Just released a new version of Contacts, with the following new features since 0.3…

Overview of Changes in 0.4 (since 0.3)

• Add support for saving and restoring window size on application exit and start up. (bug 240)
• Allow double click in the chooser window if it is single select. (bug 176)
• Use the icon theme for the application icon
• Prevent the search entry selecting text on backspace. (bug 53)
• Fix group editing/management (bug 217)
• New translations: Bulgarian and Danish

Download

I expect Ross will have debian and ubuntu packages within minutes.

It seems the GUADEC Marketing Campaign has got off to a great start. We’ve had some fantastic ideas for posters from Dave Lamb, who seems to have a good talent for marketing. I think posters
seven, eight
and
nine are my favourites so far. We’ve been discussing these on the gnome-uk list, but we should probably move it over to the guadec-list for more input.

We also have about 10 people so far who have volounteered to put posters up in colleges and universities, or talk to their local LUG meetings about it. I’m sure we can do better though, so if you know anyone who has possible contacts, make sure they put their name down to volounteer!

Also, there’s a last chance to enter your talk proposals if you’ve been to busy preparing releases for GNOME 2.18. The call for papers deadline has now been extended to Thursday 15th March.

Michael was over this weekend, and we found some time to have a go at the guadec.org website. Having slightly more experience with Drupal, he managed to explain some of it’s idiosyncrasies to me. We’ve hopefully managed to make the navigation a bit more understandable, and I’ve updated it with the latest news on the GUADEC Marketing Campaign. We also added some information about visas if you’re travelling to the UK.

And don’t forget, tomorrow is the deadline for submitting talk proposals for GUADEC 2007.

YOUR DESKTOP NEEDS YOU!

If YOU want to get involved in THE BIGGEST and THE BEST CONFERENCE in
the GNOME CALENDAR, then help us SPREAD THE WORD about GUADEC and
GNOME!

And now that I have your attention…

One of the goals of Guadec, and especially in bringing it to the UK,
was to raise awareness about the GNOME project. At our last Guadec
planning meeting we were discussing the ways in which we can get more
people involved in Guadec.

One of the easiest ways to get involved is to start promoting Guadec
and the Gnome project at your local LUG or university, or any other
geeky institution. We’d like to see Guadec posters put up in as many
university and collage computer science departments as possible.

So first things first, we need some nice posters that are easily
printable on A4 paper to stick up on notice boards. It would be great
if we could find some artists in the UK to help with this project, so
if you know any artistic people who are interested in free software,
please ask them if they would like to help out!

If you are a collage or university student, or regularly attend your
local lug meetings, SPEAK UP NOW, and place your name on our marketing
campaign wiki page

You might also want to join the gnome-uk mailing list or the guadec-list to join in the discussions.

Just a reminder that the call for papers will close on the 12th March, so you have only 12 days left to get your proposal in!

We are hoping to run a number of workshops and tutorials this year, so we are especially interested in any talks of this nature. If we get enough then one of the opening/closing days could be devoted entirely to workshops and tutorials. And they don’t have to be of interested just to seasoned hackers. We would like to be able to run lots of workshops that aim to help people just getting into GNOME and GTK+ development.

There are just a few gtk+ bugs left now that are preventing the new colour scheme feature of the Theme Manager from working correctly.

• Bug 402131 – Theme color scheme is sometimes ignored on theme switches.

  A really serious bug that means the colour scheme is not reset when the theme changes. This means that changing between two themes that only differ by the colour scheme will mean they have no effect.

• Bug 412596 – Setting the colour scheme property of GtkSettings has no affect.

  This prevents the thumbnails from having the correct colour scheme.

• Bug 409357 – leak in color scheme code

  This doesn’t really stop the colour scheme feature from working, but it would be nice to get fixed before release.

It would be really great if anyone from the gtk+ team could take a look at these and get them fixed.

After much debate on both the desktop developers mailing list, and the control center mailing list, we’ve decided that GNOME 2.18 will ship with the existing menu system as default.

We had hoped that the shell using code from Novell would be ready in time for 2.18, but there are still some serious usability and accessibility problems that need to be addressed.

As such, Denis made the change yesterday to use the menu system by default. However, if you would like to use the control center shell, it can easily be made available by using the Alacarte menu editor to make it visible in your menus.

Rodrigo has just release Control Center 2.17.91, with an impressive list of fixed bugs (it’s even longer than 2.17.90). This is partly due to one Jens Granseuer (aka fizz), who has done amazing work with bugzilla. I have a feeling he is a human patch machine. We are now down to 11 bugs without a response, down from 129 when we had our bug day. Overall, we’ve fixed nearly 100 bugs in the last two months, and nearly 400 have been marked resolved! I’m hoping control-center is going to become nearly as bug-free as the other modules I help maintain.

