Jonathan Blandford

It was really lovely to get back to GUADEC. I loved being around old friends and meeting the new faces within the project. The venue was stellar and I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the talks this year.

For me, my favorite talks were the progressive webapps talk by Phaedrus Leeds, Federico’s meme-filled talk on accessibility, and Rob’s talk about the Endless deployment to Oaxaca, Mexico.

[Note: I hope someone goes back to the youtube videos and adds timestamps / links to all the talks. It would be easier to find and browse  them. ]

On my part, I gave a talk on GNOME Crosswords and participated on a panel on how to get a Job with Free Software. The crosswords talk in particular seemed pretty successful. It had a great article written about it in lwn.net (thanks Jake!), which lead to an increase in bug reports and crossword contributions.

One observation: it felt that attendance was down this year. I don’t know if it was Covid or Mexico, but some combination led to a smaller crowd than usual. I saw that there was a mini-GUADEC in Berlin as well (which I’ll assume was a lagging indicator of the above and not a cause.)

If we continue to have remote GUADECs in the future, I hope we can find a way to do a better way of connecting people across the conferences. One of the real advantages of GUADEC is it is a place for the project to unify and decide on big things collectively, and I’d hate for us to develop schisms in direction. I didn’t feel particularly connected to the folks in Berlin, which is a shame. I’d love to see them again.

Hopefully a few more of us can get together in Riga next year! But if we can’t, I hope we can find better ways to be more inclusive for remote events and individuals.

Crosswords Bof

There was enough interest from the Crosswords talk that we were able to hold an impromptu BoF on Saturday. Seven people showed up to work on various aspects of the game. We tested the existing puzzles, wrote some new puzzles, and added some additional features. Great progress was made towards UTF-8 support for the WordList, and some initial Printing support was coded.

More importantly, we were able to clean up a bunch of small papercuts. We tweaked the colors and controls, and also added acrostic support. The end result is a lot of visual tweaks to the game that improves the playability and appearance.

I took a bunch of these improvements and packaged it up into a new release. It’s now available on Flathub.

Thanks to Rosanna, Neil, Federico, Heather, Jess, Dave, and Caroline for their contributions!

Mexico:

Mexico was lovely as always. I’ve always  wanted to visit Guadalajara, and it definitely met my (already high) expectations. It was a walkable city with lots of hidden spots and surprises in store. I’d love to go back sometime with a bit more time, and really explore it more thoroughly.

It’s time for another GNOME Crosswords release! This time we had a focus on I18N support. I also got patches from another new contributor – Philip – who added some nice improvements, dutch-language support, and a downloader.

New features include:

• A preferences dialog to let you filter puzzle sets by language. This gives us a way to only show puzzles either in your current language or in all languages. It opens the door for puzzle sets and downloaders in different languages.
• Translation support. We have Dutch and Spanish translations now. It would be great to see more languages available for the next release.
• Don’t grab focus when clicking on a clue. This was a small change that had a big impact on playability.
• Copy/Paste support for the grid.
• Undo/Redo support for the game.
• Use the shiny new libadwaita AboutWindow.
• Input now works on MacOS, making it fully playable on that platform.
• Dutch-language crosswords work with the ‘IJ’ cell.

Wait, what’s that last one???

Amazingly enough, it turns out that Dutch crosswords allow an ‘IJ’ digraph in the same cell. This is an interesting twist on the crossword, as you can add an ‘I’ and ‘J’ character independently, as well as together.

To support this, I added a Quirks object that can be used to modify the behavior of the game. Beyond Dutch support, I started adding support for rebus-style crosswords as a second quirk. I imagine having to add more as we add additional language support.

Fortunately, we already supported strings within answers so this wasn’t too hard to implement. However, I’m not 100% sure I got the input controls correct. If you’re a Dutch crossword solver, I’d love to hear from you. I also hooked up the quirks to the help overlay so it only shows the special input mode when you have a puzzle that needs it (or are running it in Dutch).

I also added another extension to the .ipuz implementation to specify the locale of puzzles. We use that to filter puzzles, and add the quirks.

Lessons learned:

I thought I’d write down the things that I got stuck on this cycle in the hopes it saves other people time in the future:

Recoloring SVGs

GtkImage has the really convenient ability to recolor images when the appearance changes from light to dark. As far as I can tell, that functionality isn’t exported, so to use it you have to load the svg as a symbolic icon. Despite the documentation, it’s pretty finicky to get that correct so make sure to read all the documentation carefully. In addition, GtkImage really wants the image to be icon sized. You can override that with gtk_image_set_pixel_size().

