Category: GNOME

The display settings for GNOME hasn’t seen a major change since before 3.0, so with the design help of Allan Day, I had the chance to completely update the interface for 3.10. The interface now follows the new visual style of the other settings panels and simplifies tasks such as setting the primary display. It also includes simpler and clearer display indicators. Full details of the redesign, including the mockups, are available on the wiki page. Not everything is complete yet; “presentation mode” needs some additional support from the windowing system before it can be implemented. However, Wayland support is now available thanks to Giovanni Campagna’s work on Mutter and gnome-desktop, which also includes a new confirmation dialog provided by gnome-shell.

One of the new features I was able to contribute to GNOME 3.8 was the sharing settings panel.

The goal of this panel is to provide the user with a way to control what is shared over the network. The sharing services are provided by various existing projects, including Vino, Rygel and gnome-user-share. If any of the services are not installed, the relevant settings are not displayed. The panel also allows the user to configure various options for the services.

More details about the design of the panel are on the wiki page.

New releases of Media Explorer and Mx are now available. Mx and Media Explorer both have improved compatibility with Clutter 1.9 and Media Explorer has had many bug fixes and a few new enhancements, including category filters in the Video listings and an improved Music listing view.

I’ve recently been working on a new background chooser for GNOME, which supports multiple “sources” of backgrounds. Today I used libsocialweb to integrate support for browsing the user’s photostream from flickr.

The UI is still a work in progress, I’m hoping to land it before the feature freeze at the end of the week.

I’ll also be at Guadec this week, but only for the 28th and 29th. See you there!

For the new Control Center in GNOME 3.0 (or System Settings, as it will be known), I’ve been working on a settings panel to allow people to set their timezone, date and time. This means there is a new date and time mechanism dbus service provided by gnome-settings-dameon, and a new UI to configure it with. The latest UI is available in gnome-control-center git and looks something like this:

It still needs a lot of testing and I’d also like to add support for using NTP services, although finding a method of applying this for different distributions will probably be tricky.

Mx is a widget toolkit using Clutter that provides a set of standard interface elements, including buttons, progress bars, scroll bars and others. It also provides useful interfaces and utilities, such as Clipboard and Icon Theme support. Styling is achieved using a CSS style configuration file. It is used to implement the user experience shell in MeeGo Netbook.

• This is the first release in the unstable development series.
• As this is a development release, it should not be used in production environments.
• Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Mx.

Some of the new features include some visual changes:

Shadows in MxEntry and MxScrollView:

New MxModalFrame for a window modal container, which darkens and blurs the window:

News

Changes since 1.0.0:

• Updated documentation
• Fix compilation with recent versions of GTK+
• Require GTK+ 2.20
• MxWidget: Move padding into the correct struct
• Reduce the libtool version age to indicate ABI change
• Fix GtkLightSwitch size and remove labels
• Focusable: don’t accept focus on hidden actors
• Allow spacing to be set from CSS in MxTable and MxBoxLayout
• MxOffScreen: Add “redirect-enabled” property
• MxOffScreen: Add accumulation buffer capability
• MxOffScreen: Provide an accessor to the fbo
• BoxLayout: add “scroll-to-focused” property
• Add MxSettings and support for reading xsettings
• Use CoglSubtexture rather than internal subtexture implementation
• ScrollView: add shadows to the inside of a scrollview when scrolling
• Viewport: respect fill, alignment and padding properties
• Window: respect ClutterStage:user-resizable property
• Improvements to MxIconTheme
• Support pixel (px) and point (pt) font size values in CSS
• MxModalFrame: new widget to implement modal dialogs

Updated Translations:

• Turkish (Ahmet Özgür Erdemli)
• Asturian (astur)

Many thanks to:

• Chris Lord
• Neil Roberts
• Thomas Wood
• iain

Sources

Sources are available from clutter-project.org:

http://source.clutter-project.org/sources/mx/1.1/

or from git:

http://git.clutter-project.org/mx/

git clone git://git.clutter-project.org/mx.git

Documentation

Documentation for the unstable branch of Mx is currently available at:

http://docs.clutter-project.org/docs/mx/unstable/

Bugzilla

Issues and feature requests should be filed in bugzilla:

http://bugzilla.clutter-project.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=mx

Jon McCann was recently working with the accessibility folks to come up with a new design for accessibility settings in GNOME 3.0. The results of the discussions are linked to on the Settings/Universal Access wiki page.

To help clean up some of the current settings panels, I have been implementing the mockup that Jon worked on. The current state is available in the latest Gnome unstable release, which is available in Rawhide for people running Fedora. Unfortunately Ubuntu have decided not to ship development packages of this Gnome release for people to test, so here are some screenshots of what is available so far:

Some features will need integration with the new Gnome Shell, and these are “grayed out” for now. Clearly there is some work to be done to make sure it conforms to the new Human Interface Guidelines and generally looks visually appealing. Unfortunately, there isn’t a large team of people working on Control Center right now, so it would be great if anyone can help out testing, fixing and improving! If you think you may be able to help out, the best way to get in touch is to pop in to the #control-center channel of irc.gnome.org. If you feel like diving straight in, the UI file for Universal Access is here. Send any changes back to the mail list or pop by IRC!