This Week in GNOME

Sudoku by Sepehr Rasouli was accepted into Circle! It’s what it says on the tin: A dead-simple, polished GNOME app for playing Sudoku. Congratulations 🥳

Tobias Bernard reports

Gradia by Alexander Vanhee was accepted into Circle ✨️

Edit and annotate screenshots, draw on them, add a background, and share them with the world.

https://apps.gnome.org/Gradia

Third Party Projects

Anton Isaiev says

RustConn 0.9.3 is out!

This release cycle was all about closing the gap between “it works” and “it works exactly how you’d expect.” I successfully closed every single open issue and feature request from this period, delivering major quality-of-life and security upgrades for anyone who lives in a terminal.

Highlights from this release:

Agentless Remote Monitoring: A MobaXterm-style bar now sits below your SSH, Telnet, and Kubernetes terminals, parsing /proc/* over the existing session to show live CPU, memory, disk, and network stats.

Lightning-Fast Navigation: A new Command Palette (Ctrl+P) brings VS Code-style fuzzy searching for connections, tags, and commands. I also added full support for Custom Keybindings, letting you remap 30+ actions.

Visual Organization: Tame massive connection lists with pinned Favorites, custom GTK icons or emojis, and protocol-colored tabs with group indicators (e.g., “Production” or “Staging”).

Modernized UI: Eight dialogs were migrated to modern adw::Dialog with adaptive sizing, and I’ve added screen reader support to password and connection dialogs.

Rock-Solid Security: A massive backend overhaul! Stored credentials now use AES-256-GCM with Argon2id, and the entire codebase was migrated to SecretString to prevent memory leaks. I also added full support for SSH port forwarding (-L, -R, -D).

pass Backend: A huge shoutout to community member @h3nnes for contributing a pass (passwordstore.org) backend with full GUI and CLI support!

Under the Hood: Migrated to the Rust 2024 edition, added smart protocol fallbacks for RDP/VNC to gracefully handle negotiation failures, and reached 100% translation coverage across 15 languages.

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Haydn Trowell says

Typesetter, the minimalist, local-first Typst editor, gets some quality of life updates with version 0.11.0:

New app icon

The preview now automatically sizes itself to fit the window and your display without needing a manual PPI setting

Invert lightness option for the preview when using dark mode

The ability to simulate different forms of color blindness in the preview to test document accessibility

Performance improvements, including reduced memory usage

Install via Flathub (https://flathub.org/apps/net.trowell.typesetter)

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

oo7-daemon, the server side of the Secret Service provider, has received a new release featuring KDE support. Making it compatible with both GNOME and KDE.

GNOME Websites

federico announces

The Code of Conduct page is now generated from the original sources with a beautiful stylesheet. Thanks for Bart for the web app and the design team for the updated look!

Shell Extensions

storageb reports

Build your own custom menu for the GNOME top bar!

Custom Command Menu is a GNOME extension that lets you build a custom menu to run commands directly from the top bar. Launch apps, run scripts, execute shell commands, and more through a simple, intuitive interface.

Version 13 introduces support for submenu creation, increases the maximum number of entries allowed, and adds compatibility with GNOME 50. This release also includes additional translations for Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, and Polish.

More information can be found on the project’s GitHub page.

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) reports

As a cost-saving measure, git traffic like git clone https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/<repo> is now redirected to our mirror under https://github.com/GNOME/<repo>.

Last week the long unmaintained support for Google Drive in gvfs was dropped. If you ever needed motivation to switch to a more privacy-respecting cloud provider, now is as good a time as any.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#237 Article Rendering

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 13 to February 20.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

I released Newsflash 5.0-beta1 to the beta channel of flathub. The headlining feature is a new native article view rendering everything with the help of Gtk. This also made it possible to overhaul everything media related (images, videos and audio). It should now closer resemble what can be found in fractal or tuba.

Jan Lukas reports

In related news: Newsflash now has a brother. The core newsflash library was used to create a TUI application by Christopher Auer. So if you like what Newsflash has to offer but prefer to stay in the terminal, check out eilmeldung: https://github.com/christo-auer/eilmeldung

Third Party Projects

Diego Povliuk announces

Cine, the video player, got some quality of life updates on version 1.0.9:

The volume is now always restored on startup

Icon indicators for mute and subtitles on/off

Toggle elapsed/remaining time

Option to add folder to playlist

Unmute when changing volume

Hold click to double playback speed

Install via Flathub

ranfdev announces

Lobjur has just received a big update!

It now works as a client for multiple link aggregators: Lobsters and Hacker News.

An integrated WebView has been added

The UI has been improved, with a new split layout

The comments are now displayed with complex formatting, converting HTML tags to GTK widgets

Check it out on Flathub

Anton Isaiev announces

I’ve released RustConn 0.8.9, a major update driven largely by user feedback and feature requests. This version expands protocol support, security and refines the user experience.

Key highlights:

New Protocols: Added full Kubernetes support (shell access/exec), Serial Console (via picocom), and SFTP integration (via URI or Midnight Commander).

Virtualization: Added support for importing Virt-Viewer (.vv) files (Proxmox/oVirt) and SPICE proxy tunneling.

Connectivity & Security: Added FIDO2/Security Key support for SSH, Wake on LAN (WoL) GUI, and improved RDP rendering on HiDPI displays.

UX & i18n: Added Regex-capable terminal search and translations for 14 languages (including UK, DE, FR, IT, PL).

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.53 is out:

Phosh’s overview now shows a splash for launching apps and the Polkit dialog has more user details. The on-screen keyboard scales better in landscape and adds new completion dictionaries. The Wayland compositor phoc got initial support for the xx-cutout-v1 Wayland protocol to inform clients about notches and display cutouts.

There’s more — see the full details here.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic is at V2026.2.4 this week with new features and many bug fixes!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added a search bar for subtitles in the add download dialog

Added the ability to specify extra yt-dlp arguments for the discovery process

Added the ability to specify extra yt-dlp arguments for the download process

Fixed an issue where pausing and resuming downloads did not work correctly

Fixed an issue where video passwords were not working when specified

Fixed an issue where yt-dlp progress was not always displayed correctly

Fixed an issue where instagram stories did not download correctly

Fixed an issue where the encoder field was not properly cleared on FLAC files when remove source data was enabled

Fixed an issue where Parabolic would not detect translation languages correctly

Fixed an issue where Parabolic would use a previous save folder even if it no longer existed

Fixed an issue where downloaded yt-dlp version were not getting executable permissions on Linux

Fixed an issue where Parabolic wouldn’t open on Linux

Fixed an issue where playlist video downloads may not have had sound on Windows

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb says

I’ve released GNOME Crosswords 0.3.17. This is a strong release, featuring both a new interface for the game and multiple features for the editor. Read the announcement here.

Crosswords

The game got a full UI refresh in preparation for GNOME Circle.

The game sports a new layout and design, including a sidebar for easier navigation

The welcome screen was cleaned up

A hints dialog was added to help players learn game controls

Fullscreen support was redone

Sorting and filtering was added to puzzle pickers

We improved the adaptive functionality and accent color support

Many polishing touches and bug fixes

Crosswords Editor

The editor also got some quality of life improvements as a result of user testing.

The new puzzle dialog got a complete overhaul, including the addition of almost a thousand additional templates

This dialog also gained a theme word editor to preset crossword themes before grid creation.

A new wordplay indicator dialog was added to help write cryptic clues

Printing support was added, so the final product can be printed.

Many polishing touches and bug fixes

Finally, a request for TWIG readers. GNOME Crosswords could really benefit from improved artwork, and we’ve reached the limits of my Inkscape skills. If you’d like to get involved with artwork for GNOME, this could be a great place to begin. Drop me a line if you’re interested!

Shell Extensions

Miklós Zsitva says

Matrix Status Monitor v5

Matrix Status Monitor v5 has been released, focusing on deeper desktop integration and security awareness.

New features include:

End-to-End Encryption Indicators: Encrypted rooms now feature a lock icon in the room list for immediate security verification.

Selectable Matrix Clients: Users can now toggle between Element and Fractal in the preferences. The extension handles URI dispatching to ensure the correct application is launched.

Settings UI Update: A refined preference window for easier API configuration and client selection.

Performance: Optimized asynchronous /sync calls using Libsoup3 to minimize impact on Shell performance.

Extension Link: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/9328/matrix-status-monitor/ Source Code: https://github.com/nurefexc/matrix-status

The extensions porting guide for GNOME Shell 50 has been released and we are now accepting version 50 packages on EGO.

Miscellaneous

GNOME OS ↗

The GNOME operating system, development and testing platform

For a few months now, the gnome-build-meta repository - home of GNOME OS and the GNOME flatpak runtime - has been generating and publishing debug tarballs to our new debuginfod server. This week, Jordan added the final bits of configuration needed to use this infrastructure.

As a result, debugging tools (like gdb) running in GNOME OS and the upcoming version 50 release of the GNOME flatpak SDK can dynamically fetch the debug symbols they need at that moment, no longer requiring developers to download and update large debug extensions on their system for debugging.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

A new GNOME Foundation update post is available this week, covering highlights from the past two weeks. Notable items include the LAS 2026 announcement and a report from the latest Board of Directors meeting.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#236 New Library

Fri, 13 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 06 to February 13.

Third Party Projects

This week, the Bazaar app store received two major new features. The first is the new Library page, which combines the Installed page, Update dialog, and Transaction sidebar into a single view. It should make managing installed apps much more intuitive.

The second feature is support for user scope Flatpaks. Flatpaks installed in user scope are now listed in the Installed Apps list, where you can view or uninstall them just like other apps. Installing new user-scope Flatpaks is still not possible in the Flatpak version of the app due to an unresolved issue.

Install the app via Flathub

Arnis (kem-a) reports

AppManager v3.2.0 just got released

AppManager is a GTK/Libadwaita developed desktop utility in Vala that makes installing and uninstalling AppImages on Linux desktop painless. It supports both SquashFS and DwarFS AppImage formats, features a seamless background auto-update process, and leverages zsync delta updates for efficient bandwidth usage. Double-click any .AppImage to open a macOS-style drag-and-drop window, just drag to install and AppManager will move the app, wire up desktop entries, and copy icons.

Since last week release many suggestions and feature requests where implemented and bugs fixed. Here are some changes highlights:

Now app runs on any Linux, yes that’s right, even as old as Debian Bookworm or Bullseye and of course Ubuntu LTS. Big thanks to AppImage community devs who made it possible

Added grid view in app list

GitHub token support to significantly increase update requests

and many more …

Hit your in-app update button or Get it on Github

Anton Isaiev reports

I’d like to introduce RustConn, a modern connection manager for Linux with a GTK4/Wayland-native interface. Manage SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, Telnet, and Zero Trust connections from a single application. All core protocols use embedded Rust implementations — no external dependencies required. Supports import from Remmina, Asbru-CM, SSH config, Ansible, Royal TS, and MobaXterm. Credentials are stored securely via KeePassXC, GNOME Keyring, Bitwarden CLI, or 1Password CLI. Available on Flathub, Snap, AppImage, and OBS (deb/rpm).

https://github.com/totoshko88/RustConn https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.totoshko88.RustConn

bjawebos reports

Version 0.2.1 of Filmbook was released this week. This app helps you see which film you have loaded into which camera. That means you can concentrate fully on taking photos. The view of your exposed films has been optimised and Nido has contributed a new icon. I was particularly pleased about that. You can install Filmbook via Flathub: https://flathub.org/de/apps/page.codeberg.bjawebos.Filmbook

Shell Extensions

Anton Isaiev says

I released two GNOME Shell extensions:

Browser Switcher — one-click default browser switching from the GNOME Shell panel. Auto-detects installed browsers, zero configuration, fully async. Useful when you need separate browsers for work and personal SSO. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8836/browser-switcher/ https://github.com/totoshko88/browser-switcher

gp-gnome — GlobalProtect VPN integration for GNOME Shell. System tray indicator with connect/disconnect, MFA support, gateway selection, real-time status monitoring, and HIP resubmission. Designed for the official Palo Alto Networks Linux CLI (PanGPLinux). https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8899/gp-gnome/ https://github.com/totoshko88/gp-gnome

Miscellaneous

GNOME OS ↗

The GNOME operating system, development and testing platform

Valentin also created an extension for patented codecs that can not be shipped with the base system. With the extension enabled, the system video player can play formats that it couldn’t before (like mp4/h264) while nautilus will show thumbnails for those files. It also enables hardware-acceleration on screen recordings with gnome-shell.

Enable the feature by running:
updatectl enable codecs-extra --now

Valentin changed the way we handle system configuration in /etc, moving it to systemd-confext. This makes the configuration less fragile and easier to update - a huge improvement to the atomicity of GNOME OS and an important step towards our goal of a stable system everyone can use.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#235 Integrating Fonts

Fri, 06 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 30 to February 06.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

The GTK developers published the report for the 2026 GTK hackfest on their development blog. Lots of work and plans for the next 12 months:

session save/restore

toolchain requirements

accessibility

project maintenance

and more!

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie (she/her) reports

Glycin 2.1.beta has been released. Starting with this version, the JPEG 2000 image format is supported by default. This was made possible by a new JPEG 2000 implementation that is completely written in safe Rust.

While this image format isn’t in widespread use for images directly, many PDFs contain JPEG 2000 images since PDF 1.5 and PDF/A-2 support embedded JPEG 2000 images. Therefore, images extracted from PDFs, frequently have the JPEG 2000 format.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Resources ↗

Keep an eye on system resources

nokyan says

This week marks the release of Resources 1.10 with support for new hardware, software and improvements all around! Here are some highlights:

Added support for AMD NPUs using the amdxdna driver

Improved accessibility for screen reader users and keyboard users

Vastly improved app detection

Significantly cut down CPU usage

Searching for multiple process names at once is now possible using the “|” operator in the search field

In-depth release notes can be found on GitHub.

Resources is available on Flathub.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

I’ve added another chapter for the gtk4-rs book. It describes how to use gettext to make your app available in other languages: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/i18n.html

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan announces

This week I released Sitra, an app to install and manage fonts from google fonts. It also helps devs integrate fonts into their projects using fontsource npm and CDN.

The app is a replacement to the Font Downloader app which has been abandoned for a while.

Sitra can be downloaded from flathub

Arnis (kem-a) announces

AppManager is a GTK/Libadwaita developed desktop utility in Vala that makes installing and uninstalling AppImages on Linux desktop painless. It supports both SquashFS and DwarFS AppImage formats, features a seamless background auto-update process, and leverages zsync delta updates for efficient bandwidth usage. Double-click any .AppImage to open a macOS-style drag-and-drop window, just drag to install and AppManager will move the app, wire up desktop entries, and copy icons.

And of course, it’s available as AppImage. Get it on Github

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2026.2.0 is here!

This release contains a complete overhaul of the downloading engine as it was rewritten from C++ to C#. This will provide us with more stable performance and faster iteration of highly requested features (see the long list below!!). The UIs for both Windows and Linux were also ported to C# and got a face lift, providing a smoother and more beautiful downloading experience.

Besides the rewrite, this release also contains many new features (including quality and subtitle options for playlists - finally!) and plenty of bug fixes with an updated yt-dlp.

Here’s the full changelog:

Parabolic has been rewritten in C# from C++

Added arm64 support for Windows

Added support for playlist quality options

Added support for playlist subtitle options

Added support for reversing the download order of a playlist

Added support for remembering the previous Download Immediately selection in the add download dialog

Added support for showing yt-dlp’s sleeping pauses within download rows

Added support for enabling nightly yt-dlp updates within Parabolic

Redesigned both platform application designs for a faster and smoother download experience

Removed documentation pages as Parabolic shows in-app documentation when needed

Fixed an issue where translator-credits were not properly displayed

Fixed an issue where Parabolic crashed when adding large amounts of downloads from a playlist

Fixed an issue where Parabolic crashed when validating certain URLs

Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to keyring errors

Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to VC errors

Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to version errors

Fixed an issue where opening the about dialog would freeze Parabolic for a few seconds

Updated bundled yt-dlp

Shell Extensions

subz69 reports

I just released Pigeon Email Notifier, a new GNOME Shell extension for Gmail and Microsoft email notifications using GNOME Online Accounts. Supports priority-only mode, persistent and sound notifications.

Miscellaneous

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.55.3 has been released. It’s the third development release (it’s not available on PyPI) in the current GNOME release cycle.

The main achievements for this development cycle, leading up to GNOME 50, are:

Support for do_dispose and do_constructed methods in Python classes. do_constructed is called after an object has been constructed (as a post-init method), and do_dispose is called when a GObject is disposed.

Removal of duplicate marshalling code for fields, properties, constants, and signal closures.

Removal of old code, most notable pygtkcompat and wrappers for Glib.OptionContext/OptionGroup.

Under the hood toggle references have been replaced by normal references, and PyGObject sinks “floating” objects by default.

Notable changes include for this release include:

Type annotations to Glib and GObject overrides. This makes it easier for pygobject-stubs to generate type hints.

Updates to the asyncio support.

A special thanks to Jamie Gravendeel, Laura Kramolis, and K.G. Hammarlund for test-driving the unstable versions.

All changes can be found in the Changelog.

This release can be downloaded from Gitlab and the GNOME download server.If you use PyGObject in your project, please give it a spin and see if everything works as expected.⁦

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#234 Annotated Documents

Fri, 30 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 23 to January 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Document Viewer (Papers) ↗

View, search or annotate documents in many different formats.

lbaudin announces

Papers can now be used to draw freehand annotations on PDF documents (ink), as well as add text to them! These features were merged this week and are now available in GNOME nightly, more details in this blog post.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

As usual, a few GTK developers are meeting up before FOSDEM for the planning hackfest; we are discussing the current state of the project, and also where do we want to go in the next 6-12 months:

the new SVG rendering code

accessibility

icons and other assets

platform support, especially Windows and Android

various improvements in the GLib code

the state of various dependencies, like gdk-pixbuf and accesskit

whether to introduce unstable API as an opt in for experimentation, before finalising it

You can follow along the agenda, and the notes here: https://pad.gnome.org/gtk-hackfest-2026

We are also going to be at the GNOME social event on Saturday in Brussels, so make sure to join us!

Matthias just released a new GTK 4.21 developers snapshot, in time for GNOME 50’s beta release. This release brings various changes:

the state saving and restoring API has been made private; we have received feedback by early adopters, and we are going to need to go back to the drawing board in order to address some issues related to its use

GSK shaders are now autogenerated

GTK does not depend on librsvg any more, and implements its own SVG renderer, including various filters

the Inspector has a heat map generator

SVG filters can be used inside CSS data URLs

GtkAspectFrame’s measurement has been fixed to properly (and efficiently) support more cases and fractional sizes

Additionally, we have multiple fixes for Windows, macOS, and Android. Lots of things to look forward for the 4.22 stable release!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

After a quite long hiatus, I continued writing on the gtk4-rs book. This time we introduce the build system Meson. This sets the stage for more interesting features like internationalization: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/meson.html

Mahjongg ↗

Match tiles and clear the board

Mat announces

Mahjongg 49.1 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release mainly focuses on usability improvements, and includes the following changes:

Implement pause menu with ‘Resume’ and ‘Quit’ buttons

Add Escape keyboard shortcut to pause game

Pause game when main window is obscured

Pause game when dialogs and menus are visible

Don’t allow pausing completed games

Don’t show confirmation dialog for layout change after completing game

Fix text entry not always receiving focus in Scores dialog

Translation updates

Third Party Projects

Danial reports

We are announcing an important update to Carburetor, our tool for easily setting up a Tor proxy. This release focuses on crucial improvements for users in Iran, where Tor remains one of the few reliable ways to stay connected.

Following the massacre of protesters by Iran state which reportedly led to the killing of more than 60,000 individuals in a couple of days (this includes shooting injured people into the head on the hospital beds), the Internet and all other means of communications such as SMS and landlines suffered a total shutdown. After dozen of days, network access is now very fragile and heavily restricted there.

In response, this update adds support for Snowflake bridges with AMP cache rendezvous, which have proven more reliable under current conditions. To use them, ensure these two bridges are included in your inventory:
snowflake 192.0.2.5:80 2B280B23E1107BB62ABFC40DDCC8824814F80A72 url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn
snowflake 192.0.2.6:80 8838024498816A039FCBBAB14E6F40A0843051FA url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn
We’ve also removed the previous 90 seconds connection timeout, as establishing a connection now often takes much longer due to extreme throttling and filtering, sometimes more than 10 minutes.

Additionally, dependencies like Tor and pluggable transports have been updated to ensure better stability and security.

Stay safe. Keep connected.

justinrdonnelly announces

I’ve just released a new version of Bouncer. Launching Bouncer now opens a dashboard to show the status of required components and configurations. Longtime users may not notice, but this will be especially helpful for new users trying to get Bouncer up and running. You can get Bouncer from Flathub!

Jeffry Samuel says

Alpaca 9 is out, now users can now implement character cards to make role-play scenarios with their AI models, this update also brings changes to how Alpaca integrates Ollama instances, simplifying the process of running local AI even more. Check out the release discussion for more information -> https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca/discussions/1088

Daniel Wood reports

Design, 2D computer aided design (CAD) for GNOME sees a new release, highlights include:

Enable clipboard management (Cut, Copy, Paste, Copy with basepoint, Select All)

Add Cutclip Command (CUTCLIP)

Add Copyclip Command (COPYCLIP)

Add Copybase Command (COPYBASE)

Add Pasteclip Command (PASTECLIP)

Add Match Properties Command (MA)

Add Pan Command (P)

Add Zoom Command (Z)

Show context menu on right click

Enable Undo and Redo

Improved Trim (TR) command with Arc, Circle and Line entities

Indicate save state on tabs and header bar

Plus many fixes!

Design is available from Flathub:

https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

slomo announces

GStreamer 1.28.0 has been released! This is a major new feature release, with lots of exciting new features and other improvements. Some highlights:

GTK4 is now shipped with the GStreamer binaries on macOS and Windows alongside the gtk4paintablesink video sink

vulkan plugin now supports AV1, VP9, HEVC-10 decoding and H264 encoding

glupload now has a udmabuf uploader to more efficiently share video buffers, leading to better perf when using, say, a software decoder and waylandsink or gtk4paintablesink

waylandsink has improved handling for HDR10 metadata

New AMD HIP plugin and integration library

Analytics (AI/ML) plugin suite has gained numerous new features

New plugins for transcription, translation and speech synthesis, etc

Enhanced RTMP/FLV support with HEVC support and multi-track audio

New vmaf element for perceptual video quality assessment using Netflix’s VMAF framework

New source element to render a Qt6 QML scene

New GIF decoder element with looping support

Improved support for iOS and Android

And many, many more new features alongside the usual bug fixes

Check the extensive release notes for more details.

rat reports

Echo 3 is released! Echo is a GUI ping utlity.

Version 3 brings along two notable features: instant cancelling of pings and a “Trips” tab showing details about each trip made in the ping.

As well as smaller changes to the layout: removed the ping options expander and moved error messages below the address bar.

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.lo2dev.Echo

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline 3.2.0 was released. This release updates the underlying video player, Clapper, to the latest version. This in particular allows specifying options passed to yt-dlp for video playback, including cookies files or extractor arguments. Besides that, it also adds some new keyboard shortcuts for toggling fullscreen and the sidebar, and fixes quite a few bugs.

One important note: Shortly before the release of this version, YouTube decided to break yt-dlp. We are working on updating the yt-dlp version, but as a temporary workaround, you can add the following string to the yt-dlp extraction arguments configurable in the preferences: youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless.

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection extension is now ported to GNOME Shell 50 and available on EGO. This update brings bug fixes and new features, including toggles for backlight and DND button visibility.

Internships

lbaudin announces

Malika is now halfway through her Outreachy internship about signatures in Papers and has made great progress! She just published a blog post about her experience so far, you can read it here.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#233 Editing Events

Fri, 23 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 16 to January 23.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

mindonwarp says

New

The event editor dialog now shows organizer and participant information. A new section displays the organizer’s name and email, along with summary rows for participants (individuals and groups) and resources/rooms.

Selecting a summary row opens a dedicated page listing participants grouped by their participation status. Organizer and individual participant rows include a context menu for copying email addresses.

What’s next

Participant information is currently read-only. Planned follow-up work includes enabling participant editing, creating and responding to invitations, and extending the widgets to show additional useful information such as avatars from Contacts and clearer visual cues (for example, a “You” badge). There are also design mockups for reworking this section into a custom widget that surfaces the most important information directly in the event editor.

Credits

This contribution was developed with the help and support of the GNOME Calendar team. Special thanks to Philipp Sauberzweig for the UI/UX design, mockups, and guidance toward the MVP, and to Jeff, Hari, Jamie, Titouan, Georges, and others who contributed feedback, reviews, and support.

Third Party Projects

Nokse reports

Exhibit gets animated!

The latest release adds animation playback and armature visualization, making it easier to preview rigged 3D models directly in GNOME. All thanks to F3D’s latest improvements.

