So many things…

So, I haven’t blogged since before GUADEC, and what a lot of things have happened!

Guadec itself was excellent. It was great to meet so many new people, but also catch up with old friends. The most frightening thing for me is having to do it all over again next year, but instead from the organisers perspective. It’s going to be in Birmingham, UK. If you’d like to get involved then you can either contact me, or get on the gnome-uk mailing list.

LugRadio Live was last weekend, and again it was a chance to meet new people and old friends. I hadn’t been before, but I was organising the GNOME stand. I’m never quite sure what the stands should aim to do, and what we as a project get out of it. We had a few laptops, but it was a pretty relaxed atmosphere and we didn’t have anyone tied to the stand. We have LinuxWorld in London coming up soon, and I’d like to know of any volunteers who might be available to help out. Again, the mailing list is probably the best port of call if you’re interested.

On the software front…

There have been several releases in our development series of gtk-engines. We have now made excellent progress towards our goal of converting all the theme engines to use cairo. This includes a new engine (Glide) to eventually replace Smooth, and also the new-look Crux engine (work in progress) courtesy of myself (coding) and Lapo Callemandri (mockup).

I’ve also been hacking on gnome-themes. We had a little informal meeting at Guadec about it, and decided to chuck most of the old and ugly themes away. If there is demand, then I will run off a tarball that contains the old themes so that you can still install them. The themes that are left are Clearlooks, Crux, Mist and Glider, as well as the accessibility themes. As I mentioned, Crux is getting a revamp, including new icons, and Mist is also going to get some updated icons (although they’re not available just yet).

Unfortunately, I haven’t had time in between all this to revamp the theme manager. There have been a few improvements of note, such as it’s now easier to install a theme, and you can save the current background when you save a custom theme. The main problem with the theme manager at the moment is that the UI just doesn’t scale very well. With any luck, I’m going to take a fresh look at it for 2.18.