I’ve done the release team duty for the GNOME 3.13.3 release this week. As I often do, I took some screenshots of new things that I’ve noticed while smoketesting.

There is quite a bit of good new stuff in this release, starting with an rewritten and improved Adwaita theme that is now part of GTK+:

Next, I’ve noticed that our sharing infrastructure has become network aware, and lets you change what is shared depending on what network you’re on:

This works not just for media sharing, but for file sharing and screen sharing as well.

At the other side of media sharing, gnome-online-accounts has learned to set up access to the media servers in your local network:

Among the applications, yelp and evince stand out with new, modern looks that fit in very well with the rest of GNOME:

There are more things to discover that I could not capture in a screenshot. For example, I noticed that GNOME shell now remembers which workspace windows where on when you disconnect and reconnect external monitors.

If you want to learn more about GNOME 3.13.3, you can study the release notes (here and here) or you can try it out in Fedora rawhide. Richard has also set up a copr repository for F20.

This is also a good occasion to announce publicly that we are aiming to have GNOME 3.14 in Fedora 21 – it may be a little tight, schedule-wise (the GNOME 3.13.91 beta release happens on Sep 1, a few days after the beta freeze for F21), but we’ve been able to squeeze things in, in the past.

Keeping up with the theme of making life easier for application developers, I decided to take an afternoon off from releasing GNOME 3.13.3, and wrote a little application that shows icons from the icon theme, their symbolic variants, and some extra information from the icon naming spec, such as the icon description, and the context for the icon.

This should make it a little easier to find the right icon to use in your application. gtk3-icon-browser will be available in GTK+ 3.13.4.

This has been a long time coming. We’ve wanted to replace the default GTK+ theme for a very long time.

-#define DEFAULT_THEME_NAME "Raleigh"
+#define DEFAULT_THEME_NAME "Adwaita"

The Raleigh theme that we’ve used as the default until now has some advantages:

• It is very simple
• No dependency on a theme engine (external or internal)
• It does not use a lot of resources

But there is no nice way of putting it: it is very ugly.

This may not  be such a big deal on Linux, where distributions generally have ‘their’ theme, not to mention the many packaged and readily available themes.  So, basically no Linux user ever sees the default GTK+ theme. The situation is very different on other platforms, where GTK+ is often bundled with applications, and it may not be easy to install themes, or get the bundled GTK+ to use them.

For a very long time, we’ve held onto the belief that the theming system is a way to make applications blend smoothly into the platform, and that there should be a native theme for each major platform that GTK+ can run on.

This is a great idea in theory. In practice, it has not worked out so well.  The one platform where we have a native theme is Windows, and even though the ms-windows theme has received much appreciated attention and updates by Руслан Ижбулатов  this cycle, it is still incomplete and has problems with some recent GTK+ features.

(No need to panic though. Even if it is no longer the default, the ms-windows theme will still be available.)

Adwaita on the other hand,  is a very complete theme that has received a lot of attention over the last three years. Not only does it support all recent GTK+ features, many of the CSS improvements that the GTK+ theming machinery has received in the last years were direct responses to the needs of the Adwaita designers.

With Adwaita, GTK+ applications can rely on having a 100% complete theme that will look and feel the same on all supported platforms.  A theme that is constantly receiving a lot of love and attention and keeps up with new GTK+ features.

Another big plus: Adwaita has a high-quality dark variant, which will now also be available everywhere.

So, why not do this switch earlier ? After all, Adwaita has been around for a while.

The main reason is that we did not want to lose the ‘no theme engine’ characteristic of the default theme.  Theme engines, and loadable modules in general, are something we’ve been moving away from for a while now. They are

•  questionable from a security perspective (executable code thats shipped separately, inserted into all your applications)
• associated with search path problems
• require stable APIs for many things that are more or less internal

(No reason to panic, though. Theme engines will not stop working overnight in GTK+ 3.)

The alternative to engines that we want themes to use is CSS. Our CSS implementation has only recently become powerful enough to replace the last features from the Adwaita theme engine  (focus rectangles and menu shadows). That is why we are doing the switch now.

One of consequences of moving Adwaita into GTK+ is that we will no longer ship application-specific theming as part of the theme (many core GNOME applications currently have small amounts of CSS glue inside gnome-themes-standard). Where this is still relevant, applications should just install it themselves. Here is an example for how to do this.

Thanks for the huge amount of recent work on Adwaita go to Jakub Steiner, Lapo Calamandrei, Jon McCann and Cosimo Cecchi.

I’ve first introduced GtkInspector a few weeks ago. Since then, it has made it into the GTK+ 3.13.2 development release and is
now available in Fedora rawhide, which should hopefully make debugging of GTK+ applications in Fedora easier.

I’ve continued to work on the inspector, and it is time to give an update on what it can do now. So far, my focus has been mostly on covering more of GTK+’s features at a basic level, and so much on adding sophisticated debugging support. That will probably change over time.

In unsorted order, here are some of the recent additions:

We show a warning dialog now when the inspector window is opened with a keyboard shortcut. This is meant as a safety net for users who may end up here by accident when they mistype an application shortcut. We don’t want them to get scared by the inspector, so we offer them a quick way out.

The warning dialog can be turned off permanently with a setting, so frequent users of the inspector can avoid it.

When using the mouse to pick a widget, we now lower the inspector window, so it doesn’t get in the way.

This tab shows all the embedded resources in the application (as well as in used libraries). This is perhaps not such a great debugging feature, but still useful information. We show the type and size of the resources, and display e.g. images as such.

Editing of properties has been changed from a cell renderer to popovers. Popovers let us use much more room so that we can e.g. embed a font chooser to edit font properties.

Some other properties have gotten their own editors. Here, we are editing a cell renderer property that is mapped to a tree model column. The editor allows to change the attribute mapping, and the Properties button lets us jump to the tree model in question, where it will open the Data tab:

It can be useful to see the data in the tree model, to verify that we have used the right column in the attribute mapping.

Another custom property editor has been added for action names. The Properties button lets us jump to the Actions tab of the widget where the action is defined:

Actions can be activated from here. For stateful actions, we also allow to set their state:

One feature I am proud of is that when gesture support was merged in GTK+ a few weeks ago, the branch already came with GtkInspector support for gestures.

I hope that this can become a model for the future, and we can make ‘GtkInspector support’ an expected deliverable for every new GTK+ feature, just like accessibility or internationalization are now.

Last, not least, the inspector is very useful in sorting out theme questions – the GNOME designers have used it quite a bit while doing a major refactoring of the Adwaita theme that will land soon.

Of course, one can also use it for more silly things, like figuring out how to do translucent headers:

I’m very interested in hearing both success stories of GtkInspector helping to solve problems and gaps where GtkInspector is lacking functionality.