Translating keyfiles with meson

We use keyfiles (aka, .desktop files) as a config file format to define the puzzle sets. These config files have user-visible strings added to them them, and then are compiled into a gresource file. This was surprisingly hard to get translated. Some notes:

• xgettext supports –keyword=Keyword and -kKeyword to define custom keywords to translate. Unfortunately, despite being documented otherwise, msgfmt only supports –keyword=Keyword. Don’t use -k.
• Meson doesn’t allow you to pass the language type to xgettext for an arbitrary file. In order to force it to use the correct type, I had to name my config file puzzle.config.desktop.in, and rename it to puzzle.config post-translation.
• There’s no way for meson to have a compile-time dependency on the po files for i18n.merge_file(). In order to test it, I had to remove the translated desktop file in order to force rebuild it after every translation change. Meson 0.64 is supposed to fix this.

What’s next?

• I’m giving a talk at GUADEC! Come hear the details of how this game was built and some interesting facts about crosswords. Sadly, I’m scheduled at the same time as the always-popular gnome shell update, but hopefully a few people will be interested in what I have to say.
• To fully support internationalization, we need to support other languages for the wordlist. There’s an open bug for it. The work here shouldn’t be too hard, but will require a decent amount of work to make sure we’re multi-byte clean.
• And as always, if you are interested in writing and publishing crosswords, let me know!

 

I’m pleased to announce Crosswords 0.3. This is the first version that feels ready for public consumption. Unlike the version I announced five months ago, it is much more robust and has some key new features.

New in this version:

• Available on flathub: After working on it out of the source tree for a long while, I finally got the flatpaks working. Download it and try it out—let me know what you think! I’d really appreciate any sort of feedback, positive or negative.

• Puzzle Downloaders: This is a big addition. We now support external downloaders and puzzle sets. This means it’s possible to have a tool that downloads puzzles from the internet. It also lets us ship sets of puzzles for the user to solve. With a good set of puzzles, we could even host them on gnome.org. These can be distributed externally, or they can be distributed via flatpak extensions (if not installing locally). I wrapped xword-dl and puzzlepull with a downloader to add some newspaper downloaders, and I’m looking to add more original puzzles shortly.

• Dark mode: I thought that this was the neatest feature in GNOME 42. We now support both light and dark mode and honor the system setting. CSS is also heavily used to style the app allowing for future visual modifications and customizations. I’m interested in allowing  css customization on a per-puzzle set basis.

• Hint Button: This is a late addition. It can be used to suggest a random word that fits in the current row. It’s not super convenient, but I also don’t want to make the game too easy! We use Peter Broda’s wordlist as the basis for this.
• .puz support: Internally we use the unencumbered .ipuz format. This is a pretty decent format and supports a wide-variety of crossword features. But there’s a lot of crosswords out there that use the .puz format and a I know people have large collections of puzzles in that format. I wrote a simple convertor to load these.

Next steps

I hope to release this a bit more frequently now that we have gotten to this stage. Next on my immediate list:

• Revisit clue formats; empirically crossword files in the wild play a little fast-and-loose with escaping and formatting (eg. random entities and underline-escaping).
• Write a Puzzle Set manager that will let you decide which downloaders/puzzles to show, as well as launch gnome-software to search for more.
• Document the external Puzzle Set format to allow others to package up games.
• Fix any bugs that are found.

I also plan to work on the Crossword editor and get that ready for a release on flathub. The amazing-looking AdwEntryRow should make parts of the design a lot cleaner.

But, no game is good without being fun! I am looking to expand the list of puzzles available. Let me know if you write crosswords and want to include them in a puzzle set.

Thanks

I couldn’t have gotten this release out without lots of help. In particular:

• Federico, for helping to  refactor the main code and lots of great advice
• Nick, for explaining how to get apps into flathub
• Alexander, for his help with getting toasts working with a new behavior
• Parker, for patiently explaining to me how the world of Crosswords worked
• The folks on #gtk for answering questions and producing an excellent toolkit
• And most importantly Rosanna, for testing everything and for her consistent cheering and support

I gave a talk on the History of GNOME for GUADEC 2017. (Slides are available here, and hopefully the video feed will be posted soon.) It was a great trip down memory lane, and I really enjoyed putting this talk together. I didn’t include my final thoughts in the slide so I thought I’d include them in this post:

1. First, we didn’t appreciate how much work this was  when we started. We have totally beaten win95, but the expectations bar has risen every year
2. We have done a helluvalot of great work, and largely kept pace with expectations. This has been an amazing accomplishment and we should be proud of what we’ve done.
3. The future for GNOME is more important and more promising then it has ever been

• trees: Neat! It looks like google street views has extended all the way to Westford, MA. They even have a picture of my favorite tree.