Catching up
The last couple of months have been particularly busy:
- A few more releases down the road, the portal permissions support in Flatseal has finally matured. I took the opportunity to fix a crash in Flatpak’s permission store and to complete its permissions API, to pave the way for existing and future Flatseal-like front ends.
- I took a short break to take care of my twenty five Sugar applications. Released a new version of the BaseApp, and updated every application to the latest upstream release and GNOME runtime.
- On a personal note, I have been mentoring some brilliant interns at work, which is a refreshing experience after so many months of lockdown due to COVID.
What’s new in Portfolio?
On the visuals department, this new release brings a refreshed icon by @jimmac, which looks fantastic and takes it closer to the modern art style in GNOME.
Regarding features, well, there’s quite a lot. The most noticeable one is the Trash folder.
One of my goals for Portfolio is that, for the little it does, it should just work™. It shouldn’t matter what the users environment might be or how it’s being distributed. This imposes some technical challenges and, I imagine, is one of the reasons why a few file managers available on Flathub don’t provide feature parity with their non-flatpak versions.
Because of this, I prototyped different Trash folder implementations. Initially, I went for the right way™ and simply relied on the gvfsd. Sadly, there were a few issues with the sandbox interaction that prevented me from fulfilling my goal. Therefore, I stuck to my own implementation of freedesktop’s Trash spec. I must admit though, that I really enjoy reading these specs for Portfolio.
But there’s more!
A common issue among users, of the Flatpak version, is that they can’t see the real root directory. This is understandably confusing. Therefore, Portfolio now includes a Host device shortcut, as a best-effort attempt to mitigate this.
If you have been using Portfolio on devices with slow storage, you have probably seen that loading screen a few times when opening folders. I will eventually get around to something more elaborated but, for the time being, I reduced these load times with a bit of cache.
Among other improvements, there are now proper notifications when removing devices, filtering and sorting options will persist between sessions, and the files view will restore its scroll position to the previous directory when navigating back.
As for the bugs, kudos to @craftyguy for fixing a couple ones that prevented Portfolio to run on Postmarket OS.
Last but never least! Thanks to @lqs01, @AsciiWolf, @eson57, @Vistaus, @rffontenelle and @cho2 for helping me with translations.