So, because the change log is so impressive, here it is in full:

gnome-control-center 2.17.91

common:
- Compilation fixes (Kjartan Maraas)
- Fixed localedir defines (Christian Persch) (#395383)
- Use standard installation paths (Christian Persch) (#395383)
- Use capplet name for G_LOG_DOMAIN (Jens Granseuer) (#380991)
- Require GTK+ <= 2.10 (Jens Granseuer) (#358106)

about me:
- Fix build with gcc 2 (Jens Granseuer)
- Fix memory leaks (Jens Granseuer)
- Fix possible crash (Jens Granseuer)

at-properties:
- Fix reference leaks and dont segfault if glade file is not available (Jens Granseuer)

default applications:
- Use specific string as app ID in gnome_program_init (Christian Persch) (#403708)
- Plug memory leaks (Jens Granseuer) (#395212)
- Fix DATADIR define (Jens Granseuer)

keybindings:
- Issue a sensible error message when trying to use unmodified keybindings
  (Jens Granseuer) (#328152)
- Removed leftover call to gnome_theme_init (Jens Granseuer) (#157452)
- Support localised key names (Jens Granseuer) (#145346)
- Clean up sorting to not use an imaginary column (Jens Granseuer)
- Avoid warnings when clearing at exit (Mariano Su�rez-Alvarez) (#405175)
- Added missing GConf key (Mariano Su�rez-Alvarez)

mouse:
- Dont crash if the glade file is not available (Jens Granseuer)

network:
- Plug memory leaks (Jens Granseuer) (#395609)

sound:
- Polypaudio->PulseAudio renaming (Gabor Kelemen) (#394003)
- Added a11y label relations for the devices tab (Patrick Wade) (#369302)

theme switcher:
- Fix compiler warnings (Thomas Wood)
- Fixes on the suffix checks (Alberto Ruiz)
- Pass correct order of arguments to gnome_vfs_xfer (Kjartan Maraas)
- Listen for changes in the gtk-color-scheme property of GtkSettings (Thomas Wood)
  (#405210)

typing break:
- Use specific string as app ID in gnome_program_init (Christian Persch) (#403708)
- Use compositing to display the typing break window when available (Christian
  Persch) (#363665)

ui properties:
- Plug memory leaks (Jens Granseuer)
- Change "Editable menu accelerators" to "Editable menu shortcut keys" as per
  the style guide (Jens Granseuer) (#337624)

windows:
- Plug memory leaks (Jens Granseuer)

fontilus:
- Use GOption argument parsing (Christian Persch) (#393994)
- Fixed some leaks (Christian Persch)

themus:
- Port to GOption (Jens Granseuer) (#336286)

settings daemon:
- Prevent crashes/assertion failures trying to set ridiculously high/low
  volumes (Jens Granseuer) (#401376)
- Fixed property names (Jens Granseuer)
- Dont install the same window filter twice (Jens Granseuer) (#382504)
- Make sure we have a key event before treating it as such (Jens Granseuer)
  (#382503)
- Fixed leaks (Jens Granseuer, Paolo Borelli) (#342672)
- Round volume instead of truncating on umute so a simple mute/unmute doesn't
  lower the volume (Jens Granseuer) (#400966)
- Make the new volume overlay window follow the icon and color themes
  (William Jon McCann) (#403320)
- Eat media player keys if someone is listening on the bus interface already
  (Bastien Nocera) (#394313)
- Revert to the old font path if the new one could not be set (Jens Granseuer)
  (#397504)

shell:
- Prevent capplets from being launched twice (Rodrigo Moya)
- Use correct GConf prefix (Rodrigo Moya)
- Added default common tasks (Rodrigo Moya)
- Respect the exit_on_close flag (Scott Reeves)
- Added a flag controlling display of GenericName's (Scott Reeves)
- Fix typo in usage string (Jens Granseuer) (#398361)
- Respect the --disable-schemas-install configure flag (Christian Persch) (#401004)
- Dump remnants of gstreamer-0.8 (Jens Granseuer)
- Use custom gnomecc.menu instead of settings.menu (Denis Washington) (#402797)
- Dont show Help menu if help is not available (Rodrigo Moya)
- Disable package management/main-menu items in the context menu (Rodrigo Moya)
- Use correct text color when highlighting (Rodney Dawes) (#398079)
- Use smaller icons by default (Scott Reeves) (#405078)
- Use G_GNUC_FUNCTION instead of non-portable __FUNCTION__ (Damien Carbery) (#383022)

updated translations:
- ar (Djihed Afifi)
- be (Ihar Hrachyshka)
- bg (Alexander Shopov)
- ca (Jordi Mas and Josep Puigdemont i Casamaj�)
- cs (Jakub Friedl)
- en_GB (David Lodge)
- et (Priit Laes)
- fr (Marc Lorber, Robert-Andr� Mauchin and St�phane Raimbault
- he (Yair Hershkovitz)
- hu (Gabor Kelemen)
- ja (Takeshi AIHANA)
- ko (Changwoo Ryu)
- mk (Jovan Naumovski)
- nb (Kjartan Maraas)
- pl (Artur Flinta)
- pt_BR (Luiz Fernando S. Armesto)
- ru (Leonid Kanter)
- sv (Daniel Nylander)
- th (Theppitak Karoonboonyanan)

I suppose we’ll have to update our website now.

I just noticed this interesting addition to System Monitor

Although not particularly useful on my system it seems (it hasn’t picked up the hostname or distribution), the banner graphic down the side was what took me by surprise. I would link to the GNOME logo guidelines at this point for suggestions, but live.gnome.org appears to be down again.

Update: Here it is: http://live.gnome.org/BrandGuidelines

Although, I suspect most distributions will just replace this graphic anyway?

Update 2: Corey filed a bug about this now. Looks like there are some quite strong opinions.