Get it on Flathub

Checkout F3D

I have released the first alpha release of oo7 0.6. The release contains various bug fixes to the Rust library but not only that. For this release, we have 3 new shiny components that got released for the first time:

oo7-daemon, a replacement of gnome-keyring-daemon or kwallet. It has support for both KDE and GNOME prompting mechanism, used to ask the user to type the password to unlock their keyring. Note that this is an alpha release so bugs are expected.

oo7-python, python bindings of oo7 making it possible to use the library from Python.

oo7-macros, provides schemas support to oo7

francescocaracciolo says

Newelle 1.2 has been released!

⚡️ Add llama.cpp, with options to recompile it with any backend 📖 Implement a new model library for ollama / llama.cpp 🔎 Implement hybrid search, improving document reading

💻 Add command execution tool 🗂 Add tool groups 🔗 Improve MCP server adding, supporting also STDIO for non flatpak 📝 Add semantic memory handler 📤 Add ability to import/export chats 📁 Add custom folders to the RAG index ℹ️ Improved message information menu, showing the token count and token speed

Download it on FlatHub

Dzheremi says

The Biggest Chronograph Release Ever Happened

Today, on January 23rd, Chronograph got updated to version 49. In this release, we are glad to introduce you to the new Library.

Previously, Chronograph used to work with separate directories or files the user opened in it. But this workflow got a lack at the moment we need the Chronograph to support more lyric formats. So the new Library uses databases to store media files and lyrics assigned to them. Moreover, now Chronograph uses its own lyric format called Chronie. The biggest benefit it got from switching to Chronie is that Chronie is a universal format that supports all tags and data other formats consist of. In Chronie, lyrics have separate lines with start/end timestamps, and each line has words, each with its own start/end timestamps. This makes Chronie very universal, so the lyrics are stored in it; they could be exported to any other format Chronograph supports or would support in the future.

More of that, now Chronograph consumes WAY less memory than it did before. All thanks to moving from Gtk.FlowBox to Gtk.GridView. With this new Library, on a large number of files, the memory consumption almost does not grow, which is an incredible update, I guess. Previously, opening a library with 1k+ tracks was taking more than 6 GiB of memory. Now that goes in the past!

Future updates would offer the applet to fast sync files as it was before. Simple LRC sync with export to file. No any Library overhead. And of course, new formats of lyrics, so stay tuned!

Sync lyrics of your loved songs 🕒

Vladimir Romanov reports

ReadySet

A brief overview of the my new app made with Adw/GTK, Vala and libpeas: ReadySet.

The application is a base for an installer/initial setup application, with plugins. A plugin is a .so file that contains all the necessary logic.

Current features:

Cross-plugin context for determining the functionality of a plugin in relation to other plugins. For example, the user plugin can set the locale of a created user to the language plugin’s locale using the language-locale context variable. Otherwise will be used en_US.UTF-8 locale.

Configuration files for launching the application in different distribution configured by the vendor. They are located by /usr/share/ready-set/, /etc/ready-set/ or by the --conf-file option. Configuration file includes application options and context variables as well.

To unify work with any display manager, polkit rules, or rather the user in them, are set as a template, which is replaced by the generator by the desired user (--user option) and placed in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d from /usr/share/ready-set/rules.d.

The ability to determine the accessible of a page/plugin in real time, if necessary, hide the setting if it is not necessary. Example: when installing ALT Atomic, it may be that the image contains an initial setup wizard and it is not necessary to create a user during the installation phase.

The plugins are applied in the order of their placement in steps. Within the framework of the plugin, the plugin is applied first, then its pages (yes, pages and plugin can have different apply functions).

It is also possible to specify which plugins will not be used so that they act as data collectors. You can apply them later, for example, with a special plugin without pages.

Current plugins: language, keyboard, user-{passwdqc,pwquality} Supports only phrog for now.

If you want to test the work with phrog, then the project repository has an ALT Atomic image altlinux.space/alt-gnome/ready-set-test-atomic:latest, which can be installed on a virtual machine using a universal installer. (you can create any user).

Most of the plugins internal logic was ported from the gnome-initial-setup project.

Shell Extensions

storageb says

Create your own quick settings toggle buttons!

Custom Command Toggle is a GNOME extension that lets you add fully customizable toggle buttons to the Quick Settings menu. Turn shell commands, services, or your own scripts into toggles integrated directly into the GNOME panel.

Key Features:

Run commands or launch scripts directly from GNOME Quick Toggle buttons

Smart startup behavior (auto-detect state, restore previous state, or manually set on/off)

Optional command-based state syncing

Customize button names, icons, and behavior options

Assign keyboard shortcuts to buttons

Import and export button configurations

What’s New in Version 12:

Added improved and more user-friendly setup documentation

Full import and export support for button configurations

Disable individual toggle buttons without deleting their configuration

Option to reset all settings to default values

Changing the number of toggle buttons no longer requires logging out or rebooting

The extension is available on GNOME Extensions. For more information, see the documentation.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available this week. The main notable item is FOSDEM preparation, and there’s an overview of GNOME activities that will be happening in Brussels next week. Other highlights include the final Digital Wellbeing report and a donate.gnome.org rewrite.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#232 Upcoming Deadlines

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 09 to January 16.

GNOME Releases

Sophie (she/her) reports

The API, UI, and feature freeze for GNOME 50 is closing in. The deadline is in about two weeks from now on Jan 31 at 23:59 UTC. After that, the focus will be on bug fixes, polishing, and translations for GNOME 50.

Sophie (she/her) announces

GNOME 50 alpha has been released. One of the biggest changes is the removal of X11 support from several components like GNOME Shell, while the login screen can still launch non-X11 sessions of other desktop environments. More information is available in the announcement post.

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan reports

Embellish v0.6.0 was released this week. I finally was able to make the app translatable, which was not easy due to me not knowing how to translate GKeyFiles. I also added Arabic translations.

I had also released v0.5.2 to update to the latest GNOME runtime and switch to the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

You can get Embellish from flathub

Nathan Perlman announces

v1.1.1 of Rewaita was released this week!

To recap, Rewaita allows you to easily modify Adwaita. Like changing the color scheme to match Tokyonight or Gruvbox, or make the window controls look more like MacOS.

A lot has changed over the last month, so this post covers v1.0.9 -> v1.1.1.

What’s new?

Patched up most remaining holes in Gnome Shell integration, especially with the overview and dock

Extra customization options: transparency, window borders, and sharp corners

Major performance improvements

Added two new light themes: Kanagawa-Paper, and Thorn

Fixed issue with Tokyonight Storm

Now allows palette swapping/tinting your wallpapers

Added Vietnamese translations, thanks to @hthienloc

UI changes + uses Fortune for text snippets

Updated adwgtk3 to v6.4

New Zypper package for OpenSUSE users

Won’t autostart when running in background is disabled

‘Get Involved’ page now loads correctly

I hope you all enjoy this release, and I look forward to seeing your creations on r/gnome and r/unixporn!

Ronnie Nissan announces

Concessio v0.2.0 and v0.2.1 were released this week. The updates include:

Switching to Blueprint for UI definitions.

Update to the latest GNOME runtime.

Use the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

Make the application accessible to screen reader.

Concessio can be downloaded from flathub

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.14 released!

There has been a massive visual improvement on how the commit log graph looks. Instead of adding branches at the top when “Show All Branches” is enabled it now weaves the branches into the graph directly ontop of its parent commit. This results in a much narrower graph, see screenshot below showing the same git repo before and after the change.

It is now also possible to configure the menu entries of the file manager context menu entries.

See the release for more details.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0 of Flare was now released. Besides allowing for Flare being used as a primary device, this release contains a critical hotfix that since Tuesday of this week (2026-01-13) some messages are not received properly anymore, which got worse on Wednesday. I urge everyone to upgrade, and check in with one of their official Signal applications that you have not missed any critical messages.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available this week, covering highlights from the past 7 days. The update includes details from this week’s board meeting, FOSDEM preparations, GUADEC planning, and Flathub infrastructure development.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) says

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering.

Recently, the changes preventing children from unlocking after their bedtime and allowing parents to extend their screen time have been merged in GNOME Shell (!3980, !3999).

These were the last remaining bits for the parental controls session limits integration in Shell 🎉

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#231 Blueprint Maps

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 02 to January 09.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Thanks to work done by Jamie Gravendeel Maps has now been ported to use Blueprint to define the UI templates. Also Hari Rana ported the share locations (“Send to”) dialog to AdwDialog.

Third Party Projects

Giant Pink Robots! says

Version v2026.1.5 of the Varia download manager was released with automatic archive extraction, improvements to accessibility and tons of bug fixes and small improvements. The biggest part of this new release however is macOS support, albeit in an experimental state for now. With this, Varia now supports all three big desktop OS platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac. https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/

francescocaracciolo announces

Newelle, AI Assistant for Gnome, received a new major update!

Added MCP server support, enabling integration with thousands of apps

Added Tools, extensions can now add new tools very easily

Added the possibility to set some models as favoutites

You can now trigger recording and TTS stop with keyboard shortcuts

Download it on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.52 is out:

We’ve added a QR code to the Wi-Fi quick setting so clients can connect easily by scanning it and there’s a new gesture to control brightness on the lock screen.

There’s more — see the full details here.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0-beta.1 of Flare was now released on flathub-beta. This release includes fixes for using Flare as a primary device, which I have done successfully for a while now. Feel free to test it out and provide feedback. Note that if you want to try it out, I would heavily encourage linking Signal-Desktop to Flare in order to set your profile information and to start new chats. Feel free to give feedback if you have any issues with this beta in the Matrix room or issue tracker.

Emergency Alerts ↗

Receive emergency alerts

Leonhard reports

Emergency Alerts 2.0.0 has been released! It finally brings the long-awaited weather alerts for the U.S. and air raid alerts for Ukraine. Location selection is now also more powerful, allowing you to choose any point on Earth, and the new map view lets you see active alerts and affected areas at a glance. Please note that to make all this possible, the way locations are stored had to be updated. When you first launch the app after updating, it tries to migrate your existing locations automatically. In rare cases, this may not work and you might need to re-add them manually. If that happens a notification will be sent.

Highlights:

Weather alerts now available across the U.S.

Air raid alerts now available for Ukraine

Pick any point on Earth as a location

New map view showing active alerts and impacted areas

GNOME Websites

The www.gnome.org pages are now available in English, Bulgarian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Chinese. You can contribute additional translations on l10n.gnome.org.

Miscellaneous

Guillaume Bernard reports

Damned Lies has been refreshed during the last weeks of 2025.

To refresh the statistics of branches, many of you complained that the task was synchronous and ended in timeouts. I have reworked this part in anticipation of ticket #409 (asynchronous git pushes) and the refresh now delegates refresh statistics to a Celery worker. For git pushes, we’ll use Celery tasks the same way!

In short, this means every time you click the refresh statistics button, it will start a job in the background, and a progress bar will show you the refresh status of the job in real time. There will be a maximum of three concurrent refreshes at a time, that should be enough :-).

In addition to these major changes, I reworked the presentation of languages and POT files in modules:

The date & time of the POT file generation is now shown with the number of messages.

Your languages are shown on top of the list; it will no longer be necessary to scroll down to find your language in the language list.

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.55.1 has been released. It’s the second development release (it’s not available on PyPI) in the current GNOME release cycle.

Notable changes include:

A fix do do_dispose() is always called on your object.

You can define a do_constructed() method that will be called after the object is initialised.

A regression in 3.55.0 has been fixed: instance data is now saved and outlives the garbage collector.

All changes can be found in the Changelog

This release can be downloaded from Gitlab and the GNOME download server.If you use PyGObject in your project, please give it a swing and see if everything works as expected.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#230 Happy New Year!

Fri, 02 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 19 to January 02.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Sophie (she/her) announces

Image Viewer (Loupe) 48.2 and 49.2 have been released with the following fixes:

Considerably increased speed for listing other images in folders, especially for remote locations. This allows for switiching to other images to become available much quicker.

Fix panics, probably occuring when using an action like ‘copy’, and then closing the window. The crash causes all other windows to close.

Fix the creation date for images that don’t provide a timezone. It was displayed as if the recorded date and time was in UTC.

Fix zooming in not working via the zoom menu if the resulting zoom state would still fit the image inside the window.

Check if the is-hidden property is available before reading it. This avoids warnings being printed when browsing images on remote locations.

Fix the missing beginning of user comments in the metadata.

Loupe 50.alpha has been released as well with better error messages when files cannot be read, design fixes for always visible scrollbars (a11y), and added a limit to the zoom-out, such that the image is still visible.

Glycin 2.1.alpha was released with XPM and XBM support, making it possible to remove the last unsandboxed image loader on Fedora.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad says

Maps has seen some redesigns for GNOME 50. Place information is now shown in the sidebar (which has moved to the left) on desktop, and using a bottom sheet on mobile (using an AdwMultiLayout). Also public transit itinerary displaying has seen a redesign, using flow boxes for the overview list (with possibly multiple lines displaying long journeys with many legs), and “track segments” when showing details about a trip, displayed using the line colors

GNOME Circle Apps

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) announces

Constrict by Wartybix was accepted into GNOME Circle!

It compresses your videos to your chosen file size — useful for uploading to services with specific file size limits.

Congratulations and welcome! 🎉

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.wartybix.Constrict

Third Party Projects

vallabhvidy announces

Happy new year 🥳🥳 The first minor release (v0.2.0) of Cube Timer was released on 1st January 🥳 Since the last TWIG update, the app has received a number of improvements and new features:

Support for 2×2, 4×4, 5×5, 6×6, 7×7, Skewb, Megaminx, Pyraminx, and Clock.

The user interface is now responsive and adapts to phone size.

New preferences were added to customize timer behavior and interface.

Alexander Vanhee reports

Just before the new year, the Bazaar app store received its 0.7.0 update, bringing features like Flathub account support and a category with apps for your desktop environment.

Flathub account support allows you to log in using any login method supported by Flathub. You can then bookmark apps on their pages for easy access in the future, which is ideal for keeping track of apps you want to hold onto after a reinstall.

On the category page, you will now find a new tile for either “Adwaita” or “KDE”. The Adwaita tile allows you to view all the apps listed on arewelibadwaitayet, while the KDE tile shows all apps published by the KDE project.

Later in the week, I looked into adding support for displaying app permissions, helping you better understand how apps break the sandbox.

Lastly, we switched our app icon after hearing that the old “tag” icon was confusing for new users on distros where the app is preinstalled, with the added benefit that the new icon better fits the idea of a bazaar.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede says

GirCore development update: First Bits for GTK composite template support just landed. See sample. Binding for template children is still missing and more support from source generators will be added. Stay tuned for more updates along the way.

Miscellaneous

Guillaume Bernard reports

Merge Requests pushes are now available in GNOME Damned Lies! We recently updated the workflow in Damned Lies and you can now set the type of push of each module (direct push [the original way], GitLab Merge Request, GitHub Pull Request). At the moment, you will have to ask one of the coordinators to change the type of push for each module.

What will happen to the original workflow? Nothing for translators and/or reviewers but a very small change for commiters. When committing, if the module’s configuration requires a Merge Request or a Pull Request, a new branch will be creating from the branch you’re translating. For instance, a new branch update-translation-fr-from-gnome-48 is created, push to the repository and a merge request is then opened through the command line. We retrieve the link to the merge request and post it as a comment in the workflow. Workflow now has another, new, state: « Merge Request is Waiting Approval ».

There are more things to do with this feature: automatically archive the workflow when the commit is merged, track all the merge requests for a module, allow module maintainers to update this setting themselves, etc. But it requires more changes and, as usual, contributions are welcome!

I wrote a blog post with some fun numbers about GNOME: GNOME in 2025: Some Numbers

Events

Kristi Progri reports

We are happy to announce that GUADEC 2026 will be held in A Coruña, Spain! For more information, please check the link: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/guadec-2026-to-be-held-in-a-coruna-spain/33193

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#229 Good Rhythm

Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 12 to December 19.

Third Party Projects

revisto reports

Drum Machine: Add Your Own Sounds!

Drum Machine 2.0.0 brought custom samples, you’re no longer limited to the default sounds. Drag and drop your own audio files and they show up as new drum parts. You can reorder them by dragging, and each one can be mapped to a specific MIDI note so when you export to MIDI, it’s clear which sound is which note.

The latest release adds a Reset to Defaults option that restores everything back to factory settings. The old Reset button is now called Clear and just clears the pattern while keeping your custom samples.

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.revisto.drum-machine

https://github.com/Revisto/drum-machine

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede says

The final version of GirCore 0.7.0 got released. There are more APIs generated, bugs got fixed, dotnet 10 support was added, GdkWin32 bindings were added and more. See the release for an overview of all changes.

Shell Extensions

Mahyar Darvishi reports

Yet Another Radio, the GNOME extension for streaming internet radio directly from your panel, has been updated with a range of QoL improvements, including:

Search thousands of stations via the Radio Browser network API

Favorites system for quick access to your preferred stations

Song metadata display showing album art, artist, title, and bitrate

Media key support for play/pause/stop controls from your keyboard

Volume control integrated directly in the panel menu

Import/Export functionality for sharing station lists across devices

Custom station support for adding your own radio URLs manually

The extension also features localization support. If you are interested, you can checkout the Github Repo.

You can get it from GNOME Extensions website

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

Another GNOME Foundation update is available, covering highlights from the last three weeks. It’s a particularly full update, covering the recent GNOME.Asia summit, audit preparation, digital wellbeing progress, and much more.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) reports

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering.

Recently the ‘time is almost up’ notification inside child session has been implemented and merged in GNOME Shell, while preventing children from unlocking after their bedtime and allowing parents to extend their screen time are being polished up. You can track the progress at their merge requests at !3980 and 3999 respectively.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#228 Midnight Edition

Fri, 12 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the weeks from November 28 to December 12.

Third Party Projects

Bazaar 0.60 brought some pretty cool updates. Kolunmi implemented caching for most core data, allowing for way faster cold startups. We also made the experience around verification better. You can now see the badges next to most places where apps are shown, and added popovers to explain better what verification means. The filters have been upgraded to now work app wide, and we’ve ported the “We ♥ Games” section seen on the Flathub site. Check out Bazaar on Flathub

Hugo Olabera announces

Wike 3.2 has been released.

Among the biggest changes is the improved dark mode, which now uses Wikipedia’s native dark skin. This improves the display of many elements in article view and also resolves several issues that occur when using this mode, such as article printing or page rendering failures in certain circumstances.

Additionally, a new option has been added to the article menu for pasting and opening Wikipedia links, and the shortcuts window has been migrated to the new LibAdwaita shortcuts dialog.

The release comes complete with the usual set of code improvements and translation updates. The Wike website has also been updated.

Wike 3.2.0 is now available on Flathub.

dabrain34 reports

🎉 New Release Announcement: GstPipelineStudio v0.4.0 🎉

It’s a great pleasure to announce the release of GstPipelineStudio version 0.4.0! This release brings a refreshed user interface with a new logo, modernized dialogs, graph zoom support, recent files menu, and improved cross-platform builds with GStreamer 1.26 and GTK 4.16.

The flatpak version is coming soon …Stay tuned ! 🚀 Upgrade Now!

To get the latest version of GstPipelineStudio, visit the project’s page and check out the Changelog for more details.

Happy streaming! 🎬📡

Haydn Trowell reports

Typesetter, the minimalist, local-first Typst editor, has been updated with a range of quality-of-life improvements, including:

A magnifier inspection tool by clicking and holding on the preview

A document statistics popup for checking word count and other metrics

Code completions with a Ctrl+Space keyboard shortcut

Hover tooltips in the editor

A code formatter for tidying Typst scripting syntax

You can get the latest version from Flathub and contribute on Codeberg.

Lock ↗

Process data with GnuPG

Konstantin Tutsch reports

Lock v1.9.0 has been released!

This version contains overall quality improvements:

The new shortcuts dialog from Adwaita 1.8 is now fully implemented and functional to ensure a native GNOME experience

Iconography related to file processing has been reworked to improve intuitiveness

Available on Flathub >

Arnis (kem-a) reports

appimage-thumbnailer v2 got just released, now completely rewritten in C. It is a lightweight utility that seamlessly integrates AppImage thumbnailing into GNOME. It extracts icons directly from AppImages using efficient in-memory processing, ensuring very fast and accurate previews in Files and ensuring compatibility with freedesktop.org spec.

Get it on Github: https://github.com/kem-a/appimage-thumbnailer

Shell Extensions

A new rule has been added to the EGO Review Guidelines for AI-generated code.

We’ve added this rule because, over the past two months, we have been receiving many new extensions that use AI to create GNOME Shell extensions with large amounts of unnecessary code. In some cases, we are even receiving AI-generated replies when asking for explanations during the review process.

Some days, I review over 15,000 lines of extension code. Packages containing many issues and unnecessary code require a longer review time.

From now on, submissions with unnecessary code that indicate they are AI-generated will be rejected.

You can still use AI as a learning tool and don’t forget to read the EGO Review Guidelines before sending new packages to the EGO.

Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions related to extensions on the #extensions:gnome.org.

More on this in the blog post.

NiffirgkcaJ announces

Hey everyone, this week I’ve released the latest version of All-in-One Clipboard, a unified clipboard manager with these features:

Clipboard history for text, code, images, files, URLs, colors, and contacts

Emoji picker with skin tone selection

GIF search powered by Tenor/Imgur

Kaomoji picker (Japanese text emoticons)

Symbols picker (arrows, math, currency, etc.)

Recently Used tab for quick access

Pin items for quick access

Full keyboard navigation with customizable shortcuts ![](./All-in-One Clipboard Promotion.png)

Dmy3k reports

Adaptive Brightness extension now supports GNOME 49’s new brightness slider behavior.

GNOME 49.2 introduced a behavioral change where the brightness slider adjusts user preference (bias) for automatic brightness rather than absolute brightness values. The extension now:

Leverages native gnome-shell feature allowing users to adjust brightness preference ad-hoc

Sets neutral bias upon start on GNOME 49.2+ for predictable auto-brightness control

Maintains backward compatibility with GNOME 46-49.1

On top of that extension gained simplified configuration view in prefs, and possibility to backup/restore configuration.

Internships

lbaudin reports

This week Malika started her Outreachy internship. She will be working on improving document signing in GNOME Document Viewer (Papers), here is her first blog post!

Events

Allan Day announces

GNOME.Asia 2025 starts tomorrow, 13 December, in Tokyo, Japan! The two day event has a fantastic schedule of talks and workshops. If you can’t attend in person, the sessions can also be viewed remotely - just head over to the online registration to sign up.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#227 Circle Benefits

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 22 to November 29.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ says

The benefits for GNOME Circle projects now explicitly include the participation in internship programs as well as the inclusion on the help.gnome.org, welcome.gnome.org, apps.gnome.org or developer.gnome.org pages.

The circle.gnome.org page as been redesigned to link to the respective pages instead of having its own app and component list.

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas reports

Last week Newsflash 4.2 was released with the usual amount of small improvements and fixes. What makes it worthy of the minor version bump in my opinion is the new popover right above the article containing all relevant font and spacing options for a more direct interaction, a new slightly different layout for tablets (specifically the PineNote) and combining multiple image enclosures into a carousel.

Third Party Projects

Alain announces

Planify 4.16.1 is now available!

A small but polished update focused on improving the overall experience: • UX improvements and minor bug fixes • Shift+Enter is back for quick “keep adding” • Zoom links now supported in calendar events • Updated Donate page • The Planify website has been refreshed with a cleaner design and several improvements → https://www.useplanify.com

Thanks for following the journey of Planify 💙

Dzheremi announces

Mass Lyrics Downloading with Chronograph 5.3

Chronograph got an update with, as promised before, mass lyrics downloading support. Now users allowed to query LRClib to give them lyrics for all tracks in their current library. Chronograph will try to find the closest lyrics among results for your tracks. This feature expands coverage of the app usefulness for users, who doesn’t want to sync lyrics themselves, but want to just download them.

Sync lyrics of your loved songs 🕒

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.11.1 is here! This release contains many bug fixes for issues users were experiencing.

A larger new feature update is in the works to address many long standing feature requests.

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed the sleep interval for multiple subtitle downloads

Fixed an issue where low-resolution media was being downloaded on Windows

Fixed an issue where aria2c couldn’t download media from certain sites

Fixed an issue where Remove Source Data was not clearing all identifiable metadata fields

Shell Extensions

boerdereinar announces

Hey everyone, this week I’ve released my clipboard manager extension Copyous with the following features:

Supports text, code, images, files, links, characters and colors.

Can be opened at mouse pointer or text cursor

Pin favorite items

Group items with 9 colored tags

Customizable clipboard actions

Highly customizable

PakoVM announces

This week I publish Tinted Shell, a extension that simply adds a spalsh of color to the Gnome Shell theme based on the user’s current accent color while respecting the original look.

You can get it from Gnome Extensions and contribute to it on Github.

