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).

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 33

May 24, 2009

This week… 2349 commits, in 189 projects, by 255 happy hackers (and 298 were translation commits).

  • John Carr published his syncml branch of conduit, adding SyncML support for contacts and calendar items.
  • Gnumeric got support for more styles in its ODF export (cell, paragraph and text styles).
  • Niepce Digital got an initial UI shell and basic gphoto support.
  • krb5-auth-dialog added a gconf key to disable its notifications.
  • f-spot date range dialog got ported from libglade to gtkbuilder; rhythmbox also replaced libglade by gtkbuilder.
  • The graph component in goffice gained support for formatted editing of graph limits that are dates and times. (GNOME bug 574681)
  • Evolution search bar got improved, to more closely resemble Firefox. (GNOME bug 580925)
  • Rhythmbox status icon has been made into a plugin, with additional capabilities, some aspects of the status icon and the notification popups are now a bit more configurable.
  • Willie Walker continued his numerous improvements to the speech generator in Orca, porting Pidgin, Gecko and Thunderbird to the new generator.
  • In gnome-utils gsearchtool got rid of its libgnomeui usage. (GNOME bug 573670)
  • Brasero gained the possibility to span data across several media. (GNOME bug 438858)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 31

May 10, 2009

This week… 1980 commits, in 184 projects, by 244 happy hackers (and 281 were translation commits).

  • Alacarte switched from libglade to gtkbuilder (GNOME bug 577911) and Trevor Watkins published his work on a vala rewrite in the vala+gdesktopmenu branch.
  • Anjuta git plugin now features a “amend” option in its commit dialog. (GNOME bug 580340)
  • Eog gained a “set as background” command in its image context menu. (GNOME bug 581180)
  • Tomas Bzatek fixed the gvfs FTP backend to parse file sizes over 4 gigabytes correctly.
  • Robert Carr added a D-Bus module to Seed, he wrote about it in DBus, sandboxes, REPLs, Life.
  • Alexander Larsson went through the lowlevel part of gnio, fixing all the issues he pointed out in his initial review, making it work fully on win32, writing docs, plus fixing lots of other things he found. He posted a status report, with some open questions.
  • Jonh Wendell started refactoring Vinagre to make it a generic viewer, not just for VNC anymore.
  • Vino, XChat-GNOME, deskbar-applet, gnome-system-monitor and Evolution changed to use g_timeout_add_seconds instead of g_timeout_add where appropriate. (GNOME bug 581204, GNOME bug 581094, GNOME bug 581207, GNOME bug 591099, GNOME bug 573830)

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 30

May 3, 2009

This week… 2031 commits, in 193 projects, by 245 happy hackers (and 290 were translation commits).

  • The App monitoring module landed in gnome-shell, it will be used to provide things like “Recent Apps”. (GNOME bug 570899).
  • The Evolution external editor plugin has been updated to behave like the kmail equivalent, the normal evolution mail composer is now displayed, and the external editor starts whenever the user types something in the body. (GNOME bug 567145)
  • Jody Goldberg improved Gnumeric xlsx format parsing, adding basic support for external references.
  • Yelp can now display simple text files. (GNOME bug 565502)
  • Passepartout, the revived desktop publishing application, got its internationalisation support completed, making all the diealogs properly translatable.
  • Tomboy printing support was rewritten to 1) wrap very long lines and 2) partially render paragraphs at the end of pages.
  • Empathy gained a menu entry to display its file transfer manager. (GNOME bug 574626)
  • Rhythmbox got support to read cover art embedded in media files (for local files only). (GNOME bug 345975)
  • The GNOME sound recorder saw its libgnome/libgnomeui dependency removed. (GNOME bug 567310)
  • Davyd Madeley rebased David Zeuthen resolution independance private git-svn branch against the real GTK+ repository, and published it into a new “resolution-independence” branch.
  • Finally, deprecated GTK+ symbols were removed from a bunch of modules: vino, gnome-system-tools, gok and gnome-media/grecord.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 26

April 5, 2009

This week… 1520 commits, in 164 projects, by 160 happy hackers (and 180 were translation commits).

  • GTK+ and glib switched to git.gnome.org; so Alexander Larsson sent in his client-side-windows branch; in the meantime Dan Winship published a glib branch adding GResolver, a glib-ish interface to DNS.
  • Gerd Kohlberger migrated gok to libcanberra; it was the last module using esound.
  • Anjuta git plugin got checkout support; and the project import wizard has been replaced by a simpler dialog that allows to import directly from a version control system.
  • A patch by Simon van der Linden got commited to gnome-terminal, adding a “Leave Fullscreen” menu item (GNOME bug 566335).
  • Totem switched from bacon-message-connection to libunique (GNOME bug 162822), also a new D-Bus Service plugin (GNOME bug 576016) and the YouTube plugin was ported to C, using the new libgdata library.
  • Matthew Barnes continues his hard work removing bonobo usage from evolution, he finished attachment dragndrop in the composer window.
  • Evince fading animations got fixed (the next page was displayed before animation started).
  • Empathy was fixed so IRC commands without special support are no longer sent as plaintext. (GNOME bug 577026).
  • Rhythmbox improved his support for MTP devices; it now creates album objects on the device when transferring songs, and sends the album art to the device if it supports the JPEG file type.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 15

January 18, 2009

This week… 1452 commits, in 161 projects, by 186 happy hackers (and 261 were translation commits).

  • A Brasero plugin has been added to Totem, to allow creating VCDs from playing video files, and duplicate VCDs and DVDs (GNOME bug 565383).
  • Hand-written gir files (GL, cairo, fontconfig, freetype, libxml2, xfixes, xft and xlib) were moved from gir-repository into gobject-introspection; so upstream libraries depending on these can avoid a gir-repository dependency.
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo turned the already awesome epiphany location bar into the woohoo bar (enhancing the completion popup by showing a two line cell containing the favicon, the title of the page and the URL). (GNOME bug 541782)
  • gnome-session got a D-Bus Presence API, and the user switch applet got updated to use it.
  • There were lots of updates to brasero to address issues raised during discussion on desktop-devel-list.
  • gnome-network-preferences has been renamed to gnome-network-properties
  • Evolution added the possibility to import PST files (Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders). (GNOME bug 208426)
  • GTK+ got a new API to change global input method. (GNOME bug 450716)
  • Bastien Nocera replaced some custom code in gnome-user-share, and a direct Avahi dependency, by using the mod_dnssd Apache module. (GNOME bug 567442).
  • Finally, Meld and the trash applet both removed their libgnome dependency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 8

November 30, 2008

This week… 1476 commits, in 165 projects, by 160 happy hackers (and 155 were translation commits).

  • There were lots of 2.24.2 tagging, with 2.24.2 released on Wednesday.
  • Many modules completed the “Cleaning up GTK Includes” goal (file-roller, system-monitor, gnome-session, fast-user-switch-applet, libgweather, gnome-nettool and gnome-netstatus).
  • Another goal is about removing deprecated GTK+ symbols, gdm, system-monitor and gnome-netstatus completed it.
  • gedit merged plugin system changes from its “new_plugin” branch; this includes a new python plugin loader, references to Python have been removed from gedit core.
  • Christian Persh continued cleaning gnome-terminal and added a runtime debugging framework.
  • Ron McOuat patch to add support for basic and digest authentication in souphttpstr (in GStreamer) got applied.
  • Diego Escalante Urrelo gave some attention to gnome-netstatus, cleaning it up (including the removal of the libgnomeui dependency) and applying some long-waiting patches (most notable being the consideration of Fitt’s law).
  • Aisleriot gained a new game, Queen of Italy (aka Terrace)
  • Lutz Mueller and Morten Welinder made it possible to drag a sheet from gnumeric to gedit (or any other text program).
  • Finally Evolution CalDAV support gained support for VTODO and VJOURNAL resources

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 7

November 23, 2008

This week… 1470 commits, in 149 projects, by 183 happy hackers (and 126 were translation commits).

  • Support for file transfer has been merged in Empathy; it is currently only available for Link-Local XMPP, support for Jabber should now be implemented in telepathy-gabble; Guillaume Desmottes posted about this.
  • gnome-shell is progressing nicely and Owen Taylor gave a status update.
  • f-spot moved from gnome-vfs to gio.
  • Behdad Esfahbod continued his work on vte and its pangocairo backend, he also removed obsolete backends.
  • Josselin Mouette merged Debian patches into esound, which prompted the release of 0.2.41.
  • Rhythmbox can now deal with uninitialized iPods.
  • Benjamin Otte improved the gvfs FTP backend to work with more FTP servers.
  • evolution-mapi, a connector to Microsoft Exchange 2007, gained its own subversion module and has been proposed for 2.26.
  • tracker got its indexer module API GObject oriented, this will allow easier bindings development and more flexible behaviour for modules.
  • Glade gained a new editor for cell renderers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Issue 0

October 5, 2008

This week… 1537 commits, in 172 projects, by 188 happy hackers (and 321 were translation commits).

Gimp 2.6 and Banshee 1.3.2 were released (and activity continued at full pace afterward). Richard Hult cleaned up devhelp code, optimised it at places, and improved the advanced search enough as to get it enabled by default. Evolution continued its switch to LGPL, and memos and tasks in the kill-bonobo branch are now (mostly) working. Murray Cumming cleaned up obsolete documents off developer.gnome.org.

Read the rest of this entry »