Category: GNOME

Guadec 2007 Videos

More videos from Guadec 2007 available.

The new videos are:
[ ] Anne Østergaard – People are our most important asset – Why Organizational or Corporate Culture in FLOSS Organisations Matters.ogg
[ ] Ari Jaaksi – Nokia, maemo, and stuff.ogg

[ ] Geodata standards, GeoClue project.ogg
[ ] James Vasile – Legal Issues and Free Software.ogg
[ ] Jamie McCracken – Tracker and the next generation desktop.ogg
[ ] Jim Krehl – The New Main Menu: An Interactive Alternative to Hierarchy.ogg
[ ] Joe Shaw – Too Many Metas: A 10,000 ft. view on building a metadata desktop.ogg

[ ] Mirco Müller – lowfat, a possible path towards GNOME 3.0_4.0.ogg
[ ] Philippe Normand – Elisa: Media-Center for masses.ogg
[ ] Thomas Vander Stichele – Practical Project Maintenance.ogg
They’re available on either ftp or http:

Code cleanup in default-applications capplet

I’ve just committed a patch to the default-applications capplet that converts it to use GConfPropertyEditor. This removes a lot of duplicated code within default-applications:

$ svn diff -rPREV gnome-da-capplet.c | diffstat
gnome-da-capplet.c | 1029 ++++++++++++++---------------------------------------
1 file changed, 277 insertions(+), 752 deletions(-)


If anyone is currently running gnome-control-center from SVN, I would appreciate any extra testing on the default-applications capplet to ensure than no unexpected behaviour has been introduced.

More GUADEC 2007 Videos

Six more GUADEC videos online, including a video of the lightning talks session. Quite a few of these videos where from the Recital Hall, where the sound quality wasn’t great, but I hope some people find them useful.

[   ] Lightning Talks.ogg
[   ] Zaheer Abbas Merali - GStreamer - more than just playback.ogg 
[   ] William Jon McCann - Building a Modern Multi-User Desktop.ogg                         
[   ] Philip Van Hoof - An E-mail framework for mobile devices.ogg                          
[   ] Lennart Poettering - PulseAudio and GNOME, or: what's coming after EsounD?.ogg
[   ] Bastien Nocera - Bluetooth and GNOME.ogg

[edit: fixed the links]

Applying the GPL to Artwork

As art.gnome.org contact, I often get questions about whether someone can use GNOME some icons in their project. Most of the time I have said please contact the author, but I would like to try and work out an agreed interpretation of the GPL for artwork.

I’ve started a thread on gnome-themes-list, and would be grateful if people (especially any lawyer types) could give any more insight.

New Wallpapers for GNOME 2.24

I was hoping to refresh the set of wallpapers in gnome-backgrounds for GNOME 2.24. Cimi thought this was such an excellent idea, he jumped the gun and set up a contest: http://www.cimitan.com/contest/. I’m not such a big fan of contests, since the “issues” we had with the splash screen contests in the past. However, I think this time we may have hit on a good solution to the past issues.

I want to keep the quality and usability of gnome-backgrounds high, so please do read the style rules if you are thinking of submitting an entry. We’ve had some great submissions so far, but definitely could do with more options!

The runners up will take pride of place on the new art-hub, which will replace art.gnome.org.

History Meme

Desktop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 cd
75 ls
49 svn
45 ssh
37 vim
37 make
13 ./test-notes
11 svn-prepare-ChangeLog.pl
11 ./openmoko-messages
11 ./openmoko-dialer

Laptop:

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
91 vim
53 sh
52 svn
47 cd
40 ls
31 find
21 git
18 ssh
11 su
11 make

OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

I’ve mostly been working on non-ui related components for OpenMoko recently (working on the package management system, opkg and it’s associated packagekit backend), which gave me a chance to step back from the GUI applications and take a look at some of the areas that could be improved. I posted some of my thoughts on the openmoko-devel mailing list (thread here) and got some quite interesting and encouraging responses.