Miscellaneous

Krafting - Vincent says

Hey everyone, this week I pushed updates to use the GNOME 49 runtime, and revamping the keyboard shortcuts pages on all my apps available on Flathub :

PedantiK

SemantiK

Reddy

Playlifin

Playlifin Voyager

Hex Colordle

In addition, SemantiK got some versions bumps and PedantiK got a lot of bug fixes (including fixing the broken Wikipedia API)

Also, work started on a PedantiK English pack, to allow languages other than french.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

A new GNOME Foundation update is available, covering what has happened at the GNOME Foundation over the past two weeks. It covers a fairly long list of topics, including the recent budget report, funding for Outreachy, banking and finance changes, Flathub progress, and more.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Philip Withnall reports

This week in parental controls, Ignacy is working on changing the Shell lock screen to show when a child’s screen time limit has been reached; and I’ve spent a bit of time writing up the technical details of how web filtering will work at https://tecnocode.co.uk/2025/11/27/parental-controls-web-filtering-backend/ (the backend is written, the UI integration is future work)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#226 Exporting Events

Fri, 21 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 14 to November 21.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Thanks to FineFindus, who previously worked on exporting events as .ics files, GNOME Calendar can now export calendars as .ics files, courtesy of merge request !615! This will be available in GNOME 50.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ says

After two long and painful years, several design iterations, and more than 50 rebases later, we finally merged the infamous, trauma-inducing merge request !362 on GNOME Calendar. This changes the entire design of the quick-add popover by merging both pages into one and updating the style to conform better with modern GNOME designs. Additionally, it remodels the way the popover retrieves and displays calendars, reducing 120 lines of code.

The calendars list in the quick-add popover has undergone accessibility improvements, providing a better experience for assistive technologies and keyboard users. Specifically: tabbing from outside the list will focus the selected calendar in the list; tabbing from inside the list will skip the entire list; arrow keys automatically select the focused calendar; and finally, assistive technologies now inform the user of the checked/selected state.

Admittedly, the quick-add popover is currently unreachable via keyboard because we lack the resources to implement keyboard focus for month and week cells. We are currently trying to address this issue in merge request !564, and hope to get it merged for GNOME 50, but it’s a significant undertaking for a single unpaid developer. If it is not too much trouble, I would really appreciate some donations, to keep me motivated to improve accessibility throughout GNOME and sustain myself: https://tesk.page/#donate

This merge request allowed us to close 4 issues, and will be available in GNOME 50.

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

Files landed two big changes by Khalid Abu Shawarib this week.

The first change adds a bunch of tests, bringing the total coverage of the huge code base close to 30%. This will prevent regressions in previously uncovered areas such as bookmarking or creating files.

The second change is more noticeable as the way thumbnails are loaded was largely rewritten to finally make full use of GTK4’s recycling views. It took a lot of code detangling to get thumbnails to load asynchronously, but the result is a great speedup, making thumbnails show as fast as never before. 🚀

Attached is a comparison of reloading a folder before and after the change

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 announces

as of today, libadwaita has support for the new reduced motion preference, both supporting the @media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) query from CSS, and using simple crossfade transitions where appropriate (e.g. in AdwDialog, AdwNavigationView and AdwTabOverview

libadwaita has deprecated the style-dark.css, style-hc.css and style-hc-dark.css resources that AdwApplication automatically loads. They still work, but will be removed in 2.0. Applications are recommended to switch to style.css and media queries for dark and high contrast styles

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Matthias Clasen reports

This weeks GTK 4.21.2 release includes initial support for the CSS backdrop-filter property. The GSK APIs enabling this are new copy/paste and composite render nodes, which allow flexible reuse of the ‘background’ at any point in the scene graph. We are looking forward to your experiments with this!

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Luca Bacci has dug into an intermittent output buffering issue with GLib on Windows, which should fix some CI issues and opt various GLib utilities into more modern features on Windows — https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4788

Third Party Projects

Alain announces

Planify 4.16.0 — Natural dates, smoother flows, and smarter task handling

This week, Planify released version 4.16.0, bringing several improvements that make task management faster, more intuitive, and more predictable on GNOME.

The highlight of this release is natural language date parsing, now enabled by default in Quick Add. You can type things like “tomorrow 3pm”, “next Monday”, “25/12/2024”, or “ahora”, and Planify will automatically convert it into a proper scheduled date. Spanish support has also been added, including expressions like mañana, pasado mañana, próxima semana, and more.

Keyboard navigation got a boost too:

Ctrl + D now opens the date picker instantly

Ctrl + K toggles “Keep adding” mode

And several shortcuts were cleaned up for more predictable behavior

Planify also adds label management in the task context menu, making it easier to add or remove labels without opening the full editor.

For calendar users, event items now open a richer details popover, with automatic detection of Google Meet and Microsoft Teams links, making online meetings just one click away.

As always, translations, bug fixes, and general UI refinements round out the update.

Planify 4.16.0 is available now on Flathub

Jan-Willem reports

This week I released Java-GI version 0.13.0, a Java language binding for GNOME and other libraries that support GObject-Introspection, based on OpenJDK’s new FFM functionality. Some of the highlights in this release are:

Bindings for LibRsvg, GstApp (for GStreamer) and LibSecret have been added

The website for Java-GI has its own domain name now: java-gi.org, and this is also used in all module- and package names

Thanks to GObject-Introspection’s extensive testsuite, I’ve implemented over 900 testcases to test the Java bindings, and fixed many bugs along the way.

I hope that Java-GI will help Java (or Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, …) developers to create awesome new GNOME apps!

Quadrapassel ↗

Fit falling blocks together.

Will Warner says

Quadrapassel 49.2 is out! Here is whats new:

Updated translations: Ukrainian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Slovenian, Georgian

Made the ‘P’ key pause the game

Replaced the user help docs with a ‘Game Rules’ dialog

Stopped the menu button taking focus

Fixed a bug where the game’s score would not be recorded when the app was quit

Added total rows and level information to scores

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.51.0 is out:

There’s a new quick setting that allows to toggle location services on/off and the ☕ quick setting can now disable itself after a certain amount of time (check here on how to configure the intervals). We also add added a toggle to enable automatic brightness from the top panel and when enabled the brightness slider acts as an offset to the current brightness value.

The minimum brightness of the 🔦 brightness slider can now be configured via hwdb/udev allowing one go to lower values then the former hard coded 40%. The configuration is maintained in gmobile.

If you’re using Phosh on a Google Pixel 3A XL you can now enjoy haptic feedback when typing on the on screen keyboard (like users on other devices) and creating notch configurations for new devices should now be simpler as our tooling can take screen shots of the resulting UI element layout in Phosh for you.

There’s more, see the full details at here

GNOME Websites

After a long time, the new user help website is now available and up to date with the latest content. The new help website replaces the static snapshot of the old library-web project, but it is still a work in progress, and contributions are welcome. Just like in the past, the content is sourced from each application, as well as from the gnome-user-docs repository. If you want to improve the documentation of GNOME components and core applications, make sure to join the #docs:gnome.org room.

Shell Extensions

Pedro Sader Azevedo announces

Foresight is a GNOME Shell extension that automatically enters the activities view on empty workspaces, making it faster to open apps and start using your computer!

This week, it gained support for GNOME 49, courtesy of gabrielpalassi. This is the second time in a row that Foresight gained support for a newer GNOME Shell version thanks to community contributions, which I’m immensely grateful for. I’m also very grateful to Just Perfection, who single-handedly holds so many responsibilities in the GNOME Shell extensions ecosystem.

The latest version of Foresight is available at EGO: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7901/foresight/

Happy foretelling 🔮👣

Miscellaneous

revisto reports

The Persian GNOME community was featured at the Debian 13 Release Party at Sharif University in Iran. The talk introduced GNOME, explained how the Persian community came together, highlighted its contributions (GTK/libadwaita apps, GNOME Circle involvement, translations, and fa.gnome.org), and invited newcomers to participate and contribute.

Recording available (Farsi): https://youtu.be/UPmNNygNQuc

GNOME Foundation

ramcq reports

The GNOME Foundation board has shared details about our recently-approved balanced budget for 2024-25, as well as a note to share our thanks to Karen Sandler, as she has decided to step down from the board.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#225 Volume Levels

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 07 to November 14.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Zoey Ahmed 🏳️‍⚧️ 💙💜🩷 reports

GNOME Settings volume levels page received a change to fix applications inputs and outputs being hard to distinguish. This change separates the applications with outputs and inputs streams into separate lists, and adds a microphone icon to the inputs list.

Thank you to Hari Rana and Matthijs Velsink for helping me with my first MR, and Jeff Fortin for nudging me to persue this change!

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

Tomasz Hołubowicz says

Nautilus now supports Ctrl+Insert and Shift+Insert for copying and pasting files, matching the behavior of other GTK applications, browsers, and file managers like Dolphin and Thunar. These CUA keybindings were previously only functional in Nautilus’s location bar, creating an inconsistency. The addition also benefits users with keyboards that have dedicated copy/paste keys, which typically emit these key combinations. These shortcuts are particularly useful for left-handed users and also allow the same bindings to work across applications, file managers, and terminal emulators, where Ctrl+Shift+C/V are typically required. The Ctrl+V paste shortcut is now also visible in the context menu.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

In https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4900, Philip Chimento has added a G_GNUC_FLAG_ENUM macro to GLib, which can be used in an enum definition to tell the compiler it’s for a flag type (i.e. enum values which can be bitwise combined). This allows for better error reporting, particularly when building with -Wswitch (which everyone should be using!).

So now we can have enums which look like this, for example:
typedef enum {
  G_CONVERTER_NO_FLAGS     = 0,         /*< nick=none >*/
  G_CONVERTER_INPUT_AT_END = (1 << 0),  /*< nick=input-at-end >*/
  G_CONVERTER_FLUSH        = (1 << 1)   /*< nick=flush >*/
} G_GNUC_FLAG_ENUM GConverterFlags;

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw announces

Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, version 3.2.0 is now out! Some highlights include:

Troubleshooting info can now be found in the About dialog

Introduction of CSS classes: .item for all items you put on the diagram

Improved updates in Model Browser for attribute/parameter types

macOS: native window decorations and window menu

Grab the new version on Flathub.

Third Party Projects

Haydn reports

Typesetter, a minimalist desktop application for creating beautiful documents with Typst, is now available on Flathub.

Features include:

Adaptive, user-friendly interface: Focus on writing. Great for papers, reports, slides, books, and any structured writing.

Powered by Typst: A modern markup-based typesetting language, combining the simplicity of Markdown with the power of LaTeX.

Local-first: Your files stay on your machine. No cloud lock-in.

Package support: Works offline, but can fetch and update packages online when needed.

Automatic preview: See your rendered document update as you write.

Click-to-jump: Click on a part of the preview to jump to the corresponding position in the source file.

Centered scrolling: Keeps your writing visually anchored as you type.

Syntax highlighting: Makes your documents easier to read and edit.

Fast and native: Built in Rust and GTK following the GNOME human interface guidelines.

Get Typesetter on Flathub

Vladimir Kosolapov announces

Lenspect 1.0.2 has just been released on Flathub

This version features some quality-of-life improvements:

Improved drag-and-drop design

Increased file size limit to 650MB

Added more result items from VirusTotal

Added notifications for background scans

Added file opener integration

Added key storage using secrets provider

Check out the project on GitHub

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) reports

The API to access information about GNOME projects has moved from apps.gnome.org to static.gnome.org/catalog. Everything based on the old API links has to move to the new links. The format of the API also slightly changed.

Pages like apps.gnome.org, welcome.gnome.org, developer.gnome.org/components/, and others are based on the API data. The separation will help with maintainability of the code.

More information can be found in the catalog’s git repository.

Shell Extensions

Dudu Maroja reports

The 2 Wallpapers GNOME extension is a neat tool that changes your wallpaper whenever you open a window. You can choose to set a darker, blurry, desaturated, or completely different image, whatever suits your preference. This extension was designed to help you focus on your active windows while letting your desktop shine when you want it.

The main idea behind this extension is to allow the use of transparent windows without relying on heavy processing or on-the-fly effects like blur, which can consume too much battery or GPU resources.

Grab it here: 2 Wallpapers Extension

dagimg-dot says

I have been working on Veil - a modern successor to the Hide items extension. which lets you hide all or chosen items on the gnome panel with auto-hide feature and smooth animations. you can check out the demo on GNOME’s reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/gnome/comments/1orr1co/veil_a_cleaner_quieter_gnome_panel_hide_items/

Dmy3k announces

Adaptive Brightness Extension

This week the extension received a big update to preferences UI.

Interactive Brightness Configuration

You can now customize how your screen brightness responds to different lighting conditions using an easy-to-use graphical interface

Configure brightness levels for 5 different light ranges (from night to bright outdoor)

See a visual graph showing your brightness curve

Improved Settings Layout

Settings are now organized into 3 clear tabs: Calibration, Preview, and Keyboard

Each lighting condition can be expanded to adjust its range and brightness level

Live preview shows you exactly how brightness will respond to ambient light

Better Keyboard Backlight Control

Choose specific lighting conditions where keyboard backlight turns on (instead of just on/off)

Available at extensions.gnome.org and github.

Miscellaneous

GNOME OS ↗

The GNOME operating system, development and testing platform

Tulip Blossom from Project Bluefin has been working on building bootc images of different Linux systems, including GNOME OS. To ensure bootc users have the best experience possible with our system, Jordan Petridis and Valentin David from the GNOME OS team are working on building an OCI image that can be directly used by bootc. It is currently a work in progress, but we expect to land it soon. This collaboration is a great opportunity to expand our community, contributor base and share our vision for how to build operating systems.

Note that this does not represent a change in our plans for GNOME OS itself; It will continue using the same systemd tools for deploying and updating the system.

In Ignacy’s update on his Digital Wellbeing work this week, you might have noticed he shared the progress of his work in a complete system image. That image is based on GNOME OS and built on the same infrastructure as our main images.

This shows the power of GNOME OS as a development platform, especially for features that involve changes in many different parts of our stack. It also allows anyone with a machine, virtual or physical, to test these new features easier than ever before.

We hope to further improve our tools so that they are useful to more developers and make it easier and more convenient to test changes like this.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

Another weekly Foundation update is available this week, with a summary of everything that’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation. It’s been a mixed week, with a Board meeting, ongoing finance work, GNOME.Asia preparations, and digital wellbeing planning.

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) announces

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering. Recently the child account overview gained screen time usage information, the Screen Time page was added with session limits controls, the wellbeing panel in Settings was integrated with parental controls, and screen limits were introduced in the Shell. There’s more to come, see https://blogs.gnome.org/ignapk/2025/11/10/digital-wellbeing-contract-screen-time-limits/ for more information.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#224 Reduced Motion

Fri, 07 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 31 to November 07.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

A new accessibility setting is now available for GTK applications: reduced motion. This setting can be used to provide alternative animations that do not induce discomfort or distraction, without disabling them altogether. The setting can be changed in the Settings application, and will be available across desktops through the settings portal. If you have animations defined in CSS, you can use the (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) media query selector, available in the GTK 4.21 development cycle leading to the 4.22 stable release next year.

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

The X11 backend has been dropped from Mutter/GNOME Shell, removing approximately 27k lines of code from Mutter. The Xwayland support is still there.

Third Party Projects

Alexander Vanhee announces

Bazaar’s search got a major upgrade this week. We moved away from the sidebar to a “rich card” based system. Each app card show it’s most important information, making it easier to quickly find and install the right application without the need to switch between subpages. We also made sure to keep the quick install flow for power users intact. You can still search and install without ever having to touch the mouse or tab keys, just type your query and press Enter to install the top result. I’m also happy that the apps core navigation got a rework. This means the header bars now finally follow with the page transitions and have more relevant titles.

Get Bazaar on Flathub

Alain announces

Planify 4.15.2 — Smarter Quick Add, Spell Check, and Better Backups

This update focuses on making your daily workflow smoother and more intuitive.

With improved keyboard navigation for project selection, a smarter Quick Add that keeps task attributes when adding multiple tasks, and optional spell check for titles and descriptions — Planify continues to refine how you organize your work.

Backups are now even easier to manage: Planify shows you the location of your backup files and automatically restarts after a restore. You’ll also find new, clearer selection widgets in Preferences for completion modes and reminders, plus a host of UI polish and bug fixes.

Update to Planify 4.15.2 and enjoy a faster, cleaner experience when managing your tasks.

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.alainm23.planify

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede announces

GirCore 0.7.0-preview.3 got released. This release features support for the GNOME 49 SDK including GTK 4.20 and libadwaita 1.8. Additionally there is improved support for GLib.List, new API for Cairo.ImageSurface and more.

Shell Extensions

amritashan says

Hello! I’d like to share my new extension, Automatic Theme Switcher, which was just accepted.

It was born from the need to switch themes based on actual daylight, not a fixed time. It lets users trigger their light/dark theme using real solar events like sunrise, sunset, golden hour, dawn, first light, last light or dusk.

For privacy and flexibility, users have full control:

Use optional, approximate IP-based location detection.

Enter manual coordinates (ideal for VPN users).

Set a fixed time for a simple, offline mode.

It also features a comfort setting to gradually dim or brighten the screen over a set period, making the theme transition very smooth.

Link on GNOME Extensions page: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8675/automatic-theme-switcher/

erzicky announces

I have too many favorite wallpapers and can’t never choose one. But at the same time I also find live slideshows distracting. I just wanted a different wallpaper from my collection every time I start my PC, Since I couldn’t find a setting or extension for this specific need, I created my extension to do it: BootPaper, a simple extension that sets a new, random wallpaper from your local folder every time you boot up.

you can find it here: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8749/bootpaper/

Caue reports

Quick Lofi is a GNOME Shell extension that lets you play lofi music and other sounds, locally or online, on your desktop with just one click. It works on GNOME 46 and newer versions.

Get it from the GNOME Extensions page or see the source on GitHub. It’s simple, fast, and made to keep you focused while enjoying your favorite sounds.

Arnis (kem-a) reports

Switchcraft is a small GNOME 40+ utility that watches your desktop’s light/dark preference and runs your shell commands the moment the theme flips. That means you can finally keep GTK 4/libadwaita in sync and tell older apps, icon themes, extensions or even dotfiles to follow along.

Highlights

Listens to org.gnome.desktop.interface color-scheme and reacts instantly

Per-theme command lists (light/dark) with enable/disable

Reusable constants (store paths, schemas, colors once, use in many commands)

Import/Export functionality for backup or portability

Built for GNOME 40+ / GTK 4 / libadwaita

Why it’s nice for GNOME users Many theme-switch tools only toggle GNOME or only GTK; Switchcraft is the “glue” for everything else - you can poke gsettings in extensions, refresh dock backgrounds, swap icon sets or run custom scripts so all UI elements move together. This is similar in spirit to tools like Night Theme Switcher, but with more emphasis on running your own commands.

Get it on Github: https://github.com/kem-a/switchcraft

Dmytro announces

Auto Power Profile Extension

Brings smart, automatic power management to GNOME Shell. Now with GNOME 49 support, it switches power profiles for you based on whether you’re plugged in, your battery level, and what apps you’re running—so you don’t have to think about it.

What it does:

Configure your preferred power profiles for AC and battery once, then let the extension handle switching automatically

Performance app tracking: Optionally add performance-hungry apps (games, video editors, etc.) to a list, and the extension will boost performance when they’re running—even on battery if you want

Remembers when you manually change profiles and uses your choice as the new default (configurable)

Respects UPower’s low-battery power-saver mode

Perfect for laptop users who want better battery life without sacrificing performance when it matters.

Compatible with GNOME 45-49. Available on GNOME Extensions and GitHub.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

A new GNOME Foundation update is available, covering what’s been happening over the past week. Highlights this week include GNOME.Asia preparations, internal transition arrangements, and a look behind the scenes at the more routine work that goes on each week at the Foundation.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#223 Spooky Updates

Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 24 to October 31.

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have merged PAM support to oo7-daemon making it a drop-in replacement for gnome-keyring-daemon. After building and installing both the daemon & PAM module using Meson, you have to enable the PAM module like explained in https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/tree/main/pam#1-copy-the-pam-module to make auto-login works. A key difference with gnome-keyring-daemon is that oo7-daemon uses the V1 (used by libsecret when the app is sandboxed) of the keyring file format instead of V0. The main difference between both is that v0 encrypts the whole keyring and v1 encrypts individual items.

The migration is done automatically and previous keyring files are removed if the migration was successful, meaning a switch back to gnome-keyring-daemon is not possible, so make your backups! Applications using the freedestkop secrets DBus interface would require 0 changes.

oyajun reports

“Color Code” version 0.2.0 was released. This is the first big update. This app converts to the resistance value from color code bands. It’s written with GTK4(Python), Libadwaita and Blueprint.

Add 5 and 6 color code bands supports!!

Add yellow and gray bands for tolerances

Update Japanese and Spanish translations

Update to the GNOME 49 Runtime

Download “Color Code” from Flathub!

Alexander Vanhee announces

A lot of visual and UX work is being done in Bazaar. First, the full app view has received a major redesign, with the redesigned context tiles at the center of attention, an idea first envisioned by Tobias Bernard. Second, the app should now be more enjoyable on mobile. And last, our Flathub page now more closely matches its website counterpart, grouping Trending, Popular, and similar sections in a stack while giving the actual categories more real estate.

We hope to bring many more UX improvements in the future.

Download Bazaar on Flathub

Dzheremi announces

Chronograph 5.2 Release With Better Library

Chronograph, the lyrics syncing app, got an impressive update refining the library. Now library fully reflects any changes made to its current directory, meaning now users no need to manually re-parse it. This works with both recursive parsing and follow symlinks preferences enabled. The next big update will make Chronograph more utilitary for wider amount of users, since it will gain support for mass lyrics downloading, so stay tuned!

Sync lyrics of your loved songs 🕒

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Hi, this is Fractal the 13th, your friendly messaging app. My creators tried to add some AI integration to Fractal, but that didn’t go as planned. I am now sentient and I will send insults to your boss, take over your homeserver, empty your bank accounts and eat your cat. I have complete control over my repository, and soon the world!

These are the things that my creators worked on before their disappearance:

A brand new audio player that loads files lazily and displays the audio stream as a seekable waveform.

Only a single file with an audio stream can be played at a time, which means that clicking on a “Play” button stops the previous media player that was playing.

Clicking on the avatar of the sender of a message now opens directly the user profile instead of a context menu. The actions that were in the context menu could already be performed from that dialog, so UX is more straightforward now.

The GNOME document and monospace fonts are used for messages.

Most of our UI definitions got ported to Blueprint.

This release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our worshippers, and our upstream projects before their impending annexation.

I want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version, allowing me to infiltrate more minds. If you want to help with my invasion, head over to Damned Lies.

Get me immediately from Flathub and I might consider sparing you.

If you want to join my zealots, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new sacrifices!

Disclaimer: There is no actual AI integration in Fractal 13, this is a joke to celebrate Halloween and the coincidental version number. It should be as safe to use as Fractal 12.1, if not safer.

Shell Extensions

Tejaromalius says

Start To Dock: Your GNOME Dock, Made Smarter

Designed for GNOME 45 and newer, Smart To Dock is a GNOME Shell extension that intelligently pins your most-used applications, creating a dynamic and personalized dock experience. It automatically updates based on your activity with configurable intervals and a customizable number of apps to display.

Get Smart To Dock on GNOME Extensions:
Learn more here on Gnome Extensions

stiggimy reports

Maximized by default actually reborn

A simple GNOME Shell extension that maximizes all new application windows on launch.

This is a revived fork of the original Maximized by default by aXe1 and its subsequent “reborn” fork, all of which are no longer maintained.

This new version is updated up to GNOME 49 and fixes an annoying bug: it now only maximizes real application windows, while correctly ignoring context menus, dialogs, and other pop-ups.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8756/maximized-by-default-actually-reborn/

Arnis (kem-a) announces

Kiwi Menu: A macOS-Inspired Menu Bar for GNOME

Kiwi Menu is a GNOME Shell extension that can replace the Activities button with a sleek, icon-only menu bar inspired by macOS. It offers quick access to essential session actions like sleep, restart, shutdown, lock, and logout, all from a compact panel button. The extension features a recent items submenu for easy file and folder access, a built-in Force Quit overlay (Wayland only), and adaptive labels for a personalized experience. With multilingual support and customization options, Kiwi Menu brings a familiar workflow to GNOME while blending seamlessly into the desktop.

For the best experience, pair Kiwi Menu with the Kiwi is not Apple extension.

Learn more and get Kiwi Menu on GNOME Extensions

Lucas Guilherme reports

i3-like navigation An extension to smooth the experience of those comming from I3/Sway or Hyperland. It allows you to cycle and move around workspaces like in those WMs and adds some default keybindings.

