting Evolution from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • Finally usage of libgnomevfs has been removed from gnome-pilot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 55

October 25, 2009

This week… 1781 commits, in 178 projects, by 250 happy hackers (and 298 were translation commits).

  • A fullscreen mode has been added to xchat-gnome (GNOME bug 445638).
  • Jonh Wendell added the ability to use JPEG compression (thus lossy encoding) to vinagre. (GNOME bug 573272)
  • Evince has been changed to always use a different process for every document.
  • Eog got support for animated images, it plays animated images as supported by GdkPixbufAnimation (GNOME bug 335093).
  • gnome-pilot was ported to GtkBuilder, and removed most of its usage of libgnomeui.
  • Empathy removed its applets (megaphone, nothere) and Python bindings of libempathy and libempathy-gtk, on the premise they were unused and applications should use telepathy-glib, and a future telepathy-gtk, via gobject-introspection.
  • Colin Walters updated the GNOME Shell to use a stable ordering for well-known icons in the notification area (volume, battery, network…). (GNOME bug 598313)
  • Brasero got changed to no longer store some settings with GConf anymore (like window size or position of widgets) but to save and load them using GKeyFile instead.
  • Thomas Thurman worked quite a lot on the “cowbell” metacity branch, to allow styling of window borders using CSS, he also posted a status update.
  • Ray Strode made DeviceKit-power optional in gdm.
  • GNOME Disk Utility got handling of LUKS volumes.
  • Martyn Rucell updated the Totem tracker plugin to the new (0.7) tracker API.
  • Paolo Bacchilega added PackageKit support to File Roller, so it will now prompt for new packages when opening archives that require an uninstalled tool.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »