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 81

April 25, 2010

This week… 1978 commits, in 233 projects, by 242 happy hackers (and 492 were translation commits).

  • Support for animated images (GNOME bug 335093) and scaling of SVG images (GNOME bug 108435) have been added to eog.
  • Many patches from Quentin Sculo have been applied to perl-Gtk2, bringing support for new widgets and methods the GTK+ Perl binding.
  • Much work continued to happen with regards to gsettings, Matthias Clasen for example added gsettings-tools, a command line tool equivalent to gconftool. (GNOME bug 616313)
  • Ignacio Casal Quinteiro created a gsettings branch to hold the port of gedit to GSettings.
  • In the same vein, Bastien Nocera ported gnome-bluetooth, and Milan Bouchet-Valat ported gnome-system-tools, and Shaun McCance ported yelp.
  • Ray Strode added a smartcard plugin to gnome-settings-daemon, it listens for smartcard insertion and removal events and then locks the screen or forces a log out (depending on gconf) when the card used for login is removed.
  • Lucien Langa added correct handling of the RSS media extension to evolution-rss, making it possible to download enclosures.
  • Łukasz Jernaś started writing the Giggle documentation using Mallard.
  • Jean Brefort implemented graph only sheets into Gnumeric. (GNOME bug 158170)

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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 77

March 28, 2010

This week… 3046 commits, in 229 projects, by 308 happy hackers (and 1235 were translation commits).

  • Another big week for translators, German, Bulgarian, Portuguese and Solvenian are now totally translated, 33 teams are over the 90% bar, and 55 over the 70% bar. This week award goes to the Asturian, progressing by over 4 points.
  • XChat-GNOME got a fullscreen mode. (GNOME bug 445638)
  • Glade has been switched to use the new GtkToolPalette widget, instead of a custom widget (GNOME bug 613956); Tristan Van Berkom wrote about it in The Glade palette goes full circle.
  • Ryan Lortie merged the GVariant parser into glib. (GNOME bug 600271)
  • The font plugin of gnome-settings-daemon has been disabled. (GNOME bug 613604)
  • GNOME Shell has been updated so that ejecting drives will run the same action as in Nautilus. (GNOME bug 613405)
  • Jiří Techet changed libchamplain so it cancels the download of tiles that get out of the viewport.
  • Vivien Malerba added support for variables in GdaBrowser data manager.
  • Support for GObject Introspection has been added to gtk-vnc, as well as a sample javascript demo program.

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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 64

December 27, 2009

This week… 1152 commits, in 137 projects, by 191 happy hackers (and 128 were translation commits).

  • Thanks to a patch by Philip Chimento gtk-doc got a much improved support for parsing unions. (GNOME bug 165425)
  • Francisco Rojas added tag autocompletion to Postr. (GNOME bug 507242)
  • Support for BibTeX syntax highlighting has bee pushed to gtksourceview. (GNOME bug 605071)
  • Takao Fujiwara updated gdm to reload the i18n file automatically. (GNOME bug 599263)
  • Sergey V. Udaltsov updated the gnome-settings-daemon keyboard plugin to use the new GkbdStatus status icon.
  • The GNOME Color Manager gained an experimental user-calibrate wizard, which the user can use when there is no calibration hardward available.
  • Maxim Ermilov added JavaScript support to Anjuta, debugger, symbols et al.
  • Empathy has been updated with support for inviting to multi user chats.
  • The IM status plugin of Rhythmbox got support for Pidgin, a contribution by Mohamad Elrashidin Sajeli. (GNOME bug 605023)
  • Xan Lopez brought back window.close() to Epiphany.

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Issue 60

November 29, 2009

This week… 1770 commits, in 169 projects, by 229 happy hackers (and 274 were translation commits).

  • The GtkToolPalette widget, which provides a tool palette with categories, has been merged into gtk+ (GNOME bug 567729).
  • Ke Wang added D-Bus support to the Java ATK wrapper, so it can work with the new AT-SPI
  • Thorsten Sick added complete documentation to many of the (lib)seahorse files, and seahorse-plugins migrated from libglade to GtkBuilder.
  • Federico Mena Quintero added handling of the XF86RotateWindows hotkey to gnome-settings-daemon, to rotate a laptop display; this is for tablets that have a “rotate the screen” hotkey. It finds the laptop’s built-in video output and rotate it to the next available rotation.
  • Colin Walters ported GNOME Shell “AppWell” and panel to CSS. (GNOME bug 602131).
  • Anjuta and Brasero both moved code to use the GtkInfoBar widget introduced in GTK+ 2.18.
  • The way message parsing and escaping is handled in Empathy has been reworked to handle more cases of URL and smileys replacements.
  • The one-canvas branch of the GNOME Icon Theme has been merged to master, many impressive icons in there! (unfortunately it still needs a proper build system, see GNOME bug 602988)
  • Alexander Larsson commited GConverter to glib master, it is a generic interface for stateful conversions of data, it is a generic interface suitable for things like IConv, compression, decompression and regexp replacement. He posted to gtk-devel-list about it: GConverted commited.
  • Totem gained support for playing DVDs from images, it now shows mounted archives in the Movie menu.
  • David Zeuthen cleaned up the user interface of the SMART dialog of gnome-disk-utility. screenshot of cleaned up UI.
  • And Gian Mario Tagliaretti wrapped the API added in GIO 2.22 in pygobject.

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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 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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