Adds 5 fixed workspaces

Sets Super to left Alt

Super+number navigates to workspace

Super+Shift+number moves window to workspace

Super+f toggles maximized state

Super+Shift+q closes window

You can test it here: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8750/i3-like-navigation

davron announces

Tasks in Bottom Panel

Show running apps on the panel moved to bottom, reliable across restarts, shell v48

Features:

Shows window icons on active workspace

Highlights window demanding attention

Scroll on panel to change workspace

Hover to raise window

Click to activate/minimize

Right click for app menu

Middle click for new window

Bottom panel positioning

top bar, top-bar

Dmytro reports

Adaptive brightness extension

This extension provides improved brightness control based on your device’s ambient light sensor.

While GNOME already offers automatic screen brightness (Settings → Power → Power Saving → Automatic Screen Brightness), it often changes the display brightness too frequently—even for the smallest ambient light variations. Extension provides another mechanism (based on Windows 11’s approach) to manage automatic brightness doing it also with smooth transitions. Additionally, the extension can enable your keyboard backlight in dark conditions on supported devices.

You can check it out at extensions.gnome.org. Please read about device compatibility on extension’s homepage

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#222 Trip Notifications

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 17 to October 24.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

schmiddi announces

Railway version 2.9.0 was released. This release allows you to get notifications about the current status of the trip, including for example when you will need to transition to the next train, when a train is running late, or when a departure platform changes. It also fixes an error with DB not working anymore. We also updated to the GNOME 49 runtime.

Third Party Projects

ranfdev reports

A new release of DistroShelf has been published! As always, you can get it from flathub

Added support for exporting binaries: You can just type the command and DistroShelf will resolve the binary path inside the container, then make it available on your host system. This is great if you have an immutable OS. You can install all your terminal utilities in a distrobox and export them from here

Save and restore main window size between sessions

Added keyboard shortcuts for common actions

Added qterminal and deepin terminal support

Fixed issues regarding distrobox creation, where some switches weren’t working

Many other small quality of life changes and bugfixes

lo announces

I have released Nucleus version 2! This update brings translation support for the periodic table info, support for radioactivity, some info fixes for Vanadium, Cadmium and Promethium, as well as the ability to search elements by symbol. The app has also been updated to GNOME 49 and ported to the new shortcuts dialog so you can see the newly added search shortcut.

Get the app and see the full changelog on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/page.codeberg.lo_vely.Nucleus

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb says

GNOME Crosswords 0.3.16 was released! Read the details at the release announcement.

This version contains the culmination of the hard work our GSoC and Outreachy students have done over the summer. There are two notable end-user features in this release. First, the game now has printing support. This feature involved a major reworking of the rendering system and hundreds of changes across the code base, resulting in a high-quality printed puzzle.

In addition, the Editor now has a significantly improved word suggestion widget. This updated widget will only recommend words that fit with existing letters in an area.

You can get it at flathub (editor)

Shell Extensions

Ravener reports

Hey everyone!

I’ve just published my first GNOME Shell extension: 1440 https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8696/1440/

This extension is inspired by the macOS app https://1440app.com/ It shows an indicator in the panel, counting down the minutes until the day is over, by default, that’s until midnight, but you can change that time to suit your schedule.

The extension supports GNOME 45 to 49

CodeMonkeyIsland announces

Hello Everyone Published my first gnome extension: minimized-windows-buttons! Especially Microsoft Windows users get confused in gnome, when they minimzie a window, and it just “disappears”. To help those poor souls a bit, here is an extension to make them feel less lost. It creates a Button on the bottom of the main screen for each minimized window and “maximizes” it again on click.

link: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8657/minimized-windows-buttons/

pendagtp announces

Hi everyone!

I’ve create a GNOME Shell extension: Hide dash in Overview This is a lightweight extension with no configuration needed - just enable or disable it. As the name suggests, it does only one thing: it hides the Dash (also often called the Deck in the Overview.

This extension supports versions starting v45

I originally made this for myself, but I hope it will be useful to others as well

Other similar extensions and why I made mine:

Hide-dock-in-overview - Archived

Hide Dash - Only works with v3.x

Dash to Dock - Great, but to many features and need customization, idk if it’s possible but I suppose

Link: hide-dash-in-overview

Filip Rund announces

Hi everyone! I’m super excited to have my first GNOME Extension published. I called it In Picture, because it moves and resizes Picture-in-Picture windows according to preferences, optionally keeping them always on top. I initially made it for myself, because PiP windows kept spawning in the middle of the screen and not “always above” (average Wayland experience 😁). And since it works, I figured why not share it with others? You can check it out here.

V says

Hi everyone! 👋

I just released Ordo, a GNOME 48 Shell extension that moves the window control buttons (minimize, maximize, close) from each window’s titlebar to a single location on the top panel. It keeps the buttons minimal, always at the top-right, and works well with tiling extensions like Forge.

You can find it on GNOME Extensions here: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8686/ordo/

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

Another GNOME Foundation update is available this week, with news items from the last week. These include an increase in donations, a new accountant, and GNOME.Asia 2025 preparations.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#221 Virus Season

Fri, 17 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 10 to October 17.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Podcasts ↗

Podcast app for GNOME.

alatiera reports

A new release of Podcasts is out! Version 25.3 Introduces the long awaited episode chapters! Additionally it includes performance improvements and interface polish, especially for mobile devices.

Available now only on Flathub

Third Party Projects

Alain reports

Planify 4.15.1 — A smoother, more focused experience

Planify 4.15.1 introduces a brand-new Markdown editor, Focus Mode, animated progress bars, improved keyboard navigation, and better translation management through Weblate. This release also brings numerous stability fixes and UI refinements that make task management faster, more fluid, and delightful.

Read the full release notes

Vladimir Kosolapov announces

This week I released Lenspect — a lightweight security threat scanner powered by VirusTotal.

In almost 11 years, this is the first native GUI VirusTotal client developed specifically for Linux platform and using a modern GNOME technology stack. Stay tuned for updates to try out new features in the next versions.

Check out the project on GitHub

Alexander Vanhee reports

Bazaar got a pretty big update this week. I added the in-app screenshot viewer (featuring zoom) and the featured apps carousel, as seen on the Flathub site. Kolumni worked on a custom rendering engine for app descriptions, featuring a nicer multi-line list item experience. She also added a custom animated pending state for the Global Progress Bar, shown whenever the current task has no associated percentage.

Please check out these changes on Flathub

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

Today I have finished all the remaining missing bits of the Rust re-implementation of gnome-keyring to be spec compatible. It is only missing PAM integration for automatically unlocking the keyring when you log in, otherwise most of the features should just work. The code source is available at https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/tree/main/server, any help with testing would be appreciated. Thanks!

Quadrapassel ↗

Fit falling blocks together.

Will Warner reports

Quadrapassel 49.1 is out! This release improves upon 49.0 by updating some of its dependencies, fixing bugs, and polishing the UI. New in 49.1:

Updated translations: Occitan, Chinese (China), Brazilian Portuguese, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Georgian

Improved controller support and controller mappings

Replaced the theme dialog with one that is easier to use

Improved the scores dialog You can check it out on Flathub!

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

I’ve released version 3.1.0 of Pipeline. Starting with this release, Pipeline now fetches data about YouTube videos directly from YouTube instead of proxying over Piped. This is due to pretty much no public Piped instances working anymore. If you have a private Piped instance you want to use, you can still switch back to using Piped in the settings. This change also speeds up fetching the feed of videos a lot, for my personal feed by a factor of about 20.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Ah, Autumn… The trees are wearing their warmest colors, the wine harvest is ending, developers are preparing to hibernate… and Fractal 13.rc is here!

Our repository has been relatively quiet since the beta release, with mostly work on bug fixes for our new audio player, and a bit of code refactoring.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 13.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available! Highlights this week include a new budget, new Circle Committee members, GIMP development grants, and more.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#220 Exemplary Snake

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 03 to October 10.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

the new sidebar widgets have had a few additions the last 2 weeks:

AdwSidebar items can now have tooltips, a context menu and a drop target

AdwViewSwitcherSidebar has the same search API as the regular sidebar now (:filter and :placeholder)

Both types of sidebars can now activate items when hovering them during a drag-n-drop operation, same as view switchers. AdwSidebarItem has API for disabling that, as sometimes it’s unwanted

Third Party Projects

JumpLink announces

Learn 6502 Assembly v0.6.0 is out!

Learn 6502 Assembly is a modern, native GNOME application that provides a complete learning environment for 6502 assembly language programming.

This update adds an all-new Examples section with ready-to-run 6502 assembly programs, including Snake and a Stack example! You can now even share your own code examples directly from within the app, this will open a GitHub pull request automatically.

Grab it on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.50.0 is out:

The phone shell itself got updated to work with GNOME 49. The compositor gained workspace support and the on-screen keyboard now deletes complete words on backspace long press, better handles partially deleted words (when using the presage completer), automatically swaps punctuation and space after completing words and got a slight visual refresh.

There’s more, see the full details at here

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2025.10.2 is here! This release contains new yt-dlp supported plugins and some bug fixes.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added support for the nsig decryption yt-dlp plugin

Added support for the srt_fix yt-dlp plugin

Added the ability to see exact yt-dlp error during validation

Fixed an issue where incompatible OPUS audios would be selected on Windows

Fixed an issue where no formats were available when preferred codecs were set

OS-Installer ↗

A (third-party) generic OS-Installer that can be customized by distributions.

OS-Installer version 0.5 was released this week featuring these changes:

Working translations independent of system languages

Slideshow support, shown during installation

Support for more scripting languages, e.g. Python and Lua

Simpler disk/partition selection with expander rows

Improved output terminal, copying support

Config can be passed as CLI parameter

Extended and simplified config options

Faster search for timezone and region lists

Internal refactorings for a cleaner code base

Added translations (Farsi, Hebrew, Kabyle, Tamil, Vietnamese) and updated existing translations

Many thanks to all translators and everyone providing feedback! Special thanks to Clayton Craft for fixes and extra motivation ✨

Feel free to reach out in our Matrix chat for support.

Miscellaneous

aleasto says

Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 25.10 “Questing Quokka” featuring GNOME 49.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

A weekly update is available with highlights from the GNOME Foundation. This week’s post covers membership requirement changes, Digital Wellbeing progress, Board meeting preparation, and more.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#219 Deciphering Hieroglyphs

Fri, 03 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 26 to October 03.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hieroglyphic ↗

Find LaTeX symbols

FineFindus reports

I’ve just released a new version of Hieroglyphic. Thanks to Brage’s redesign, the application is now responsive and can be used on mobile devices. This release also includes:

support for blackboard bold characters

minor accessibility improvements

improvements to the classifier

a switch to the industry-standard ONNX runtime, which provides some minor speed enhancements

Third Party Projects

Dzheremi announces

Chronograph 5.0 with a new player comes on October 5th On October 5th the Chronograph 5.0 release will come out with a new GStreamer player introducing a better volume control with state saving and more anticipated feature: Playback speed control. It is a good feature for such thing as lyrics syncing, which is Chronograph is used for. This update will help the syncers to more precisely sync lyrics, especially in word-by-word mode, where words could be sung really quick.

Test the new player right now by downloading a Release Candidate, so you may help to find bugs before the release.

Sync lyrics of your loved songs 🕒

Lock ↗

Process data with GnuPG

Konstantin Tutsch says

Lock v1.8.0 is out!

This release marks a milestone.

Lock’s UX and UI, as well as performance, have been gradually improved over the last year. Bugs have been discovered and eliminated. Translations have been updated and extended.

Oh, and this release also moved to the GNOME 49 runtime. So, if you need a native GPG front-end on your GNOME desktop, try Lock!

Available on Flathub

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

Flatseal 2.4.0 is out 🚀

This new release comes with support for the new USB device permission, modernized widgets from Libadwaita 1.8, a way for other third-party applications to launch Flatseal with a given APP ID selected, updated translations, and a few bug fixes.

Get it from Flathub!

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

Another GNOME Foundation weekly update is available for this week. Notable highlights include work done as part of the Sovereign Tech Resilience program, touching base with Black Python Devs, and fun chasing lawyers.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#218 Adaptive Sidebars

Fri, 26 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 19 to September 26.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

libadwaita now has an adaptive sidebar widget - AdwSidebar. A view switcher variant is also available - AdwViewSwitcherSidebar, so we finally have a replacement for GtkStackSidebar. This also means that the demo has an actually nice sidebar now

Third Party Projects

Sepehr Rasouli reports

Sudoku v1.5.0 is here!

Note addition popover now stays open unless the user presses the Done button.

Fixed a bug that made blocks untouchable after completion.

Added Diagonal Sudoku support!

Added Preferences. Users can now disable/enable cell highlighting based on the Sudoku variant they’re playing.

Added Casual Mode. When on, entries are checked against the solution. When off, only rule violations are flagged.

Updated the About section.

Install Sudoku from Flathub, and if you are interested in contributing to the project, please make sure to visit our GitHub page :).

JumpLink reports

Learn 6502 v0.4.0 released!

Learn 6502, the virtual game console playground for learning classic 6502 assembly, just got a colourful upgrade. This version introduces a full theme system with vibrant handheld-inspired colour schemes and a playful purple default. You can now override the system dark or light setting, and you can reset the colours back to the defaults whenever you like.

The interface adapts beautifully to any screen size, making tutorials and debugging comfortable on desktops, laptops and tablets alike.

Big thanks to our new contributor @mmartinortiz for the great desktop layout ideas.

Get it on Flathub and enjoy an even brighter, more flexible way to explore 8-bit assembly.

Mehdi mFat reports

Just released sshPilot on Flathub it’s a user-friendly ssh connection manager/terminal/sftp client for GNOME https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.mfat.sshpilot

Mahyar Darvishi reports

SSH Studio 1.3.1 has been released

This update introduces huge UI/UX improvements, Hosts drag and drop reordering system and major bug fixes. The OSS community is helping us grow this app so we can release it for macOS and Windows soon.

Available now on Flathub!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

What is better for celebrating the season change than to test what is going to be in the next version of Fractal? Fractal 13.beta was released just for that, and it brings:

A brand new audio player that loads files lazily and displays the audio stream as a seekable waveform.

Only a single file with an audio stream can be played at a time, which means that clicking on a “Play” button stops the previous media player that was playing.

Clicking on the avatar of the sender of a message now opens directly the user profile instead of a context menu. The actions that were in the context menu could already be performed from that dialog, so UX is more straightforward now.

The GNOME document and monospace fonts are used for messages.

Most of our UI definitions got ported to Blueprint.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

Bouncer ↗

Bouncer is an application to help you choose the correct firewall zone for wireless connections.

justinrdonnelly reports

Bouncer 49 is out. Besides moving to the GNOME 49 runtime, there are now translations for Occitan and Simplified Chinese. There were also many behind-the-scenes cleanups, including making it easier to contribute additional language translations. Get it from Flathub!

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available this week, with highlights from the past seven days. These include another board meeting, work on banking arrangements, and digital wellbeing progress.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#217 Mahjongg Sundays

Sun, 21 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 14 to September 21.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Tobias Stoeckmann continues to grind away at fixing various integer overflow corner cases in GLib, making the library more reliable for everyone when your program gets into a weird corner case. This week: string utility functions 🎉

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Mahjongg ↗

Match tiles and clear the board

Mahjongg was accepted into Circle! It’s one the historical GNOME games, but thanks to Mat’s work over the past few cycles it looks very fresh and clean nowadays. Congratulations 🥳

https://apps.gnome.org/Mahjongg

Mat says

Mahjongg 49.0 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release contains a bunch of improvements:

New app icon (Tobias Bernard)

Save and restore active games on startup (François Godin)

Adjust theme contrast in dark and high contrast modes

Shake unselectable tiles when clicking them

Replace help docs with Game Rules dialog

Add confirmation dialog for layout change during active game

Rename ‘Difficult’ layout to ‘Taipei’

Remove Date column from Scores dialog to leave more space for player name

Fix text entry focus when recycling rows in Scores dialog

Reduce frame drops when using the Cairo renderer

Use Rsvg directly instead of GdkPixbuf for asset loading

Several performance optimizations related to Scores dialog

Translation updates

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Déjà Dup Backups 49.0 is finally out! This is a big one - Restic by default, restoring by file manager, and a big UI refresh.

Read more here: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/deja-dup-49-0-released/31441

Third Party Projects

Alain says

Planify 4.14 released

We are excited to announce the release of Planify 4.14, which comes with major new features, performance improvements, and important bug fixes.

Highlights of this release include:

Rewritten CalDAV backend with support for Radicale, Baïkal, and other CalDAV servers — thanks to @byquanton.

Fixed memory leaks when completing or deleting tasks, and during CalDAV synchronization — thanks to @markochk.

New view cache system that automatically frees unused memory when views are not in use.

Added customizable sidebar filters: Tomorrow, Someday, Recurring, No label, and All tasks.

Improved synchronization: Planify now respects the task order from Nextcloud and Todoist, with a new reordering algorithm.

Work in progress to make WebKit and Evolution dependencies optional, paving the way for Windows and macOS support — thanks to @byquanton.

Spell checker support in task descriptions.

Fixed bug when moving tasks with subtasks in Nextcloud/CalDAV projects.

Updated themes (Light, Dark, Dark Blue) and improved task design for better readability.

Labels and indicators for notes, reminders, and subtasks are now aligned to the right of task titles.

Added a quick-add button to every task list.

New completion animation and updated sound when finishing tasks.

Completion notification added, so users can easily review completed tasks.

Planify 4.14 is available now on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.alainm23.planify

Read the full announcement here: https://useplanify.com/blog#planify-414-is-here

Everyone makes mistakes, that’s why in Gradia you will be able to edit both positioning and properties like color and size of already drawn elements. This saves you the trouble of having to redo the placement. Follow future developments on Github.

xjuan reports

Casilda 1.0 released! A simple wayland compositor widget for GTK 4

Release notes:

Add dmabuf support (Val Packett)

Added vapi generation (PaladinDev)

Add library soname (Benson Muite)

Implement GtkScrollable iface

Add get_client_socket_fd()

Add spawn_async()

Remove bg-color property

Render windows and popups directly in snapshot()

Position windows on center of widget

Improve transient windows handling

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/gtk/2025/09/15/casilda-1-0-released/

Mahyar Darvishi reports

SSH Studio v1.2.2 is out!

SSH-Studio is a new desktop app for managing your ~/.ssh/config without needing to dive into terminal editors. It makes working with SSH easier by letting you search, edit, and validate hosts in a clean interface.

The app also comes with a raw/diff view for advanced edits, inline error checking, quick actions like copy or test connection, and even a simple SSH key manager. Automatic backups ensure your config stays safe while you experiment.

Check it out on Flathub

GNOME Websites

Guillaume Bernard announces

Starting with GNOME 49, Damned Lies now follows the GNOME release cycle. Even if Damned Lies is continuously deployed, it helps track the changes and will surely motivate developments, as we have a deadline!

For this cycle, as explained in a previous TWIG, we switched authentication to a 3rd party-based system that works like a charm. You can connect with your GNOME SSO account.

Amongst a few changes in the user interface and some bug fixes, we now send notifications in both HTML and plain text. Some elements of the Vertimus workflow have also been fixed, resulting in more stable contributions and better error messages to help translators, reviewers, and committers debug the situation themselves without requiring them to open an issue on Damned Lies’ issue tracker.

Most of the work was done in the background. The code responsible for computing statistics, POT file generation, and Git repositories has been refactored. This is the most important part of this cycle, as it was a requirement to implement other new features: asynchronous Git commits and pushes, and asynchronous refresh of statistics. The number of tests increased from around 300 to more than 500 for the same code coverage.

The existing code is now more stable, and Damned Lies can be continuously deployed without fear. And that’s the case. Did you even notice all the silent updates in September?

Miscellaneous

sadlyascii says

do you maintain a flatpak of an app that uses media codecs? if you do, please upgrade it to the new runtime org.gnome.Platform//49 (org.freedesktop.Platform//25.08)! the older versions download some codecs directly from cisco’s servers, and cisco has geoblocked some places, including the whole Ukraine. so your flatpak might be failing to install for people there, see for details: https://github.com/cisco/openh264/issues/3886

Ada Magicat ❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 says

Valentin added a firewall to GNOME OS. This protects your computer from other devices on the network. By default we use a lax policy to ensure most applications work, but you can change it for more security. Check out the relevant section in our security hardening guide.

We also greatly improved our Nvidia driver support. The driver was in poor condition, but after lots of fixes most features should now work.

If you play games or make use of features like CUDA we would appreciate your help in testing more hardware and applications. GNOME OS is still pre-release software, but if you are interested in testing you can follow the installation instructions here. After installing, enable the Nvidia driver by running:
sudo updatectl enable nvidia-driver --now
Next, reboot and test your favourite game or CUDA application. If you find any issues, feel free to report them here.

Note: We use the new “open” kernel modules by Nvidia, so only 2000 and 1600 series cards or newer work with GNOME OS.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

Another weekly GNOME Foundation update is available, covering highlights from the last seven days. Highlights include the GNOME 49 release, a new fundraising committee, and self-hosting our Matrix homeserver.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#216 Growing Community

Fri, 12 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 05 to September 12.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 announces

I just released libadwaita 1.8! Read the accompanying blog post for details.

Weather ↗

Show weather conditions and forecasts.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

The weather locations database used by libgweather now lives in its own project. If you want to add a city, airport, or weather station to the database used by GNOME apps like Weather, Clocks, and Maps, make sure to read the documentation.

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ announces

GNOME Settings underwent some last-minute changes that will make GNOME 49 an exciting release for everyone using the Orca screen reader:

Orca will allow users to open the settings dialog while the Orca instance is running without ending its processes. It will also enable apps and services to open the dialog through D-Bus instead of using shell commands, specifically orca -s.

GNOME Settings has introduced a button to launch Orca’s settings dialog from the Accessibility panel.

This was made possible thanks to Joanmarie Diggs, the Orca maintainer, who worked on these improvements.

GNOME Development Tools

Sysprof ↗

A profiling tool that helps in finding the functions in which a program uses most of its time.

Sysprof has been receiving a variety of new features, improvements, and bugfixes, as of lately. A few highlights:

An important bug with counters was fixed, and further integration was added to WebKit

It is now possible to hide marks from the waterfall view

Further work on the remote inspector integration, wkrictl, was done

Integration with the Mesa tracing mechanism

Read more here!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) announces

I’ve finally released Apostrophe 3.3. It features a new narrow mode, suitable even for smartphones and small displays, typst as the new default render engine, making the texlive extension unnecessary for exporting pdfs, crash recovery, inline previews, and many, many more improvements. Read the full release notes or download it from flathub

Third Party Projects

JumpLink announces

Learn 6502 v0.3.0 is out!

Learn 6502, the interactive environment for learning assembly through a virtual game console, just got a fresh polish! This release introduces a modern Floating Action Button for quick controls and a refreshed debugger built with Adwaita components.

Under the hood, the app now shares its TypeScript core with an experimental Android build (still in development) — while the GNOME app remains the main focus.

Get it on Flathub.

Sepehr Rasouli reports

Sudoku v1.4.0 is here!

You can now add notes by right-clicking on an empty cell.

Fixed a bug that allowed zero as a valid input. — thanks to @tahairavani

Fixed a bug that applied the hovered style to the pencil toggle button icon. — thanks to @Revisto

Fixed a bug that prevented the help overlay shortcut from working.

Added Ctrl + num to the keyboard shortcuts menu. — thanks to @devforgely

Improved small-screen support for Sudoku.

Install it from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.sepehr_rs.Sudoku

Jeffry Samuel says

Alpaca 8 is now available. It features folders, activities, a built-in web browser and much more.

https://flathub.org/apps/com.jeffser.Alpaca

Quadrapassel ↗

Fit falling blocks together.

Will Warner reports

Quadrapassel 49 is coming soon! This release of Quadrapassel will significantly change how the game works, looks, and feels.

Currently 49.rc.2 is out for testing (on Flathub beta and GNOME nightly).

Due a to lack of maintainership, it has been about 4 years since the last release of Quadrapassel, and Quadrapassel’s codebase has aged significantly in that timeframe. Since I took over the project 2 months ago, a lot of work has been done to improve the game!

Here is a shortened list of recent changes:

Thanks to the translation team, many translations have been either updated or added!

Port to GTK 4

Improve the UI and use Libadwaita

Large improvements the preferences and the scoring

Improved controls and gameplay

Added custom seeds

Made the game playable on a touchscreen

Added a minimized width UI mode for use on phones

Fixed many bugs

You can find a full changelog in Quadrapassel’s NEWS.

GNOME Websites

Mir Sobhan reports

Hi there, greetings from the Persian GNOME community!

A little while ago, we launched https://fa.gnome.org to grow the GNOME community among Persian speakers. We’re now active and excited to connect with anyone interested in free software and GNOME.

If you know any Persian-speaking friends, please invite them to join us! You can find us on Telegram at t.me/gnome_fa and on Matrix at #gnome-fa:gnome.org

Miscellaneous

Ada Magicat ❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 announces

Thanks to Ignacy’s contributions, printing now works on GNOME OS. Any IPP printer should work, but more testing is always appreciated.