So, I set to work building some patches. Here are some screenshots of progress:

Phone numbers and contact photos in the address book contact list
Phone numbers and contact photos in the address book contact list

"Add to contact" in call log
Currently work in progress, implementing “Add to contact” in call log

I’m also hoping to get a few theme tweaks in as well. Here’s another game of spot-the-difference (hint, not anything in the number display). And it actually does make it look a lot smarter on the device’s small screen.
dialer-orig.png changes to dialer-black.png

I need to find an artist to help me improve the GTK+ theme. Firstly the gradients really need to go because not only do they look ugly with the banding from the 16bit display, they also cause significant performance problems. If anyone wants to help me out, please do drop me an e-mail, or discuss on the openmoko-devel list.

art-hub

Well, since no one stepped up to take over maintaining art.gnome.org, I decided I really needed to sort it out. I keep getting requests such as “why hasn’t my background been approved yet” and “please delete this submission”. So I have a new idea, that hopefully isn’t so high maintenance:

art-hub.png

Hopefully, it will better serve GNOME artists and help encourage people to get involved in GNOME. If you feel like contributing, sources are in GNOME svn: http://svn.gnome.org/svn/art-web/branches/art-hub/

GNOME Suggestions from 2006

At London LinuxWorld in October 2006, we had a stand promoting and discussing the GNOME project with visitors. As part of that stand, we collected ideas from people about what they liked and disliked about GNOME. While doing a spot of spring cleaning, I came across the dozens of post-it notes that people had written their suggestions on. Shame on me for not getting round to typing up the suggestions until now, but it actually makes for even more interesting reading to see what features and bugs have already been fixed.

  1. Browse mode as default
  2. Desktop search
  3. GNOME Evolution – pressing space bar marks messages as “read”. Button to go to next unread message
  4. Good menus
  5. Good integartion, smooth 🙂
  6. GNOME-VFS is too specific 🙁
  7. Software I can use without thinking about it! Love it!
  8. Need IDE with good debugging support
  9. Centralised location for editing application associations
  10. Better thumbnail cache use. e.g. delete thumbs not used for 30 days
  11. Needs to be more geeky
  12. GConf on NFS-homed rollhout (universtity) between Solaris/GNOME
  13. Good – slick system; Bad – missing certain functions
  14. File save expansion sucks 🙁
  15. Tabs in nautilus
  16. GNOME ROS MY SOX
  17. It’s Free!
  18. Make windows codecs easier to use and install. WMVs, DVDs, & co, should be a single install tickbox
  19. Evolution – autosense IMAP/IMAPv4: who the fsck knows what the server is running, or cares?
  20. Make all desktop configuration scriptable
  21. Evolution: please implement “Reply and file” (to specific mailbox)
  22. Memory consumption
  23. Evolution: (Imap) please replicate locally as the tickbox says!
  24. (Love) Gstreamer integartion
  25. Scaling all desktop icons simulatonsusly
  26. (Love) Inkscape
  27. Does everything I need
  28. F-Spot rules
  29. Keyboard navigation in panel menu
  30. I like GNOME because cute guys work on the stand
  31. Configuration of GNOME 🙁
  32. It actually works! Yay!
  33. So simple my 9 year old neice can use it! Keep it simple
  34. It does things my way
  35. Reset option for panel to restart from scratch
  36. Easy to install RPMs via Centros
  37. “Expose” & Just Works
  38. Why can’t I double click top-left corner to close a window (like Win, KDE, CDE, etc)
  39. Tomboy notes are cool!
  40. I (heart) GNOME ‘cos KDE sucxors!
  41. KDE FTW
  42. Extremely user friendly
  43. More examples in developer documentation, e.g. graphics
  44. Windowing is too chunkey, want more elegenat interface
  45. No alarm clock?
  46. Memory footprint. Library precaching
  47. I like how the menus are organised!
  48. I want to sync a Palm Tunsten T5
  49. DVB/T Freeuen card doesn’t work or is not easily configurable in Totem.
  50. File->open new users want a text field to click in before typing a filename

(Personally, I think number 30 is best)