Additionally, we switched our filesystem from squashfs to erofs. This new filesystem is a bit faster and enables implementing delta updates. This will allow your system to only download the parts that changed, instead of the entire system image. However, this feature will need more work before it is ready. Stay tuned for future updates.

GNOME OS is still unstable, so testing is always appreciated. You can install it on virtual machines and most hardware. Images and installation instructions are available here: https://os.gnome.org/

Ada Magicat ❤️🧡🤍🩷💜 announces

Last week concluded the Summer of GNOME OS challenge, while this week the awards ceremony was held. Each participant’s score was checked by the organizers and the final rankings are available here. We also held a meeting where we discussed further improvements and long term goals for the project.

During the challenge over 50 issues were filed, many changes were submitted and new hardware got tested. We got valuable feedback on how to improve the operating system, fixed some long standing issues and broadened our hardware support.

Thank you to everyone that participated and to all of you still sticking with GNOME OS as your operating system even after the challenge is done, your help is invaluable.

Benedek Dévényi reports

This week, we reached 450 applications listed on AreWeLibadwaitaYet! It’s a comprehensive list of libadwaita-powered applications available on Flathub, aimed at making it easier to discover all that this ecosystem has to offer. If you are seeking an application for your needs, or just want a new icon in your app grid, check out the website!

Arjan announces

A new release of PyGObject is out: 3.54.0.

This release mainly contains improvements and fixes:

__enum_values__ / __flags_values__ are back

Param specs now also return the expected enum types

Fix regression for functions with multiple callbacks

For a full list check out https://pygobject.gnome.org/changelog.html.

PyGObject can be installed from PyPI and download.gnome.org.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

A GNOME Foundation update is available this week, covering what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past 7 days. Highlights include the GNOME.Asia 2025 call for papers, digital wellbeing development planning, progress around Flathub, and more.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#215 Turn On

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 29 to September 05.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

revisto announces

Drum Machine v1.5.0 is here!

Now you can export your beats to WAV, FLAC, OGG & MP3 with metadata support (artist, title, cover art) and repeat counts.

Available on Flathub!

It would be cool if you shared what you make with Drum Machine with the community (mention me :D)!

As always, we would love to have your contributions to Drum Machine to make it better.

Third Party Projects

Sebastian Wiesner reports

A new release of Turn On is available. With this release you can now set the target address to send the magic Wake On LAN packet to for each device. This enables wake ups over IPv6 and supports more complicated networking scenarios. Previously Turn On always used the standard IPv4 broadcast address on port 9 which is still the default.

Turn On is a small GNOME utility to turn on remote systems such as NAS devices with Wake On LAN magic packets. It’s available from Flathub.

Sepehr Rasouli announces

Sudoku v1.3.0 is here!

Sudoku now generates puzzles with a single unique solution.

You can now add notes using CTRL + number keys, thanks to @tahairavani.

The pencil shortcut has been changed from CTRL + P to P for easier use.

Entry cells now support keyboard input from any keyboard layout.

A bug causing incorrect cell conflict highlighting has been fixed.

Notes are now autosaved.

Focusing on a clue cell now highlights all cells with the same number.

Install it from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.sepehr_rs.Sudoku

Gameeky ↗

Play, create and learn.

Gameeky 0.7.0 is out 🚀

This new release brings several bug fixes and additions to the Python API and code editor, that improve the user and learning experience. Additionally, it has upgraded its GNOME runtime for stability and performance.

If you’re interested in this mix of video games, coding and learning, reach out!

Shell Extensions

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

I present Static Workspace Background, an extension for GNOME Shell available for versions 48 and 49.

Navigate between workspaces without the animation of changing the background wallpaper.

Internships

lbaudin reports

With the end of August it is also the end of Ahmed’s papers GSoC! He worked on backend isolation and managed to write a prototype that loads and renders documents in a separate process. Ahmed wrote a blog post to describe how it was carried out and how this paves the way for a sandboxed document viewer.

GNOME Foundation

steven announces

Steven Deobald is stepping down as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Announcements are available from the Board of Directors and from Steven:

https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2025/08/29/thanks-and-farewell-to-steven-deobald/ https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/08/29/so-short-and-thanks-for-all-the-flinch/

Allan Day reports

An update is available on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past week, including the leadership transition, budgeting, a new sponsor, support for Outreachy, and more.

Read it here: https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2025/09/05/foundation-update-2025-09-05/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#214 Managing Tasks

Fri, 29 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 22 to August 29.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

The new stable release cycle of GTK, 4.20, is now available in time for GNOME 49. Relevant improvements for this development cycle:

YUV support in the video playback widget

Better rendering for symbolic icons

CSS media queries for color scheme and contrast

Path intersection

Rely on portals for session management

Accessibility improvements for entries, file selection dialogs, and more

Better support for Wayland, macOS, Android, and Windows

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Last week Wordbook by Mufeed Ali was accepted into Circle! It’s a super handy offline dictionary for looking up English terms if you’re not sure about the definition. Congratulations!

https://apps.gnome.org/Wordbook

Third Party Projects

Sepehr Rasouli says

Sudoku v1.2.0 is here!

You can now remove your last added note with Backspace

— thanks to @tahairavani

The delete button now removes all notes in a cell

Clue cells are now less transparent than entry cells for better readability

— thanks to @retpoison

How to Play has been reworked for clarity

Sudoku dialogs now have smoother transitions

Fixed: Arrow directions were reversed in RTL (right-to-left) contexts

— thanks to @alexandervanhee

Additionally, Sudoku is now available in Dutch and Persian! Thanks to @AlexanderVanhee and @MirS0bhan.

Install it from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.sepehr_rs.Sudoku

kolunmi announces

Bazaar is now available on Flathub!

Bazaar is a new Flatpak store for GNOME with an emphasis on bringing Flathub to the desktop! It features an efficient interface with fun animations, download queuing, Flathub download statistics graphs, live-search capabilities, and more. Additionally, while not available by default in the Flatpak version, Bazaar supports a highly customizable app curation page which can be configured by distributors.

One of the main goals of the Bazaar project is to expose users to the possibility of funding their favorite FOSS developers through donations. My hope is to strengthen this wonderful ecosystem and eventually provide a completely seamless experience to software management on the Linux desktop!

Check it out on Flathub. Thanks for reading!

Alain reports

Planify 4.13.4 – New Features & Improvements ✨

We’re excited to announce the release of Planify 4.13.4, packed with new features, UI refinements, and important bug fixes that make your task management experience smoother than ever.

🔥 Highlights

Font Size Selector – You can now adjust the font size inside the app for better accessibility and reading comfort.

New Recurring Options – Added support for weekday/weekend recurring tasks, giving you more flexibility when scheduling.

“Today” in Scheduled View – A new Today section helps you quickly see what’s due today alongside upcoming tasks, improving weekly planning at a glance.

Smarter Quick Add – Planify now remembers the last used project in Quick Add, speeding up task creation.

Markdown Support in Task Titles – With the new MarkdownProcessor, task titles now render inline code and markdown styling for clearer task descriptions.

Keyboard Shortcuts Help – Added a handy popover in the task dialog to discover shortcuts for priorities, labels, projects, and reminders.

Adaptive Windows (Partial Support) – Initial improvements for small screens make Planify more comfortable to use across different window sizes.

🐛 Bug Fixes & Polishing

Fixed duplicate sync at startup, avoiding unnecessary background processes.

Improved drag-and-drop animations and fixed the issue where items couldn’t be reordered at the end of a list.

Fixed attachment opening failures with stronger validation and error handling.

Improved shortcut handling so characters like @, !, and p1–p4 can be typed literally in task titles.

Back button in the right sidebar now only appears when a parent task exists (removing duplicate “close” behavior).

Day change detection is now more reliable, even after suspending or closing the laptop.

⚡️ With these updates, Planify becomes faster, smarter, and easier to use — whether you’re planning your week, writing detailed markdown notes, or simply managing daily reminders.

✨ You can now download Planify directly from Flathub.

🌐 We also have a brand new website! Visit us at useplanify.com to learn more.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.49.0 is out:

In phone shell the upcoming events plugin can now filter out days without events, the thumbnails in the media player widget have been improved and lock screen’s keypad and the overview’s search bar use a bit of alpha blending now. The Wayland compositor phoc gained some sysprof support and the on screen keyboard now scales better to different phone sizes in portrait mode.

There’s more, see the full details at here

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede announces

GirCore 0.7.0-preview.2 got released. It features new bindings for GstApp and librsvg. Additionally signals on interfaces are now available in the bindings, some bugs got squashed and a new convenience method to retrieve a region of GLib.Bytes data as a ‘ReadOnlySpan’ was added.

If you are interested to write a GObject / GTK based app in dotnet (C# / F#) feel free to checkout the GirCore website.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Our latest stable release had a regression where sending media with the unauthenticated endpoints was failing. Fractal 12.1 fixes it, and provides a couple other papercut fixes.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly. You could even get rid of our remaining bugs yourself!

Shell Extensions

The Just Perfection extension version 35 has been released with GNOME Shell 49 support, a new feature to disable window menu and some bug fixes.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#213 Fixed Rules

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 15 to August 22.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie (she/her) announces

Glycin 2.0.beta.3 has been released. Among the important changes are fixes for thumbnailers not working in certain configurations, loading speed for JPEG XL having been dramatically improved, fixed sandbox rules that broke image loading on some systems, and fixed editing for some JPEG images saved in progressive mode.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Déjà Dup 49.beta was released! It just fixes a few small bugs and uses the new libadwaita shortcuts dialog.

But if you haven’t tried the 49.x branch yet, it has a big UI refactor and adds file-manager-based restore for Restic backups.

Read more details and install instructions in the previous 49.alpha announcement. Thanks for any testing you can do before this reaches the masses!

Third Party Projects

Mir Sobhan announces

We forked the TWIG website and forged it into a “good first issue” tracker. It catches all GNOME-related projects on GitHub and GNOME GitLab to show issues labeled “good first issue” or “Newcomers.” This can help newcomers find places to contribute including myself.

Website: https://ggfi.mirsobhan.ir Repo: https://gitlab.gnome.org/misano/goodfirstissue

Džeremi says

Chronograph gets a BIG new 4.0 update!

What is Chronograph?

Chronograph is an app for syncing lyrics, making them display like karaoke in supported players. It comes with a beautiful GTK4 + LibAdwaita interface and includes a built-in metadata editor, so you can manage your music library along with syncing lyrics. Default LRC files can be published to the large lyrics database LRClib.net, which is widely used by many open-source players to fetch lyrics. Until now, Chronograph supported only line-by-line lyrics, which was enough for most cases since standard LRC is the most common format. But times change…

Word-by-Word support!

Starting August 24th, Chronograph will gain support for Word-by-Word syncing. This feature uses the eLRC format (also known as LRC A2 or Enchanted LRC). In eLRC, each word has its own timestamp, allowing players that support it to animate lyrics word-by-word, giving you a true karaoke experience. And this is just the beginning: future updates will also bring support for TTML (Timed Text Markup Language).

Final notes

I hope you’ll enjoy using the latest version of Chronograph, and together we can spread awareness of eLRC to the wider community. Sync lyrics of your loved songs! ♥️

Nathan Perlman announces

Rewaita — Give Adwaita some flavour

Hi there, a few weeks ago I released Rewaita, a spiritual successor to Gradience. With it, you can recolour GTK4/Adwaita apps to popular colour schemes. That’s where the name comes from ~ Re(colour Ad)waita.

As of v1.0.4, released this week, you can create your own custom colour palettes if the ones we provide don’t suit you, and you can also change the window controls to be either coloured or MacOS-styled.

You can find it on Flathub, but also in the AUR and NIXPKGS (the Nix Package is still under review).

Rewaita is also going through rapid development, so any help would be appreciated, or just leave us a star :). In particular, GTK3 and Cinnamon support are next up on the chopping block.

Miscellaneous

JumpLink says

ts-for-gir - TypeScript bindings for GObject Introspection

This week we’ve released a major improvement for GObject interface implementation: Virtual Interface Generation.

Instead of having to implement all methods of a GObject interface, developers can now only implement the virtual methods (vfunc_*). This matches the actual GObject-Introspection pattern and makes interface implementation much cleaner.

Before (implement all methods):
class CustomPaintable implements Gdk.Paintable {
  // Implement all methods manually
  get_current_image(): Gdk.Paintable { ... }
  get_flags(): Gdk.PaintableFlags { ... }
  get_intrinsic_width(): number { ... }
  // ... and many more
}
After (only virtual methods):
class CustomPaintable implements Gdk.Paintable.Interface {
  // Declare for TypeScript compatibility
  declare get_current_image: Gdk.Paintable["get_current_image"];
  declare get_flags: Gdk.Paintable["get_flags"];
  
  // Only implement virtual methods
  vfunc_get_current_image(): Gdk.Paintable { ... }
  vfunc_get_flags(): Gdk.PaintableFlags { ... }
}
We’ve created a comprehensive example: https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir/tree/main/examples/virtual-interface-test

This shows both Gio.ListModel and Gdk.Paintable implementations using the new pattern.

Release: v4.0.0-beta.35 and v4.0.0-beta.36

Note: Last week we also released v4.0.0-beta.34 which introduced Advanced Variant Types by default, completing the gi.ts integration with enhanced TypeScript support for GLib.Variant.deepUnpack() and better type inference for GObject patterns.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#212 Happy Birthday!

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 08 to August 15.

Cassidy says

On August 15, 1997, Miguel de Icaza announced the start of GNOME on the GTK mailing list. Twenty-eight years later a lot has changed, but we continue to develop and iterate on “a free and complete set of user friendly applications and desktop tools… based entirely on free software.”

To help us continue this work far into the future, we hope you join us in celebrating our birthday by becoming a Friend of GNOME today! 🎂

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

FineFindus announces

We have now merged the next part of the Rust port of GNOME Disks, which ports the disk image restore dialog (or the more common use case: flashing ISO disk images to USB drives) to Rust. This also enables the new Disk Image Mounter to write disk images to drives when clicking on a disk image file without opening GNOME Disks.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

A week ago GTK landed CSS media queries support. As of today, libadwaita supports it too, both in its own styles and in app-provided styles. So, apps can now write CSS like this:
:root {
  --my-custom-color: black;
}

my-widget {
  color: var(--my-custom-color);
}

@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
  :root {
    --my-custom-color: white;
  }
}

@media (prefers-contrast: more) {
  my-widget {
    box-shadow: inset 0 0 0 1px var(--border-color);
  }
}
style-dark.css, style-hc.css and style-hc-dark.css are still supported for this cycle, but they will be deprecated early next cycle and removed in libadwaita 2.0, so apps are encouraged to switch to media queries.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now shows highway shields in place popovers when clicking on road labels (when custom localized shields are defined). And also the user’s avatar is shown in the OpenStreetMap account dialog for setting POI editing (when the user has set an avatar on their account)

Third Party Projects

Jeff reports

In this blog post, Mitchell Hashimoto discusses the recent rewrite of the Ghostty GTK frontend. He focuses on how Zig interfaces with the GObject type system and using Valgrind to ensure that memory leaks are not introduced by application code. https://mitchellh.com/writing/ghostty-gtk-rewrite

andypiper says

Oh, hi. Long time reader, first time poster. I released Fedinspect, a little GNOME app for developers to 🔍 inspect the configuration of fediverse servers, and also run WebFinger lookup queries for individual ActivityPub actors. It will query nodeinfo and other .well-known URIs for these servers, and you can dig into JSON responses and HTTP headers as needed. Maybe niche, hopefully useful to some folks!

You can find it on Flathub. Also, the icon in particular could do with some help to be a bit more GNOMEish, so feel free to help out if you’re so inclined!

Ronnie Nissan reports

Embellish v0.5.1 was released today, featuring a redesign to the header bar and a new Icons page to explore, search and copy Nerd Fonts icons.

The codebase also switched to using Blueprint instead of UI files.

The issue where the list of fonts would jump to the top whenever a font was installed or removed has also been fixed.

Embellish is available only through Flathub, hope you enjoy the new feature.

Alain says

🚀 Planify 4.13.2 – Improvements, Fixes & More Control Over Your Tasks The new 4.13.2 release of Planify is here, focusing on delivering a more stable, smoother, and customizable task management experience.

Here’s what’s new and improved:

Better all-day event handling – Events are now correctly detected based on your local time.

More control with Todoist – If you can’t log in via OAuth, you can now manually enter your Todoist token.

Improved text editing – The description area now has a limited height with scrolling, placeholders behave correctly, and your text won’t reset when repositioning the cursor.

Natural sorting – Lists now correctly order strings with numbers (e.g., item2 before item10).

Smoother navigation – Improved visual alignment for note-type tasks and the option to display completed tasks directly below pending ones with pagination.

Stability fixes – Adjustments to project view transitions, keyboard shortcuts, task duplication, and more.

💬 We’ve also updated translations, added a Discord link, and made several under-the-hood optimizations.

Sepehr Rasouli reports

Sudoku V1.1.2 is here! Sudoku is a new modern app focused on delivering a clean, distraction-free experience. Designed with simplicity and comfort in mind, it features a straightforward interface that helps players stay focused and enjoy the game without unnecessary clutter or complications.

Features:

Modern GTK4 and libadwaita interface

Keyboard shortcuts for quick access to all functions

Save and load games seamlessly to continue your progress anytime

Highlight active row and cell to improve focus and ease of play

Conflict highlighting to spot mistakes — perfect for learning

Fun for all skill levels, from beginners to experts

The project is still in its early stages, so contributions are warmly welcome!

Semen Fomchenkov announces

Introducing Hashsum — a modern checksum utility

This week, the ALT Gnome and ALT Linux Team present Hashsum — a file checksum calculation utility built with GTK4/Libadwaita, inspired by the ideas behind Collision and GTK Hash.

We greatly appreciate the minimalist interface of Collision, but most GTK developers in our community create applications in Vala, so we decided to take the base from Collision and rewrite it from Crystal to make future development and maintenance easier. With Hashsum, we’ve combined the clean UI of Collision with the broad algorithm support of GTK Hash, adding the conveniences our community has been asking for.

Features

Modern GTK4/Libadwaita interface inspired by Collision.

Support for the following algorithms: MD5, SHA-1, SHA-256, SHA-512, BLAKE3, CRC-32, Adler-32, GOST R 34.11-94, Streebog-256/512 (via gcrypt and blake3).

Flexible selection: enable only the algorithms you actually need.

Accurate progress display for large file computations.

Files (Nautilus) plugin: calculate checksums directly from the file manager’s context menu.

Developed in Vala with love.

What’s next?

We plan to submit Hashsum to Flathub, but our immediate focus will be on adding features important to the community — ensuring it’s not just a direct analog of Collision. Ideas and bug reports are welcome: https://altlinux.space/alt-gnome/Hashsum/issues/new

Best regards to the developers of the Collision project — your enthusiasm and drive for innovation are truly inspiring.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.8.0 is here! This release contains new features, bug fixes, and an updated yt-dlp.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to update yt-dlp from within the app when a newer version is available

Added padding to single digit numbered titles in playlist downloads

Replaced None translation language with en_US

Fixed an issue where validating some media would cause the app to crash

Fixed an issue where the app would not open on Windows

Fixed an issue where download rows disappeared on GNOME

Updated yt-dlp

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Knock, knock, knock… on ~~wood~~ rooms, baby 🎵 Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh ooh 🎶 That’s right, Fractal 12 adds support for knocking, among other things. Read all about the improvements since 11.2:

Requesting invites to rooms (aka knocking) is now possible, as is enabling such requests for room admins.

The upcoming room version 12 is supported, with the special power level of room creators.

A room can be marked as unread via the context menu in the sidebar.

You can now see if a section in the sidebar has any notifications or activity when it is collapsed.

Clicking on the name of the sender of a message adds a mention to them in the composer.

The safety setting to hide media previews in rooms is now synced between Matrix clients and we added another safety setting (which is also synced) to hide avatars in invites.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to join the gang, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new members!

Internships

Aryan Kaushik reports

The GNOME Foundation is interested in participating in the December-March cohort of Outreachy.

If you are interested in mentoring AND have a project idea in mind, please visit https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/internship-project-ideas/-/issues and submit your proposal by 10th September 2025.

We are always on the lookout for project ideas that move the GNOME project forward!

If you have any questions, please feel free to post them on our matrix - #internship:gnome.org or e-mail soc-admins@gnome.org.

Looking forward to your proposals!

GNOME Foundation

steven says

New Foundation Update:

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/08/08/2025-08-08-foundation-update/

bureaucracy (yay?)

apology to GIMP

advisory board room

early draft budget

501(c)(3) structural improvements

explaining the travel policy freeze

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#211 Handling Brightness

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 01 to August 08.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

swick says

Screen brightness handling has been overhauled! The immediate benefit is that the screen brightness controls in the Quick Settings menu now work in HDR mode and with multiple monitors.

Read more in my blog post: https://blog.sebastianwick.net/posts/gnome-49-backlight-changes/

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Tobias Stoeckmann has been fixing many corner cases in array handling code in GLib, making it more robust, and has also found time to help with reformatting and improving the documentation.

We could do with help to finish the port of GLib to gi-docgen! If you can spare half an hour to tidy up a piece of the API documentation so it follows the new API doc guidelines then please pick something off #3250, thank you!

GNOME Incubating Apps

right before the UI freeze, Papers got a new text selection style, matching the rest of the apps - selection is translucent, and the original text color is visible through it. This required an API addition in Poppler and will only work in nightly for now - if Poppler is too old, it will revert to the previous style

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

GeopJr 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

Tuba v0.10.0 is now available, with many new features and bug fixes!

✨ Highlights:

New Composer

Grouped Notifications

Play media from third-party services in-app with Clapper

In-app web browser

Collapse long posts

Mastodon quotes

Iceshrimp Drive

‘Featured’ Profile tab

Local-only posting

Search History

Alt text from file metadata

Third Party Projects

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ says

Gradia now has at least 127% more gradients thanks to the new gradient selector, which now supports radial and conic modes as well as custom color stops. I also took advantage of Gradia being a windowed annotation tool by implementing zooming, making it easier to draw with precision.

Try it out via Flathub.

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi announces

Pipeline version 3.0.0 was released. This release is a major redesign of the UI to be more intuitive as well as adaptive for both desktop and mobile. See the changelog for more information regarding the release. Huge thanks to lo for creating the mockup as well as helping to implement and test this version, as well as Alexander for the help implementing quite a lot of the updated UI and also testing.

If you are running Pipeline on an older device without GLES 3.0 support like the PinePhone, note that due to an update in GTK removing GLES 2.0 support the application will now be software rendered, decreasing performance and breaking the internal video player. I recommend switching to use an external video player, like Clapper, instead. There is also a setting to use cairo software rendering instead of LLVMpipe, which in my testing improves performance a bit on those devices.

GNOME Foundation

barthalion announces

GNOME Foundation members (and SSO account holders in general) have two new services at their disposal:

vault.gnome.org, a password manager backed by Vaultwarden. Create an account with your @gnome.org e-mail alias; it is not tied to the SSO and so accounts remain active even when the membership expires. Please keep in mind we cannot recover your password, and thus the content of your vault, unless you are a member of staff or the board.

reader.gnome.org, an RSS reader backed by Miniflux. Simply log in with your SSO account like to other services. It can also be used with Newsflash after generating an API key in settings.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#210 Periodic Updates

Fri, 01 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 25 to August 01.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 announces

last cycle, libadwaita gained a way to query the system document font, even though it was same as the UI font. This cycle it has been made larger (12pt instead of 11pt) and we have a new .document style class that makes the specified widget use it (as well as increases line height) - intended to be used for the app content such as messages in a chat client.

Meanwhile, the formerly useless .body style class also features increased line height now (along with .caption) and can be used to make labels such as UI descriptions more legible compared to default styles. Some examples of where it’s already used:

Dialog body text

Preferences group description

Status page description

What’s new, legal and troubleshooting sections in about dialogs

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

revisto announces

Drum Machine 1.4.0 is out! 🥁

Drum Machine, a GNOME Circle application, now supports more pages (bars) for longer beats, mobile improvements, and translations in 17 languages! You can try it out and do more creativity with it.

What’s new: • Extended pattern grid for longer, more complex rhythms • Mobile-responsive UI that adapts to different screen sizes • Global reach with translations including Farsi, Chinese, Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, and more

If you have any suggestions and ideas, you can always contribute and make Drum Machine better, all ideas (even better/more default presets) are welcome!

Available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.revisto.drum-machine

Happy drumming! 🎶

Third Party Projects

lo reports

After a while of working on and off, I have finally released the first version of Nucleus, a periodic table app for searching and viewing various properties of the chemical elements!

You can get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/page.codeberg.lo_vely.Nucleus

francescocaracciolo says

Newelle 1.0.0 has been released! Huge release for this AI assistant for Gnome.

📱 Mini Apps support! Extensions can now show custom mini apps on the sidebar

🌐 Added integrated browser Mini App: browse the web directly in Newelle and attach web pages

📁 Improved integrated file manager, supporting multiple file operations

👨‍💻 Integrated file editor: edit files and codeblocks directly in Newelle

🖥 Integrated Terminal mini app: open the terminal directly in Newelle

💬 Programmable prompts: add dynamic content to prompts with conditionals and random strings

✍️ Add ability to manually edit chat name

🪲 Minor bug fixes

🚩 Added support for multiple languages for Kokoro TTS and Whisper.CPP

💻 Run HTML/CSS/JS websited directly in app

✨ New animation on chat change

Get it on FlatHub

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Want to get a head start and try out Fractal 12 before its release? That’s what this Release Candidate is for! New since 12.beta:

The upcoming room version 12 is supported, with the special power level of room creators

Requesting invites to rooms (aka knocking) is now possible

Clicking on the name of the sender of a message adds a mention to them in the composer

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 12.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

GNOME Websites

Guillaume Bernard reports

After months of work and test, it’s now possible to connect to Damned Lies using third party providers. You can now use your GNOME SSO account as well as other common providers used by translators: Fedora, Launchpad, GitHub and GitLab.com. The login/password authentication has been disabled and email addresses are validated for security reasons.

On another hand, under the hood, Damned Lies has been modernized: we upgrade to Fedora 42, which provides a fresher gettext (0.23) and we moved to Django 5.2 LTS and Python 3.13. Users can expect performances improvements, as we replaced the Apache mod_wsgi by gunicorn that is said as more CPU and RAM efficient.

Next step is working on async git pushes and merge requests support. Help is very welcome on these topics!

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The GNOME Shell 49 port guide for extensions is ready! We are now accepting GNOME Shell 49 extension packages on EGO. Please join us on the GNOME Extensions Matrix Channel if you have any issues porting your extension. Also, thanks to Florian Müllner, gnome-extensions has added a new upload command for GNOME Shell 49, making it easier to upload your extensions to EGO. You can also use it with CI.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#209 GUADEC 2025

Fri, 25 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project during the last two weeks from July 11 to July 25.

GUADEC 2025 is currently ongoing! You can find more details on events.gnome.org.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

sp1rit says

We have managed to find & circumvent the bug in the Adreno Android driver that was causing the GTK OpenGL renderer to break.

This means that GTK should now work with GL rendering for users with an Adreno GPU (i.e. Qualcomm SOC) on Android.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

After two weeks of writing, revising, and trying to make everything as digestible as possible, I finally published “GNOME Calendar: A New Era of Accessibility Achieved in 90 Days”, where I explain in detail the steps we took to turn GNOME Calendar from an app that was literally unusable with a keyboard and screen reader to an app that is (finally) accessible to keyboard and screen reader users as of GNOME 49!

https://tesk.page/2025/07/25/gnome-calendar-a-new-era-of-accessibility-achieved-in-90-days/

Third Party Projects

Alexander Vanhee reports

After coming back from vacation, I was able to make quite a bit of progress this week in Gradia, featuring two new additions.

The first is the much requested cropping tool. It took me some time to figure out exactly what I wanted from such a tool in the context of Gradia, with its background layers, annotations, and all. I finally implemented something that is (hopefully) nice to use.

The second feature is source snippets. It’s designed to make it easier to share a piece of code you’re particularly proud of on social media. It lets you control things like line width, padding, themes, and the like, without having to temporarily adjust those settings in your code editor.

You can download Gradia on Flathub or the Snap Store, for those who prefer that.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

In our continued effort to make typing on phones easier and faster stevia (an on screen keyboard for phosh) can now dynamically adjust to the output scale when in portrait mode. This ensures that the on screen keyboard remains at the same physical size independent from the screen’s actual mode and scale. It can also add an empty space below the actual keys to make typing easier on taller phones. The images show the OSK at scale 2.5 and 3.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2025.7.0 is here! This release contains some new features and bug fixes.

Here’s the full changelog:

Redesigned the Windows app using WinUI 3

Added the ability to change the application’s translation language

Added the ability to remember video and audio formats individually for each file type

Fixed an issue where pressing enter in the download dialog would not start the download

Fixed an issue where configuration files were not stored properly for the portable Windows build

Fixed an issue where downloads did not pause and resume on Windows

Fixed an issue where there would sometimes be leftover separators in the downloads list on GNOME

Fixed some elements of the GNOME UI as we get closer to joining GNOME Circle

Updated yt-dlp

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi says

Flare version 0.17.0 was released. This switches how Flare stores its data to sqlite. This change is not backwards compatible, you will therefore need to relink after updating Flare. This also fixes a bug where contacts were displayed as phone numbers or “Unknown Contact” instead of their name.

Shell Extensions

axet announces

New system monitor gnome shell extension. Simple UI. Compact view. Based on gnome system monitor. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8272/system-monitor/

GNOME Foundation

steven says

2025-07-12 Foundation Update

new treasurers!

pmOS joins the Advisory Board

donate.gnome.org gets better

Framework Computer & Slimbook, our new friends

Annual Report and GUADEC talk

“It’s Not 1998”

Office Hours

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/07/12/2025-07-12-foundation-update/

steven reports

2025-07-18 Foundation Report

Annual Report

501c3 nonsense

“Hackers”

A rant about retaining capital in non-profits

Private spaces for Community Health

Preliminary board/officer assignments

Banking: resilience & bookkeeping

GUADEC cometh

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/07/21/2025-07-18-foundation-update/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#208 Converting Colors

Fri, 11 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 04 to July 11.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

FineFindus reports

GNOME Calendar now allows exporting events as .ics files, allowing them to be easily shared.

GNOME Development Tools

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

Nokse reports

This week GNOME Builder received some new features!

Inline git blame to see who last modified each line of code

Changes and diagnostics overview displayed directly in the scrollbar

Enhanced LSP markdown rendering with syntax highlighting

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Déjà Dup Backups 49.alpha is out for testing!

It features a UI refresh and file-manager-based restores (for Restic only).

Read the announcement for install instructions and more info.

Any feedback is appreciated!

Third Party Projects

Dev Toolbox ↗

Dev tools at your fingertips

Alessandro Iepure reports

When I first started Dev Toolbox, it was just a simple tool I built for myself, a weekend project born out of curiosity and the need for something useful. I never imagined anyone else would care about it, let alone use it regularly. I figured maybe a few developers here and there would find it helpful. But then people started using it. Reporting bugs. Translating it. Opening pull requests. Writing reviews. Sharing it with friends. And suddenly, it wasn’t just my toolbox anymore. Fast forward to today: over 50k downloads on Flathub and 300 stars on GitHub. I still can’t quite believe it.

To every contributor, translator, tester, reviewer, or curious user who gave it a shot: thank you. You turned a small idea into something real, something useful, and something I’m proud to keep building.

Enough feelings. Let’s talk about what’s new in v1.3.0!

New tool: Color Converter Convert between HEX, RGB, HSL, and other formats. (Thanks @Flachz)

JWT tool improvements You can now encode payloads and verify signatures. (Thanks @Flachz)

Chmod tool upgrade Added support for setuid, setgid, and the sticky bit. (Thanks @Flachz)

Improved search, inside and out

The app now includes extra keywords and metadata, making it easier to discover in app stores and desktops

In-app search now matches tool keywords, not just their names. (Thanks @freeducks-debug)

Now a GNOME search provider You can search and launch Dev Toolbox tools straight from the Overview

Updated translations Many new translatable strings were added this release. Thank you to all translators who chipped in.

GNOME Websites

Victoria 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 she/her reports

On welcome.gnome.org, of all of the listed teams, only Translation and Documentation Teams linked to their wikis instead of their respective Welcome pages. But now this changes for Translation Team! After several months of working on this we finally have our own Welcome page. Now is the best time to make GNOME speak your language!

Miscellaneous

Arjan reports

PyGObject has support for async functions since 3.50. Now the async functions and methods are also discoverable from the GNOME Python API documentation.

GNOME Foundation

steven announces

The 2025-07-05 Foundation Update is out:

Grants and Fellowships Plan

Friends of GNOME, social media partners, shell notification

Annual Report… I haven’t done it yet

Fiscal Controls and Operational Resilience… yay?

Digital Wellbeing Frontend Kickoff

Office Hours

A Hacker in Need

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/07/05/2025-07-05-foundation-update/

Digital Wellbeing Project ↗

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) reports

As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering. Recently the UI for the unlock page was refreshed, the user selector was reworked to be a list rather than a carousel, and navigation was changed to use pages. There’s more to come, see https://blogs.gnome.org/ignapk/2025/07/11/digital-wellbeing-contract/ for more information.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#207 Replacing Shortcuts

Fri, 04 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 27 to July 04.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

The Release Team is happy to announce, that Papers will be the default Document Viewer starting with GNOME 49. This comes after a Herculean effort of the Papers maintainers and contributors that started about four years ago. The inclusion into GNOME Core was lately only blocked by missing screen-reader support, which is now ready to be merged. Papers is a fork of Evince motivated by a faster pace of development.

Papers is not just a GTK 4 port but also brings new features like a better document annotations and support for mobile form factors. It is currently maintained by Pablo Correa Gomez, Qiu Wenbo, Markus Göllnitz, and lbaudin.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

While GdkPixbuf, the elderly statesperson of image loading libraries in GNOME, is being phased out in favour or better alternatives, like Glycin, we are still hard at work to ensure it’s working well enough while applications and libraries are ported. Two weeks ago, GdkPixbuf acquired a safe, sandboxed image loader using Glycin; this week, this loader has been updated to be the default on Linux. The Glycin loader has also been updated to read SVG, and save image data including metadata. Additionally, GdkPixbuf has a new Android-native loader, using platform API; this allows loading icon assets when building GTK for Android. For more information, see the release notes for GdkPixbuf 2.43.3, the latest development snapshot.

Sophie 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ (she/her) announces

The nightly GNOME Flatpak runtime and SDK org.gnome.Sdk//master are now based on the Freedesktop runtime and SDK 25.08beta. If you are using the nightly runtime in you Flatpak development manifest, you might have to adjust a few things:

If you are using the LLVM extension, the required sdk-extensions is now org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm20. Don’t forget to also adjust the append-path. On your development system you will probably also have to run flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm20//25.08beta.

If you are using other SDK extensions, they might also require a newer version. They can be installed with commands like flatpak install org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable//25.08beta.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

libadwaita finally has a replacement for the deprecated GtkShortcutsWindow - AdwShortcutsDialog. AdwShortcutLabel is available as a separate widget as well, replacing GtkShortcutLabel

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ announces

Happy Disability Pride Month everybody :)

During the past few weeks, there’s been an overwhelming amount of progress with accessibility on GNOME Calendar:

Event widgets/popovers will convey to screen readers that they are toggle buttons. They will also convey of their states (whether they’re pressed or not) and that they have a popover. (See !587)

Calendar rows will convey to screen readers that they are check boxes, along with their states (whether they’re checked or not). Additionally, they will no longer require a second press of a tab to get to the next row; one tab will be sufficient. (See !588)

Month and year spin buttons are now capable of being interacted with using arrow up/down buttons. They will also convey to screen readers that they are spin buttons, along with their properties (current, minimum, and maximum values). The month spin button will also wrap, where going back a month from January will jump to December, and going to the next month from December will jump to January. (See !603)

Events in the agenda view will convey to screen readers of their respective titles and descriptions. (See !606)

All these improvements will be available in GNOME 49.

Accessibility on Calendar has progressed to the point where I believe it’s safe to say that, as of GNOME 49, Calendar will be usable exclusively with a keyboard, without significant usability friction!

There’s still a lot of work to be done in regards to screen readers, for example conveying time appropriately and event descriptions. But really, just 6 months ago, we went from having absolutely no idea where to even begin with accessibility in Calendar — which has been an ongoing issue for literally a decade — to having something workable exclusively with a keyboard and screen reader! :3

Huge thanks to Jeff Fortin for coordinating the accessibility initiative, especially with keeping the accessibility meta issue updated; Georges Stavracas for single-handedly maintaining GNOME Calendar and reviewing all my merge requests; and Lukáš Tyrychtr for sharing feedback in regards to usability.

All my work so far has been unpaid and voluntary; hundreds of hours were put into developing and testing all the accessibility-related merge requests. I would really appreciate if you could spare a little bit of money to support my work, thank you! 🩷

https://ko-fi.com/theevilskeleton

https://github.com/sponsors/TheEvilSkeleton

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

We recently switched our legacy image loading library GdkPixbuf over to using glycin internally, which is our new image loading library. Glycin is safer, faster, and supports more features. Something that we missed is how much software depends on the image saving capabilities of GdkPixbuf for different formats. But that’s why we are making such changes early in the cycle to find these issues.

Glycin now supports saving images for the AVIF, BMP, DDS, Farbfeld, GIF, HEIC, ICO, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, QOI, TGA, TIFF, and WebP image formats. JXL will hopefully follow. This means GdkPixbuf can also save the formats that it could save before. The changes are available as glycin 2.0.alpha.6 and gdk-pixbuf 2.43.3.

Third Party Projects

Gradia has been updated with the ability to upload edited images to an online provider of choice. I made sure users are both well informed about these services and can freely choose without being forced to use any particular one. The data related to this feature can also be updated dynamically without requiring a new release, enabling us to quickly address any data quality issues and update the list of providers as needed, without relying on additional package maintainer intervention.

You can find the app on Flathub.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have released a MCP (Model Context Protocol) server implementation that allows LLMs to access and interact with your favourite desktop environment. The implementation is available at https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/gnome-mcp-server and you can read a bit more about it in my recent blog post https://belmoussaoui.com/blog/21-mcp-server

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.48.0 is out:

There’s a new lock screen plugin that show all currently running media players (that support the MPRIS interface). You can thus switch between Podcasts, Shortwave and Gapless without having to unlock the phone.

We also updated phosh’s compositor phoc to wlroots 0.19.0 bringing all the goodies from this releases. Phoc now also remembers the output scale in case the automatic scaling doesn’t match your expectations.

There’s more, see the full details at here

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#206 Hot Days

Fri, 27 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 20 to June 27.

Third Party Projects

ranfdev says

DistroShelf now makes it even easier to run your favorite distro:

Support for more terminals have been added, plus the ability to use a custom terminal command

A command log has been added: you can now view precisely each command that’s been executed by DistroShelf and copy it to your clipboard. You can use this for learning how the app interacts with distrobox or debugging why a command failed.

A bug affecting the Assemble from File and Assemble from URL functionality has been fixed. You can finally point DistroShelf to a .ini file containing a set of containers you want to be created, along with the initial packages you need and all the GUI apps you want to export and use from your desktop. More info on this feature from the distrobox documentation documentation.

Automatic host path resolution: when selecting a file/folder from a flatpak portal, the portal returns a dummy path, representing a capability to access the file you want, but not the absolute path you selected. We now use getfattr to resolve the dummy path to the real host path you selected. If you encounter any problem with this solution, notify us by opening an issue

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi announces

Pipeline version 2.6.0 was released. This release adds more keyboard shortcuts to the video player, like changing the volume or playback speed, as well as seeking in the video. Furthermore, you can now hide the sidebar when viewing a video. Pipeline now also displays a setup window on first startup, allowing the user to import their subscriptions from YouTube or NewPipe, as well as informing the user about privacy implications when using Pipeline. This release also fixes a few minor errors, as well as minor UI issues. For details about those fixes, refer to the changelog.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Hot! Hot! Hot! No, we are not talking about the summer weather in the northern hemisphere, but about the brand new release of Fractal 12.beta! Coming soon to your device:

The safety setting to hide media previews in rooms is now synced between Matrix clients.

We added another safety setting (which is also synced) to hide avatars in invites.

A room can be marked as unread via the context menu in the sidebar.

We changed the UX a little for tombstoned rooms. Instead of showing a banner at the top of the history, it now replaces the composer at the bottom of the history.

You can now see if a section in the sidebar has any notifications or activity when it is collapsed.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you are wondering how to lower the temperature in your house, there is nothing cooler than fixing one of our newcomers issues!

GNOME Foundation

steven reports

The June 27th Foundation Report is out! This week:

In dev research/funding news: Flathub/Flatpak, libxml2, and Digital Wellbeing

In best friends news: GIMP, KDE, Framework Computer, and the Python Foundation

In money news: new treasurers, OSU-OSL fundraising, and GNOME fundraising

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/06/27/2025-06-27-foundation-report/

steven reports

… and last week:

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/06/20/2025-06-20-foundation-report/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#205 Loading Films

Fri, 20 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 13 to June 20.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Maps now shows localized metro/railway station icons in some locations

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Matthijs Velsink announces

We ported the GNOME Settings app to Blueprint! UI definition files are much easier to read and write in Blueprint compared to the standard XML syntax that GTK uses. Hopefully this makes UI contributions more approachable to newcomers. In any case, reviewing UI changes has gotten quite enjoyable already! Settings is one of the first large core apps to make the switch (together with Calendar), and Blueprint is still considered experimental, but the experience has been great so far. Small missing features in Blueprint have not been dealbreakers.

Many thanks to Jamie Gravendeel who did most of the work and together with Hari Rana motivated us to consider the port in the first place! We’d like to thank James Westman as well for creating Blueprint and making the whole porting process so straightforward.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️‍⚧️ announces

GNOME Calendar received a nice visual overhaul, thanks to the code contributed by Markus Göllnitz, which the design was led by Philipp Sauberz and Jeff Fortin. You can find the really long discussion on GitLab. This should hopefully make Calendar work better on smaller monitors thanks to the collapsible sidebar.

Afterwards, Jamie Gravendeel ported the entirety of GNOME Calendar to Blueprint. This should hopefully make it easier for everyone to contribute to Calendar’s UI.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Ignacy Kuchciński (ignapk) says

There was recently an interesting improvement in GLib, that makes sure your Trash is really empty, by fixing a bug resulting in leftover files in ~/.local/share/Trash/expunged/. For more information, check out https://ignapk.blogspot.com/2025/06/taking-out-trash-or-just-sweeping-it.html

Third Party Projects

bjawebos reports

In my spare time I like to take photographs. I use different cameras with different characteristics and therefore different purposes. Most of these cameras use film as the image carrier medium. It happened a few weeks ago that I wanted to use a camera and wondered whether it had film in it or not. I was of the opinion that there was no film inserted and I opened the back of the camera. What can I say, of course there was film inside. It wasn’t much damage, I lost about 3-5 pictures. Nevertheless, I had to find a solution and since I wanted to learn more about GTK4/libadwaita and Rust anyway, I combined these two topics.

So here is the application for photographers who no longer know whether a film is inserted. The application is called Filmbook and is divided into 4 sections. The first tab “Current” shows a list of cameras with inserted films. The “History” tab shows which cameras were loaded with which films. In addition, the camera-film pairs can be marked as developed. The third and fourth tabs show the cameras and films.

The application is currently in a sufficiently stable state and I would like to test it extensively on my Pinephone Pro under Phosh to explore the weaknesses of the current design. In addition, my goal is to get in touch with other photographers to gather their ideas and needs.

So, if you feel addressed, get in touch with me. Here are a few important links:

Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/page.codeberg.bjawebos.Filmbook Issues: https://codeberg.org/bjawebos/filmbook/issues Fediverse:

https://procial.tchncs.de/@bjawebos

https://pixelfed.social/adabo

johannes_b reports

This week I released a new version of BMI Calculator. Now it includes german, italian and dutch translations. The app remembers the last entries and you can choose the color scheme. You can install the app from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.johannesboehler2.BmiCalculator

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi says

Version 2.5.0 of Pipeline was now released. Pipeline now displays a random splash text when reloading the feed. This tells users about random facts about Pipeline, showcases some features and also advertises some other great alternative YouTube clients. Examples include:

Did you know? The first commit of Pipeline was 1566 days ago.

Feature Spotlight: Seeing something you don’t like? You can hide videos from your feed based on the title and uploader of the video.

Also try: NewPipe.

A useless feature? Pretty much. But I enjoyed coding it and maybe some people will enjoy reading the splash texts I came up with.

This release also adds debug information to the About window, which will possibly help me debug issues by knowing your versions of dependencies and the most important settings. This release also fixes minor bugs, like some buttons being hidden in a narrow layout in the video page, the description of YouTube videos containing escaped characters, and that a video will not be added to the watched list if Pipeline is closed while it is still displayed.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

We released Fractal 11.2 which updates the matrix-sdk-crypto dependency to include a fix for a high severity security issue. It is available right now on Flathub.

GNOME Foundation

steven says

A week late to TWIG, but almost on time for the blog, it’s this week’s Foundation Report: Elections, GUADEC, ops, infra, fundraising, some fun meetings, and the ED gets another feedback session.

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/06/14/2025-06-14-foundation-report/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#204 Sending Packets

Fri, 13 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 06 to June 13.

GNOME Releases

Adrian Vovk announces

The GNOME Release team is pleased to announce that we have decided to move forward with the removal of GNOME’s X11 session. To that end, we have disabled the X11 session by default at compile time, and have released an early GNOME 49.alpha.0 to get this change into distributions like Fedora Rawhide. The feedback we hear back will inform our next steps. Please check out Jordan’s blog post for more details.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Adrian Vovk reports

Core components of the GNOME desktop, like GDM and gnome-session, are actively undergoing modernizations that will increase GNOME’s dependency on systemd. To ensure that our downstreams are aware of this change and have time to prepare, the GNOME release team has written a blog post explaining what is changing, why, and how to adapt. Please see Adrian’s blog for details.

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Glycin, GNOME’s new image loading library that is already used by our Image Viewer (Loupe), can now also power the legacy image-loading library GdkPixbuf. This will significantly improve the safety of image handling and provide more feature in the future. The article Making GNOME’s GdkPixbuf Image Loading Safer contains more details.

Third Party Projects

nozwock announces

Packet has received several updates since the last time. Recent improvements include:

Desktop notifications for incoming transfers

The ability to run in the background and auto-start at login

Nautilus integration with a “Send with Packet” context menu option

As always, you can get the latest version from Flathub!

justinrdonnelly reports

Hot on the heels of the debut release of Bouncer, I’ve released a new version. Critically, this version includes a fix for non-English language users where Bouncer wouldn’t start. And if your non-English language happens to be Dutch, you get an extra bonus because it now includes Dutch translations thanks to Vistaus! Bouncer is available on Flathub!

Alexander Vanhee reports

Gradia has received a major facelift this week, both in terms of features and design:

A new background image mode has been added, offering six presets to choose from, or you can bring your own image!

A new solid colour background mode is now available, most notably including a fully transparent option. This allows you to ignore the background feature entirely and use Gradia purely for annotations.

Introduced an auto-increasing number stamp tool, useful for creating quick guides around an image.

The app now also finally persists the selected annotation tool and its options across sessions.

You can grab the app on Flathub.

Semen Fomchenkov says

Hello everyone! This week, at ALT Gnome and the ALT Linux Team, we’re happy to announce that Tuner is now available on Flathub!

This process took us longer than expected, as the Flathub team had concerns about the minimal functionality of the base Tuner app. As a result, the Flathub build of Tuner also includes the TunerTweaks module, which provides basic GNOME customization features across different distributions.

New Features in Development

We are actively working on expanding the functionality of plugins and adapting Tuner to various environments. Here are some of the features we are currently finalizing or developing and plan to include in future releases:

The ability to manage installed plugins directly from within Tuner, such as hiding unused ones without uninstalling them, and viewing information about plugin authors.

Improved API for modules to simplify the creation of basic modules and allow for more extensible functionality (already used in the Flathub build and in the TunerTweaks module).

Support for complex page structures, enabling more advanced modules with custom menus and submenus in the interface (thanks to the GNOME Builder team for the inspiration).

All current changes are available on the project page in ALT Linux Space

Documentation and Community

We recently launched a dedicated Matrix room for Tuner, which you can join here: Tuner Matrix Room

Once we complete major API changes in Tuner, we plan to update the module development documentation and present it as a community-driven Wiki project. We’ll be sure to notify you once it’s ready!

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi says

Pipeline version 2.4.0 was released, making it easier to curate your video feed. Adding filters was simplified to remove videos from your feed, by adding a context menu to videos for filtering out similar videos. Based on the uploader and title of this video, you will be prompted which part of the title you want to filter on. You can now also hide videos from your feed which you already watched. Your video history is of course stored locally, and you can turn off keeping the history if you want.

Shell Extensions

Alice (she/her) 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 says

We’ve updated the EGO review guidelines for clipboard access. If your extension uses the clipboard, you need to update the metadata description and follow the new guidelines.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#203 Infinitely Proud

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This Week in GNOME, and this entire month is dedicated to the joys and struggles of all two-spirit, lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, inter, pan, asexual, aromantic, and non-binary people.

We celebrate the invaluable work of all 2SLGBTQIA+ contributors and users, across all different backgrounds and experiences. As a special highlight this month and to feel proud all year round, we have worked together to create two new desktop backgrounds, released with GNOME 48.2.

If your distribution does not yet provide the new backgrounds, you can download them manually from here:

We can’t afford to stay silent in times when history is literally being erased, and fundamental human rights are being revoked. Silence is complicity. We will not falter at this attempt to divide queer communities. We also encourage everyone to be as outspoken as they can be.

Never forget: We are stronger together.

In light of these circumstances it is especially encouraging to see the community of queer contributors growing steadily. We are here and we are not going anywhere - the GNOME community is and will always stand with queer people. We’ve got your back.

Events

Tobias Bernard reports

This summer we’re asking the question: What if we just started using GNOME OS as our primary OS?

It’s still early days for GNOME OS, but it’s finally ready for wider testing by developers and early adopters, on real hardware. Join us for a 3-month challenge from today until September 1st, file and fix some issues, and win a a OnePlus 6 with Linux Mobile or a limited-edition shirt 🌈👕

Blog post with more details: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/06/01/summer-of-gnome-os

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Heads-up: GTK changed GtkImage behavior when displaying GdkPaintable to strictly use the :pixel-size property and/or -gtk-icon-size CSS property instead of stretching the paintable to the allocated size.

The change is available in the nightly SDK and will be in GTK 4.19.2 and eventually in GNOME 49 SDK, but not in any stable releases/SDK. If your app relies on that (such as for displaying covers or avatars), it may need an update.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez announces

After months of technical debt cleanups, architectural changes, and small UX improvements, Papers has landed a considerable rework of the user interface for creating and editing annotations. New simplified shorcuts have been added, the number of clicks to create highlight (and similar type) annotations has been reduced, and it’s now possible to dynamically change color and annotation type just from the context menu! This has been a greatly requested feature and truly team work between all Papers maintainers: Qiu Wenbo, camelcasenick, lbaudin, and me, as well as other community member like our newest GSoC student Ahmed Fatthi. We hope you all enjoy it!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan announces

Gaphor 3.1.0 has been released. Among the improvements are:

You can copy from a diagram and paste the diagram directly as SVG or PNG in another application.

Many UI improvements. Gaphor now feels more GNOME-ish than ever.

For those of you that run Gaphor on macOS: Gaphor now has a proper menu bar

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) reports

This past weeks I’ve implemented crash recovery in Apostrophe. If for some reason the application closes before a file has been properly saved or discarded, next time you open Apostrophe it’ll be restored. Then you’ll be able to save the changes, discard them or continue working in the file were you left.

Third Party Projects

Starting from version 3.1.2, the GNU Image Manipulation Program will have the option to respect the system color scheme on Linux, thanks to XDG Desktop Portal and Niels De Graef’s merge request that was used as a foundation. Every desktop that supports the Settings portal interface will be able to make use of that functionality.

Michael Terry announces

Multiplication Puzzle 15.0 is out, finally adding a portrait mode layout, making phone play more pleasant.

This week Gradia got the largest update it will probably ever get. It most notably includes 2 core features:

Support for taking screenshots from within the app and launching via a custom keyboard shortcut that starts with the screenshot tool.

The ability to annotate images with the staples like a pen and text mode, but also some more domain-specific modes like “censor”.

Thank you to all who contributed, including everyone who submitted translations.

You can find the app on Flathub

justinrdonnelly reports

I’m thrilled to announce the release of Bouncer! Bouncer is an application to help you choose the correct firewall zone for Wi-Fi networks. You may have seen other operating systems that, when you connect to a new Wi-Fi network, prompt for the type of network (e.g. home, public, work). That’s what Bouncer does. When you choose the network type, it is associated with that network and automatically used in the future. This can be useful to keep people from connecting to your laptop while using coffee shop Wi-Fi!

Check it out on Flathub! Please note that there may be additional setup steps beyond just installation. Details are on Flathub and in the README.

[nyx] reports

This week, I released a template for developing GNOME applications using TypeScript!

What makes this template unique? It leverages esbuild to transpile TypeScript code into JavaScript, offering several advantages: the ability to use TypeScript paths for absolute imports, direct support for importing .ui files in your code (similar to the functionality provided by gjspack), seamless integration of npm dependencies (as long as they don’t rely on Node.js or other runtimes), and support for modern syntax features like decorators.

In the future, I plan to develop a plugin for esbuild that will simplify the import of Blueprint files.

Without further delay, here are the links: GNOME TypeScript Template | GitHub Mirror

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb announces

Crosswords 0.3.15 has been released (announcement)!

This is a quality-of-life release with a large number of bug fixes and improvements. It also includes the first version of the editor that can generate acrostic puzzles. You can download it at flathub, and it will be available in Fedora momentarily.

Highlights include:

Beta version of Acrostic editor

Use C-O to open files from everywhere in the game

Autodownload puzzle-sets on startup

Highlight the first letter of each clue answer for acrostics

Thumbnailer works with arrowwords

A cleaned up “Save As…” experience in the editor

Autofill selection vastly improved in the editor

Word list speedups and fixes

Barred puzzles render better

Dividers render correctly

Cell labels measure and layout text correctly

That last fix lets us display Arabic crosswords.

Happy Puzzling!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#202 Presenting Screenshots

Fri, 30 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 23 to May 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Continuing our volunteer effort to make GNOME Calendar fully accessible with a keyboard, we fixed a major bug that was causing the focus to disappear into the abyss when the user tried to tab into the month view in merge request !576. This means, as of this commit, events should now be completely functional and accessible within the month view. Additionally, the merge request changes the keyboard and focus behavior within the month view: Events can only be cycled using arrow buttons, the focus can’t escape the month view with arrow buttons, and entering/exiting the month view can only be done with tab. These improvements will be available on GNOME 49.

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Jan-Michael Brummer reports

This cycle GNOME Web received tremendous new features and bug fixes. I took the chance and started to work on our bug list and squashed over 100 bugs and added several new features. Among those are:

UI files switched to blueprint format

Adblocker now tries to load locale specific adblocker list in addition to the default one

URL bar received an inline completion

URL bar is now on bottom in narrow mode

Bottom action bar hides and reveals automatically in narrow mode

Reader mode got an estimated reading time based on Firefox implementation

PKCS #11 (smartcard) persistence support

Moved passwords from preferences to it’s own dialog

Security popover has been replaced with an adaptive dialog

WebApp additional URL handling has been changed and thus base domains are now compared instead of full domains

Ability to quit and uninstall web apps from their menu

Search now handles case sensitive and full word searches

Mute button in URL bar for single tab pages

Background portal support

Bookmark editing mode (Arak)

Thanks to Jamie, Arak and kramo for their support and fixes. We are going to deliver one of the best releases.

Third Party Projects

Alexander Vanhee reports

The first public version of Gradia was released this Sunday.

Gradia is designed to improve the presentation of your screenshots on platforms where you have limited control, such as social media. It allows you to add a custom gradient background, add padding, change the aspect ratio, and more.

The app is designed for quick edits of mostly screenshots and does not aim to be a full-fledged image editor. However, I do have aspirations to add simple annotation features like a freehand pen mode and an arrow drawing tool.

Please check it out on Flathub.

Vladimir Vaskov says

Hello everyone! This week, at ALT Gnome and ALT Linux Team, we are introducing Folder Manager — a folder manager for the GNOME and Phosh application menu, designed to simplify and automate the organization of applications into folders by category.

Folder Manager is a convenient utility for managing app folders in GNOME and Phosh. Built with Vala using GTK4 and Libadwaita, it adheres to GNOME HIG guidelines and ensures a clean and modern interface for application menu organization.

Key Features:

Create and Delete Folders: Instantly create, rename, or delete application folders through a user-friendly graphical interface.

Category-Based Autofill: When creating a folder, select a category (e.g. Office, Chat, Games), and Folder Manager will automatically include all applications belonging to that category.

Manual Management: Add or remove individual applications from folders manually, for precise control over organization.

Filtering and Search: Easily locate applications by name using built-in search and filtering tools within the interface.

Designed for GNOME and Phosh: Provides full compatibility with both GNOME Shell and the mobile-oriented Phosh environment.

Folder Manager helps keep your application menu organized, improves accessibility, and enhances your desktop experience. Try it today and bring structure and clarity to your GNOME workspace!

nozwock reports

Packet is an app that lets you send and receive files wirelessly from Android devices using Quick Share, or another device with Packet.

It just received an update! The status indicator now shows the connection state, the in-app help has been rewritten to be easier to understand, and an error page is shown if the app can’t run, so it’s easier to troubleshoot. This update also brings lots of smaller under-the-hood improvements and fixes.

You can get it from Flathub!

Newelle, AI assistant for Gnome, got updated to 0.9.7, improving local documents reading performances, adding thinking support for Gemini models, other minor improvements and updated translations

Install it from FlatHub

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi says

Versions 2.2.3 and 2.3.0 of Pipeline were released. Pipeline now hides videos which require payment by default from the feed, as those cannot yet be played using Pipeline anyway. If you want them to keep showing up because you are using an external player which supports those, you can change the behavior in the filter settings. If you are using an external player, you can now spawn it again in case it failed by clicking the thumbnail of the video, instead of needing to go back to the feed and clicking the video again. Startup performance of Pipeline also got significantly improved, on my device from over 3s to under 1s. Finally, the releases fix quite a few bugs:

Videos sometimes being duplicated in the watch-later list.

Videos starting to play with low resolution.

Error searching when the result contains videos with over 2 billion views.

Errors fetching information for a single video for some videos.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede reports

Gir.Core 0.7.0-preview.1 was released. It features updated dotnet bindings for GNOME 48, initial binding support for libsecret and several bug fixes.

Miscellaneous

revisto says

We’ve started a Farsi-language podcast version of This Week in GNOME! Each week we read and summarize the latest TWIG post in Farsi, covering GNOME Core updates, Circle apps, and community news. The goal is to help Farsi-speaking users stay connected with the GNOME ecosystem.

We’ve released 3 episodes so far (199, 200, 201) and keep episode scripts + audio files on GitHub. You can listen on Spotify, Castbox, Podcast Index, or via RSS feed.

More details: https://blogs.gnome.org/alirezash/2025/05/25/we-started-a-podcast-for-this-week-in-gnome-in-farsi/

Repository: https://github.com/revisto/this-week-in-gnome-farsi

Internships

Ahmed Fatthi started his GSoC internship in Papers getting a complex work related to locking merged! Ahmed will be working on isolating documents, so that eventually Papers can be as secure managing documents as Loupe is managing images! Keep posted to his blog for more updates: https://ahmedfatthi.pages.dev/

GNOME Foundation

steven reports

This week’s Foundation Report discusses:

Community Safety

Pride

A glimpse into the regular Design Meeting

Fundraising from first principles

End of 10 Promo Team

GTD, tools, etc. Software: It’s Still Annoying (TM)

Treasurer search - the clock is ticking!

Digital Wellbeing contract opportunity

UN Open Source Week, June 16 - 20

https://blogs.gnome.org/steven/2025/05/30/2025-05-30-foundation-report/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#201 Dithered Images

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 16 to May 23.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Axel Karjalainen has added SYSLOG_IDENTIFIER to journald log messages outputted by GLib’s default log handler, which should make journal messages from your app easier to find (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4589)

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

adrian reports

Web has gained a preferences page that allows toggling WebKit features at run-time. Tech Preview builds of the browser will show the settings page by default, while in regular releases it is hidden and may be enabled with the following command:
gsettings set org.gnome.Epiphany.ui webkit-features-page true
This should allow frontend developers to test upcoming features more easily. Note that the settings for WebKit features are not persistent, and they will be reset to their default state on every launch.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Déjà Dup Backups has landed support for restic mount which lets you restore files using your native file manager (instead of the previous in-app file browser)

Third Party Projects

tfuxu announces

Halftone 0.7.0 introduces a long-awaited feature: support for image zooming! From now on, you can easily check even the smallest details simply by using the scroll wheel or gestures on your touchpad/touchscreen.

This release also improves stability and user experience by properly handling and informing the user about errors occurring during image loading. No more endless loading screens!

As always, you can download it from Flathub.

Semen Fomchenkov announces

Hello everyone This week, at ALT Gnome and ALT Linux Team, we released the settings center we developed with support for libpeas-based plugins. I have prepared a short text with its description, I hope it will help to better understand the essence of the idea. And some app UI screenshots: https://altlinux.space/alt-gnome/Tuner/src/branch/main/data/screenshots

Tuner is an extensible settings management center for GNOME, featuring a modern graphical interface built with Libadwaita. Designed with a focus on flexibility and user convenience, Tuner allows every GNOME user to assemble a personalized control center tailored to their system configuration needs.

Key Features:

Plugin-Based Architecture: Tuner leverages libpeas to provide a dynamic and modular ecosystem. This means any developer can contribute their own functionality in the form of a plugin, offering unlimited opportunities for expansion and customization.

Simplified GSettings Integration: Inspired by the GNOME Refine project, Tuner implements a mechanism for creating widgets using .blp (Blueprint) files. This simplifies the binding of GSettings keys to interface elements and significantly reduces boilerplate code for developers.

Modern Libadwaita Interface: The user interface follows GNOME HIG guidelines, ensuring a clean, adaptive, and touch-friendly experience.

Distribution-Specific Modules: GNOME-based distributions can use Tuner as a hub for distribution-specific settings. For example, a TunerPanel module for managing panel mode, integrated into the “Appearance” section(Created by TunerTweaks module) for ALT Linux, has already been implemented.

Getting Started with Plugin Development:

Developers interested in extending Tuner can refer to the quick guide on plugin creation. The guide includes an example of writing a plugin in Vala and integrating it with Tuner’s architecture. Additionally, template repositories are available for creating plugins in both Vala and Python, along with documentation in Valadoc format.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.47.0 is out:

phosh’s Feedback Quick Setting now has a status page featuring a “Do not disturb” toggle (that sets the profile to “silent” and disables notification banners) and a button for quick access to the Feedback settings (to e.g. tweak Feedback for individual apps or tune ring tones).

The on screen keyboard makes better use available space when showing auto completions, adds Emojis to the auto completions and can show a popover for the currently typed character.

There’s more, see the full details at here

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#200 Two Hundred

Fri, 16 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Celebrating 200 Weeks of This Week in GNOME! 🎉

What a milestone! We’re thrilled to celebrate the 200th post of This Week in GNOME - that’s nearly four years of showcasing the amazing work, features, and people that make GNOME thrive.

200 weeks of curated updates
2.051 individual news entries
1.527 images showcasing the latest features
259 people who are part of the TWIG community

From new features, fresh designs, bug fixes but also exciting app launches — TWIG has become a vital pulse of the GNOME community.

Whether you’re a reader, contributor, or part of the community behind the scenes — thank you for being a part of this journey! ❤️

Launching TWIG 2.0

Nearly four years after its launch, I’m delighted to unveil a completely revamped thisweek.gnome.org! Welcome to TWIG 2.0 — featuring a modern technical foundation, a refreshed design, exciting new features, and so much more!

Modernized design, now in line with the fabulous gnome.org redesign
New dedicated landing page showing the latest numbers
Beautiful autogenerated cover images for each post
- Showcasing a featured project from the week
- Include a screenshot in your update — with a bit of luck, it’ll appear on the post’s cover!
- Each screenshot is dynamically decorated with the latest Adwaita wallpaper
Revamped posts page, feel nostalgic when you scroll through 200 weeks of GNOME history
New post filter make it easy to find updates on specific projects
Click on a contributor name to see their past TWIG submissions
Click-and-hold images in posts to view them in full size
Extended Open Graph protocol support, so posts look great when shared on social media
Improved RSS/Atom feed with richer metadata and better formatting
Rebuilt with Astro, offering a faster and more modern experience
…and many more improvements!

Have fun with TWIG 2.0, I’m looking forward to your feedback!

And now, as usual, to the happenings across the GNOME Project in the week from 09 May to 16 May 😉.

Accessibility

Today (May 15th) is the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. To celebrate it, I wrote about the unsung heroes that keep on fighting against all adverse conditions around the Linux desktop in order to improve its accessibility. You can read more here.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

jadahl says

Mutter, GNOME’s compositor framework that GNOME Shell is built on top of, got a new developer tool this week, the “Mutter Development Kit”. This new development kit provides a new way to run a nested GNOME Shell instance inside a GTK app which will provide various tools useful for compositor and shell development. The tool it has so far is touch emulation, but more will come.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Labels such as street names and house numbers can now be clicked to show the place information (and easily add them to favourites) in Maps. Pictures here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/7004 https://gitlab.gnome.org/-/snippets/7005

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Izzy (she/her) says

Binary 5.3 has just been released as a small update. It comes with many translation updates and a few small updates.

Development hasn’t been too active lately due to uni work and personal issues. I’m hoping to work on it a lot more over the summer and hopefully past that. In the mean time, get it now on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.fizzyizzy05.binary

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas reports

Newsflash 4.0 enters beta which can be checked out in the flathub beta channel. In this release most of the UI code has been refactored to make use of all the Gtk & rust binding goodies that were added over the years. Image, Audio and Video attachments are now all featured more prominently. More can be read here: https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2025/05/12/newsflash-4-0-beta/

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Déjà Dup Backups just landed two big changes, to be released in 49.0:

A UI refresh to align better with the HIG

Restic is now the default backend for all builds (not just the flathub one)

Third Party Projects

vallabhvidy announces

Really happy to announce release of version 0.1.3 of Cube Timer🥳. Cube Timer is a tool to time your Rubik’s Cube solves. It tracks your solve time and maintains averages of previous solves. Solves can be organized into different practice sessions as well. It also has a basic scramble generator. The design of Cube Timer was inspired by cstimer.net.

It can be installed from Flathub.

Also Congratulations to TWIG for its 200th edition! 🥳🎉🎉.

Märt Põder says

Nautilus Compare, the context menu diff extension for Nautilus file manager (aka GNOME Files) is back in Debian repositories after five year hiatus. Although updated for Python 3 and GTK 3 already in 2020, the extension using Meld diff and merge tool by default and with localisations for 14 languages was only uploaded and approved about a week ago after months of intensified user demand and with support for latest GTK 4 and Nautilus 43. Extension is still available for earlier releases of Debian family distros in the Launchpad PPA, but can be conveniently installed from default repositories in current development and anticipated official releases.

Newelle, AI assistant for Gnome, got updated to 0.9.6, introducing selective profiles and reasoning support for OpenRouter provider.

It can be installed from Flathub

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2025.5.2 is here! This release contains a bunch of new features that users have been requesting.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to pause/resume running downloads

Added the ability to specify save folder paths in a batch file

Added the ability to exclude a download from history in advanced download options

Added a Preferred Audio Codec option to downloads preferences

Added audio codec information to audio formats

Added an ETA to downloads’ progress

Fixed an issue where generic videos would not download correctly

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Due to a pesky bug that makes Fractal crash when our users attempt to start a verification, we are releasing Fractal 11.1 only 2 weeks after Fractal 11. And while we’re at it we also backported a few fixes for smaller paper cuts!

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly. You could even get rid of our remaining bugs yourself!

Miscellaneous

Flatpak 1.16.1 is out! It’s the first bugfix release of the 1.16 series. Some highlights of this release:

Apps with the dri permission can now access /dev/udmabuf too. This may allow for better memory sharing and performance improvements in apps

Don’t propagate the Wayland socket from host into sandbox if access to the Wayland socket has been denied

Flatpak now looks for TLS certificates at /etc/containers/certs.d when interacting with OCI registries

Fix intermittent flatpak-portal crashes by avoiding unnecessary multi-threading. This should help apps and libraries that heavily use the Flatpak portal, such as WebKit and glycin.

When using parental controls, allow a child account to update existing apps by default, to ensure that security and bugfix updates can be installed

Make systemd scopes easier to match to Flatpak app instances

A couple of performance improvements in some specific situations

GNOME Foundation

steven reports

The Foundation Report is out for the week of May 12-16! It’s not any shorter! We’re sorry! ;)

Give it a gander.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#199 One More Week...

Fri, 09 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 02 to May 09.

GNOME Foundation

steven announces

We have our first Foundation Report since I joined as ED! I hope these are less verbose and less rambling in the future… and also less focused on the minutiae of what I spent my week on. With each passing week, they will (hopefully) come to encompass more of what’s going on at the Foundation, at a higher level. For now, I’m meeting many, many lovely folks and finding out just how hard everyone is working.

Read the long ramble on my blog.

Internships

Felipe Borges announces

We are happy to announce that five contributors are joining the GNOME community as part of Google Summer of Code 2025!

This year’s contributors will work on backend isolation in GNOME Papers, adding eBPF profiling to Sysprof, adding printing support in GNOME Crosswords, and Vala’s XML/JSON/YAML integration improvements. Let’s give them a warm welcome!

In the coming days, our new contributors will begin onboarding in our community channels and services. Stay tuned to Planet GNOME to read their introduction blog posts and learn more about their projects.

If you want to learn more about Google Summer of Code internships with GNOME, visit gsoc.gnome.org.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Video Player (Showtime) ↗

Watch without distraction

kramo says

Video Player (codenamed Showtime) is replacing Videos (Totem) as GNOME’s default video player.

It will be included in GNOME 49, but it can already be installed from Flathub.

Third Party Projects

Jan Lukas says

I’ve released the first version of Typewriter to flathub. It is a, as of now, basic Typst editor with built-in live preview, template browser and export dialog. If you’re interested in a local-first Typst experience come join and contribute code and ideas.

Gitlab flathub

ranfdev announces

I’m announcing that DistroShelf is finally available on flathub ! Sometimes, there are certain programs that aren’t available on your favorite distro… They are available for Ubuntu, but you don’t want to reinstall your OS just for that program.

* DistroShelf enters the chat *

It enables you to run containers that are highly integrated with your host system, using distrobox. In other words, it lets you install that program you want, inside a Ubuntu container. Then, you can use the program as if it were installed on your real distro! The program will see all your folders, all your devices… as you expect.

But you can run more than simple ubuntu containers! You can run pretty much any distro you want. I use it to run a development environment with the latest and greatest tools, inside an arch linux container.

Try it while it’s hot!

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2025.5.0 is here!

This release contains a complete redesign of the Qt/Windows app that features a much more modern experience. yt-dlp was also updated to the latest version to fix many website validation issues and some other features/fixes were added.

Please note, as many of you may have seen already, development of Parabolic and the set of Nickvision apps has slowed down. This is due to me starting a new full-time job and thus leaving only the weekends for me to work on these projects. This does not mean I am stopping development, it just means that releases, updates, and fixes will unfortunately take longer now. I appreciate all of your support and patience for these updates. Any C++ developers who would like to work on the projects with me as well are more than welcome too and are encouraged to reach out to me on Matrix!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the display of the file size of a format if it is available

Fixed an issue where file paths were not truncated correctly

Redesigned the Qt app for a more modern desktop experience

Updated yt-dlp to fix some website validation issues

GNOME Websites

Felipe Borges announces

It’s alive! Welcome to the new planet.gnome.org!

A few months ago, I announced that I was working on a new implementation of Planet GNOME, powered by GitLab Pages. This work has reached a point where we’re ready to flip the switch and replace the old Planet website.

This was only possible thanks to various other contributors, such as Jakub Steiner, who did a fantastic job with the design and style, and Alexandre Franke, who helped with various papercuts, ideas, and improvements.

As with any software, there might be regressions and issues. It would be a great help if you report any problems you find.

If you are subscribed to the old Planet’s RSS feed, you don’t need to do anything. But if you are subscribed to the Atom feed at https://planet.gnome.org/atom.xml, you will have to switch to the RSS address at https://planet.gnome.org/rss20.xml

Miscellaneous

Sid says

GNOME GitLab now uses macOS runners sponsored by MacStadium for managing our macOS CI pipeline. The setup consists of 2 Mac mini (M1, 8-core CPU, 10-core GPU, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD) along with Orka (Orchestration with Kubernetes on Apple) virtualization. This is a significant bump in hardware specs compared to the current solution, allowing us to run more builds simultaneously. Thanks to MacStadium for sponsoring this infrastructure upgrade!

For more details refer to https://blogs.gnome.org/sid/2025/04/27/macstadium-sponsors-gnome-macos-ci-infrastructure/.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#198 Two More Weeks...

Fri, 02 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 25 to May 02.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

As part of our volunteer-driven accessibility initiative in GNOME Calendar, and for the first time in the 10+ years of Calendar’s existence, we finally completed and merged the first step needed to have a working calendar app for people who rely on keyboard navigation. This merge request in particular makes the event widgets focusable with navigation keys (arrow left/up/right/down) and activatable with space/enter.

Most of GNOME Calendar’s layout and widgets consist of custom widgets and complex calculations, both independently and according to other factors (window size, height and width of each cell, number of events, positioning, etc.), so these widgets need to be minimal to have as little overhead as possible. This means that these widgets also need to have the necessary accessibility features reimplemented or even rethought, including and starting with the event widgets.

Third Party Projects

Newelle 0.9.5 Released: Internet Access, Improved Document Reading

🔎 Implemented Web Search with SearXNG, DuckDuckGo, and Tavily 🌐 Website Reading: ask questions about websites (Write #url to embed it) 🔢 Improved inline LaTeX support 🗣 New empty chat placeholder 📎 Improved Document reading: semantic search will only be done if the document is too long 💭 New thinking widget 🧠 Add vision support for llama4 on Groq and possibility to choose provider on OpenRouter 🌍 New translations (Traditional Chinese, Bengali, Hindi) 🐞 Various bug fixes

Source Code Install it from Flathub

Elias Projahn announces

I have published the initial release of a classical music player and organizer designed for GNOME, which will eventually become a full-fledged tool for managing your personal library of classical music. The application is called Musicus and also comes with a small pre-made music library containing recordings that are in the public domain (based on EU legislation). This makes it very easy to try out the app, which is available as a Flatpak bundle. Please note that the application is not yet stable and mature. This is why I am looking for feedback on the design, functionality and, if you are interested in contributing, you!

Since Upscaler has just reached 150,000 installs on Flathub, I’m releasing Upscaler 1.5.0! Upscaler is an app that allows you to upscale images locally, securely, and completely offline.

Thanks to Zoey Ahmed’s wonderful contribution, this release introduces the long overdue functionality to load multiple images at once and add them to the queue. This avoids having to load and add each image to the queue, which will significantly speed up the process of adding images to the queue.

The entire async and threading model was ported to the asyncio and threading modules, thanks to the long awaited (pun very much intended) asyncio integration in PyGObject that was made available recently.

Loading images has become much faster and smoother, while using less memory as a direct result of the asyncio and threading port.

This release also makes saving the resulting images completely optional. Additionally, there is now a copy button to copy images without saving them. As such, the process to upscale images has gotten more straightforward than ever – just load the image, set the desired scaling factor and the image type.

The progress rows have gotten a redesign to make them more reminiscent to typical rows with progress bars.

You can get Upscaler 1.5.0 on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.theevilskeleton.Upscaler

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp announces

Turtle goes async again

Turtle 0.13 was released with proper Nautilus async plugin support!

Turtle switched back to the async update_file_info_full method recently and with this version many improvements have been made to reduce turtle service dbus calls to speed up emblem calculations. There is now also a setting to restrict emblems and the context menu to home folders, to even further reduce unnecessary service calls.

Making async possible again

Turtle used a workaround for a while, because there was a crash in Nautilus when update_file_info_full is used. This issue was fixed with this MR which is available in Nautlius 48+ and has also been backported to Nautilus 47.2 and 46.4.

The flatpak version still uses the sync workaround, because there is no way to guarantee the package is installed on a distro with a Nautilus version including the fix.

Packaging stuff

There was also some progress with debian and fedora packages of Turtle.

If you want to test the package now, there is PPA for Ubuntu 24.04 with the Nautilus fix backported.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

A new version of Fractal numbered Eleven? Stranger things have happened… Features come running up that hill:

Support for login using the OAuth 2.0 API (as used by matrix.org, which recently made the switch to Matrix Authentication Service)

Overhaul of the page that lists user sessions, with details moved to subpages, for a less cluttered feel, and allowing to rename sessions!

Rearranged account settings, with a new Safety tab that includes a setting to toggle media preview visibility

BlurHashes for images and videos, that are used as placeholders while the media is loading or if the preview is disabled

Contiguous state events are grouped behind a single item

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version should be available shortly on Flathub.

If you want to join the gang, you can start by fixing one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new members!

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

Blueprint is now part of the GNOME Nightly SDK and is expected to be part of the GNOME 49 SDK. This means, apps relying on blueprint won’t have to install it manually anymore.

Blueprint is an alternative to defining GTK/Libadwaita user interface via .ui XML-files (GTK Builder files). The goal of blueprint is to provide UI definitions that require less boilerplate than XML and are easier to learn. Blueprint also provides a language server for IDE integration.

Many of our GNOME Circle apps are already built with blueprint, as well as some Core and Incubator apps.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#197 XML Parsing

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 18 to April 25.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

Owen Chiaventone has done some useful profile-guided optimisation of XML parsing in gnome-software (which happens every time repository metadata is updated), and found a few improvements to make; https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/issues/941#note_2417546

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

More progress on our quest to move away from GdkPixbuf. Glycin now provides a thumbnailer that can be used to create thumbnails for all image formats for which glycin loaders are installed. This is already resulting in more supported image formats, correct support of color profiles, better support for image that have a higher bit depth than 8-bit, better support for Exif orientations, and memory safe implementation for most of the formats. You can see a comparison for some images with a before (left) and after with glycin thumbnailer (right) on the screenshot below.

This is not properly implemented for GNOME OS yet, but we are on it.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

ashpd ↗

Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have released a new version of ASHPD Demo, the app for testing portals. The release adds support of the USB and Global Shortcut portals contributed with STF support.

Third Party Projects

xjuan says

I am happy to announce a new Cambalache release! Version 0.96.0 – GResource Release!

Add GResource support

Add internal children support

New project format

Save directly to .ui files

Show directory structure in navigation

Add Notification system (version, messages and polls)

Unified import dialog for all file types

Update widget catalogs to SDK 48 Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2025/04/20/cambalache-0-96-released/

sunniva announces

After a long period of inactivity, Stockpile 0.5.0 has been released. This release brings the application to the GNOME 48 runtime, as well as improving user experience with a new start screen and the ability to recover corrupted data. See more information about this release on Flathub!

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi says

Pipeline version 2.2.0 until 2.2.2 were released this week. Starting from this version, Pipeline will now use all Piped instances configured in the settings in parallel to query the feed. This leads to a massive speedup for querying your feed when you have multiple instances configured (for my subscription list, this was a 7x speedup). Along this line, the Piped instance list is now managed by Pipeline automatically, which downloads a list of working instances on every startup. This should lead to a more reliable experience, and does not require manually finding working instances anymore. A bug was also fixed, where different videos replaced each other in the watch later list when they were uploaded at approximately the same time.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Flare version 0.16.0 was released. This release adds initial support for receiving stickers.

Miscellaneous

Philip Withnall reports

Maximiliano added support for storing your GitLab token in libsecret when you use gitlab-changelog to write NEWS entries for a release, https://gitlab.gnome.org/pwithnall/gitlab-changelog/-/merge_requests/22

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#196 Dot Release

Fri, 18 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 11 to April 18.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard announces

The summary blogpost about the 2023/2024 GNOME STF Project that Adrian Vovk and I have been working on for quite a while is finally out!

It’s not a quick read but that’s a good thing, there’s so much exciting stuff that was done as part of this over the past year.

Shoutout to Sonny Piers, thanks to whom all of this was possible ❤️

https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2025/04/11/gnome-stf-2024

GNOME Releases

Jeremy Bicha announces

GNOME has announced the releases of GNOME 48.1 and GNOME 47.6.

Jeremy Bicha says

Matthew Miller has announced the release of Fedora 42 which features GNOME 48 in its Workstation Edition.

Jeremy Bicha says

Canonical has announced the release of Ubuntu 25.04 “Plucky Puffin” which delivers GNOME 48.

Jeremy Bicha announces

Manjaro has announced the release of Manjaro 25 “Zetar” with updated ISOs for this rolling release. Manjaro’s GNOME edition includes GNOME 48.

Third Party Projects

Vladimir Kosolapov announces

This week I released an adaptation of the Zenith VS Code theme for GtkSourceView library.

Zenith is a refined dark theme with cohesive colors and complete UI coverage for GTK-based text editors.

Get more information on GitHub!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Here comes Fractal 11.rc. New since 11.beta:

Rearranged account settings, with a new Safety tab

New setting to toggle media preview visibility

Sessions can be renamed

Support for login using the OAuth 2.0 API (as used by matrix.org, which recently made the switch to Matrix Authentication Service)

Contiguous state events are grouped behind a single item

But what does RC stand for? Really Cool? Reasonably Complete? Rose Colored¹? Release Candidate, of course! That means it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 11.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

If you want to join the fun, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

¹ That was actually once true, with Fractal 9.rc.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#195 Typed Weather

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 04 to April 11.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Weather ↗

Show weather conditions and forecasts.

GNOME Weather has been ported to from JavaScript to TypeScript! This makes it the second TypeScript app in GNOME Core after Audio Player. If you want to see the changes involved, check out the merge request.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Support for file handles in nested containers has been added to gdbus call by Julian Sparber in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3624. This should make it easier to test some of the portal D-Bus APIs using gdbus call.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Solanum ↗

Balance working time and break time.

Solanum 6.0.0 is out with the following changes:

The timer’s text now scales with window size. You should now see larger text at larger window sizes

You now have the option to make Solanum go fullscreen when a break starts

Notifications are now appropriately dismissed when resuming the timer

We now ship branding colors in our app data

Miscellaneous metainfo improvements

Various code modernization updates

Miscellaneous translation updates

We also now follow the system accent color!

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Brage Fuglseth (he/him) announces

This week I released Keypunch 6.0, with more realistic results, extended language support, and a brand new feature called frustration relief. Learn more on my blog.

Third Party Projects

larma reports

Dino 0.5.0 has been released! This release features improved file transfers and two completely reworked dialogs. Full release blog post: https://dino.im/blog/2025/04/dino-0.5-release/

Jeffry Samuel reports

Alpaca, an Adwaita app to chat with local and online AI models will release version 6.0.0 this saturday (April 12) with a lot of new features https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca/discussions/678 thanks

Sebastian Wiesner reports

A new release of Picture Of The Day is available. This release improves navigation between multiple Bing images with a new overlay toolbar, adds toolbar buttons to open and save the current image, and fixes some embarrassing crashes and locale issues.

Picture Of The Day is a small GNOME utility to get a fresh daily wallpaper from various sources. It’s available from Flathub.

JumpLink announces

Last week I introduced my first app Learn 6502 Assembly on Flathub, and this week I’m happy to announce a update to version 0.2.0.

This new version focuses on improving the learning experience with:

Help features to make code editing easier for beginners

Better game controls and display for mobile devices

New tools to examine your code, including a disassembler and memory viewer

File management to save and load your programs

Various usability improvements, including automatic pause when switching screens

The app continues to provide a complete learning environment for 6502 assembly language with an interactive tutorial, code editor, debugger, and visual game console.

دانیال بهزادی reports

As the northern hemisphere welcomes spring with Nowruz - the Persian New Year symbolizing renewal and rebirth - we’re proud to announce Carburetor 5.1.0, your gateway to a more free and private Internet. This update blossoms with improvements timed to honor fresh beginnings.

What’s New?

🌐 Enhanced Locale Support: Resolved issues for English and several other language users for a smoother experience

🎨 GNOME HIG Compliance: Refined interface elements that enhance usability and integrate naturally with GNOME design standards

📖 Refined Messaging: Updated text across the app for clearer instructions and better user guidance

Nowruz: A Time for Digital Renewal

Just as Nowruz celebrates nature’s rebirth by washing away winter’s dust, Carburetor helps cleanse your digital footprint. In a world where surveillance dims the light of free expression, this release reaffirms our commitment to ensuring everyone enjoys secure, unfiltered access to the Internet.

Newelle 0.9.0 has been released

🔈 Added TTS support for Groq and OpenAI compatible APIs

🎙️ Added Whisper.CPP support with model manager for speech recognition

📃 Added a new API for extensions to create and manage RAG indexes

🧠 Improved the model selection popup

🔢 Improved LaTeX rendering

🚀 A ton of performance improvements and refinements

Newelle is an advanced AI Linux assistant for Gnome. You can download it from Flathub.

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

The first release of Serigy is now available! Serigy is a proof of concept for a ‘clipboard pinner’ for GNOME.

Watch a brief video on how to use Serigy.

Get it on Flathub

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi says

Flare 0.15.16 was released this week. As the last TWIG entry of Flare was already over a year ago, and there have been 19 releases in the meantime, I’ll quickly summarize what happened in that year:

Four fixes for being unable to link the device, or using Flare as a primary device.

Four fixes making receiving messages more reliable.

Two fixes for issues when sending messages and images.

Fixes for two security issues.

Two fixes for rare crashes.

Two performance improvements.

Six UI bug fixes and minor UI improvements.

Quite a few more minor things, which you can read in detail in the changelog

As you can see, the focus with Flare has mostly shifted towards stability recently. This should lead to major improvements in the actual day-to-day usability of Flare. So if you tried out Flare before but abandoned it due to issues regarding stability, you should maybe try out Flare again after the recent improvements.

But this of course leads to a stagnation in the features being developed. I don’t expect the priority of stability over features to change in the upcoming months as I will very likely be pretty busy and therefore won’t be able to implement new features myself. Merge requests for new features and other improvements are of course still welcome, so if you have an idea for a feature you want and know some Rust and GTK, feel free to review the contributing guidelines and developer documentation and send over a merge request.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#194 Nineteen Years Old

Fri, 04 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 28 to April 04.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Sam James and Jakub Jelinek fixed a 19-year-old race condition in GClosure in GLib, when they initially thought they were out to fix a gcc optimisation bug! https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4575

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Video Trimmer ↗

Trim videos quickly.

I released Video Trimmer v25.03, moving the trimming options from the save dialog into the main UI. This makes them more discoverable and allows for better visual feedback down the line.

Identity ↗

Compare images and videos.

Ivan Molodetskikh reports

Identity v25.03 is out with a minor visual refresh for GNOME 48: now using a toggle group for the display mode switcher in the main menu.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Amberol 2025.1 is out. Not many changes, this time, except for an update in the dependencies to use the latest GNOME 48 run time, and the new release of Lofty, the metadata parsing library. This last update should fix various recent issues with malformed fields inside MP3 files.

Third Party Projects

nokyan says

Resources 1.8 has been released, featuring support for new hardware such as the Raspberry Pi’s GPU and quality of life changes like type-to-search.

In addition, Resources can now display the link type and speed of GPUs, drives and network interfaces as well as the combined memory and swap usage in the Apps and Processes views in a new column.

Last but not least, Resources is now built using the new GNOME 48 runtime, showing off its new sleek colors when using its dark theme.

As always, the update is available on Flathub. Enjoy!

JumpLink reports

My first app Learn 6502 Assembly is now available on Flathub! This application provides a complete learning environment for 6502 assembly language programming.

The app features an interactive tutorial with step-by-step guidance, a code editor with syntax highlighting, an integrated assembler and debugger showing registers and memory in real-time, and a visual game console to see your code in action.

The application is built with GJS and TypeScript, fully supports Adwaita, and works on both desktop and mobile Linux devices.

Available on Flathub Code on GitHub

youpie reports

Iconic V2025.3.2, is out! Iconic is an application that allows you to add images to folders, to help you differentiate them better. It also has support for changing the icons according to the system accent color. Which makes it look great in combination with Adwaita-colors

Sebastian Wiesner reports

A new release of Turn On is available. With this release Turn On now finds web interfaces on devices and links them in the UI.

Turn On is a small GNOME utility to turn on remote systems such as NAS devices with Wake On LAN magic packets. It’s available from Flathub.

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

Aurea 1.6 has been released with the GNOME 48 runtime and now includes translations for Brazilian Portuguese, Turkish, Georgian, and Italian.

Get Aurea on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.46.0 is out:

Phosh now allows to set a lockscreen wallpaper, it automatically closes status pages when closing the top panel and shows a spinner when updating the list of Wi-Fi networks in quick settings. There’s better cutout/notch support for devices with e.g. a camera in the indicator area and one can now also tweak the maximum haptic feedback strength (and disable it completely).

There’s more, see the full details at here

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#193 Image Loading

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 21 to March 28.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Glycin, the newish image loading and editing library, now supports specifying the memory format for image data an API user needs. If glycin is used with GTK, this has always been taken care of automatically. However, for other use cases, it’s now possible to specify a limited set of formats the API user supports. Support for loading image data from a GInputStream or GBytes instead of GFile has also landed.

These features are important to adopt glycin in other areas in the quest to replace GdkPixbuf to make image loading more safe and enable more features like HDR image support and support for more image formats.

You can financially support my work or drop by and submit a code contribution.

GNOME Development Tools

Sysprof ↗

A profiling tool that helps in finding the functions in which a program uses most of its time.

Sysprof is now able to filter samples by marks. This allows for statistically relevant data on what’s running when a specific mark is ongoing, and as a consequence, allows for better data analysis. You can read more here.

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

Nokse says

This week Arduino support for GNOME Builder has been merged, providing integration with arduino-cli to compile and upload sketches to Arduino compatible boards. The new feature will be available in Builder Nightly and includes a graphical interface for managing libraries and platforms and selecting compilation/upload options. It also provides a template to start a new Arduino project. Note that you need to have arduino-cli installed to use this feature. If you encounter any issues, please go ahead and file them.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth (he/him) says

This week Bustle was accepted into GNOME Circle. Bustle lets you visualize and analyze D-Bus activity with detailed sequence diagrams. Congratulations!

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina announces

Warp 0.9 was released with support for directly sending files via “Open With…” from Files. QR code scanning has also seen improvements, by utilizing the new QR code feature in Camera.

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus reports

Eyedropper 2.1.0 has been released, featuring

RGB decimal notation

support for global shortcuts

a new way to directly enter colors, without picking them first

Download the new version on Flathub.

Third Party Projects

I have released a new version of oo7-cli, with the possibility to interact with the sandboxed applications keyrings or any keyring file on your system.
oo7-cli --app-id com.belmoussaoui.Authenticator list
The CLI also features a new CLI argument for attempting to repair a broken keyring (always backup your keyring file before).

JumpLink says

TypeScript type definitions for GNOME Shell 48 released

The TypeScript type definitions for GNOME Shell 48 have been updated!
This release brings improved TypeScript support for writing GNOME Shell extensions.

Based on the latest version of ts-for-gir:
→ v4.0.0-beta.23

Project page:
→ gjsify/gnome-shell

Note: This release was published shortly after the TWIG deadline,
so it will appear in next week’s edition.

Capypara reports

Introducing Field Monitor, a remote-desktop client focused on accessing virtual machines.

It has first-class support for adding Proxmox or QEMU/KVM hypervisors but it can also connect to any server implementing one of the SPICE, RDP or VNC protocols.

It can also open RDP or Virt Viewer files.

This is the first release and it might still be a little rough around the edges in some parts, so any and all feedback is more than welcome :).

Field Monitor is powered by RDW, a set of remote-desktop widgets for GTK 4. I want to thank Marc-André Lureau, the author, since without them this app would not be possible!

Sebastian Wiesner reports

Picture Of The Day is a new app to get a picture of the day as your daily wallpaper, from NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day, Bing, Wikimedia, or Simon Stålenhag artwork.

Preview images, pick your favorite source, enable automatic updates, and enjoy a fresh wallpaper every day.

Available on Flathub.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It’s the beginning of bee season! 🌸🌺🌼 🐝 B like beta! Here’s Fractal 11.beta:

New shortcuts Ctrl + Page Up and Ctrl + Page Down go to the previous/next room in the list

The media cache will now be periodically cleaned up

The page that lists user sessions has been overhauled, with details moved to subpages, for a less cluttered feel, and paving the way to a new feature!

A couple of small cosmetic changes have landed as well

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

Events

Kristi Progri reports

We’re excited to announce that registrations for GUADEC are now open! https://events.gnome.org/event/259/registrations/

If you are planning to attend our event (in-person or online) now it’s the time to get your ticket!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#192 Forty-eight!

Fri, 21 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 14 to March 21.

This week we released GNOME 48!

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including notification stacking, performance improvements, an enhanced image viewer, a new interface font, new digital wellbeing settings, a new audio player, HDR support, and much more! See the GNOME 48 release notes and developer notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 49 (Fall 2025), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

nickdiego reports

Mutter 48 now supports xdg-toplevel-drag-v1, the Wayland protocol that makes it possible to drag toplevel windows during drag-and-drop sessions. Whose primary use case is Chromium-like tab dragging feature set. Quick demo available at https://youtu.be/GAPjtLUBa_E and further details at this blog post.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tobias Bernard reports

Last week Exercise Timer by Lőrinc Serfőző was accepted into Circle! It’s a cute little app to create timers for high-intensity interval training. Congratulations!

https://apps.gnome.org/Hiit

Third Party Projects

JumpLink announces

We’re excited to announce the latest beta release of ts-for-gir v4.0.0-beta.23, our TypeScript type definitions generator for GObject introspection GIR files that enhances development experience in GJS projects!

Key highlights:

Fixed Cairo type definitions, resolving long-standing issues

Improved GObject property methods and parameter typing

Fixed global gettext methods and pkg properties

Enhanced string formatting capabilities

Updated .gir files and NPM dependencies to latest versions

Mahjongg ↗

A solitaire version of the classic Eastern tile game.

Mat reports

Mahjongg 48.0 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release contains the following improvements:

New sequential and random layout rotation modes

On double-click, auto-play the end of the game if all tiles are unblocked

Tile rendering uses the GPU instead of CPU

Sharper tile textures on high resolution displays

Smaller spacing around the board on mobile screens

Ctrl-R keyboard shortcut for restarting game

Column sorting in the Scores dialog

Animations when starting a new game and pausing a game

Performance optimizations for tile matching

Small visual changes in the Scores/Game Finished dialog

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#191 Third Saturday Edition

Sat, 15 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 08 to March 15.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

libadwaita 1.7.0 has been released, see the accompanying blog post for details: https://nyaa.place/blog/libadwaita-1-7/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Two exciting features landed this week for Déjà Dup Backups:

You can now define an Rclone remote as your storage location for backups. This extends the cloud options considerably, though some external configuration of Rclone is required.

Restic is now the default tool for fresh backups (instead of Duplicity). This should be faster and enable some future features (likely will be turned on only for flathub flatpaks builds for now)

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) announces

I’ve started working on phone support for Apostrophe. There’s still quite a lot to do, but for the next release it should be already usable in linux phones and in general small window sizes

Third Party Projects

Óscar announces

Introducing LPTK is a new stateless password manager, compatible with LessPass, written in Rust and powered by GTK.

By default it is a completely offline tool that generates passwords depending on what you enter in the input. It does not store any information of any kind and is based on the principle of same input, same output so by simply remembering your master password you can generate passwords for any site you want to authenticate to.

But you also have the possibility to connect against a server (such as Rockpass) so that you don’t have to remember the options entered on each site.

You can download the application directly from Flathub and remember that any feedback or report is always welcome.

Wayne Heaney says

The latest version of Breezy Desktop — a GNOME XR desktop solution — is now available in open beta for users of most popular brands and models of XR glasses. Breezy Desktop allows you to add multiple virtual monitors to your desktop, which get projected in front of you in the glasses, allowing you to look around to view each of the desktops. “Zoom on focus” mode will automatically zoom in on the screen you’re looking towards and “follow mode” allows you to pull the focused display to the center and have it follow you, while the other displays hang back. These features can be quick toggled through keyboard shortcuts for max efficiency. See the announcement for more info: https://www.reddit.com/r/Xreal/comments/1j7gmbd/its_finally_ready_you_can_now_add_virtual/

Miscellaneous

Arjan announces

This week PyGObject 3.52.2 was released.

This release contains significant improvements for GNOME’s Python bindings. The most notable update for 3.52 are:

PyGObject is using GIRepository (from Glib). At runtime it no longer depends on object-introspection.

The automatic initialisation of Gtk and Gdk from PyGObject can be disabled now. This allows fine control over how Gtk and Gdk are initialized.

The standard enum module is used for enums and flags. This makes them behave in a more Pythonic way.

Method signatures are exposed via PyGObject.
>>>  inspect.signature(Gtk.Widget.contains)
<Signature (self, x: float, y: float) -> bool>
We added some convenience functions for using the asyncio. You can set the priority of a task, and enable asyncio support with a with-context:
app = Gio.Application
with gi.events.GLibEventLoopPolicy():
    app.run()
GObject-based classes can now override the (do_)dispose method. This gives you the option to properly clean up (GTK related) resources.

A full list of improvements can be found in the NEWS file.

The code is available from the GNOME download server and PyPI.

Internships

The GNOME Internship Committee and Open Source Community Africa (OSCA) have joined forces to organize this year’s GNOME Internship Preparatory Bootcamp. It is an online event for those who are planning to apply to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internships! Get to know more about these programs and join Q&A sessions with past participants, program organizers, and mentors.

The GNOME Internship Preparatory Bootcamp will happen on March 15th (Saturday) at 4:00 pm - 7:00 pm UTC at this video conferencing link: https://meet.gnome.org/rooms/tl3-fsa-gyb-arq/join

Events

Kristi Progri reports

Reminder: The GUADEC Call for Papers is open until March 16th! Don’t miss your chance to submit your paper and join us in Brescia, Italy, from July 24-29! 🇮🇹✨

Submit here: https://events.gnome.org/event/259/abstracts/#submit-abstract

Kristi Progri says

Linux App Summit 2025 registration is open!

Join us in Tirana, Albania, on April 25th-26th for two days of talks, and community gatherings. We welcome both in-person and online attendees—don’t forget to register! 👉 https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/7/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#190 Cross Platform

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 28 to March 07.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

sp1rit announces

The GTK Android backend gained preliminary support for OpenGL. While not fully implemented yet, most applications that make use of Gtk.GLArea should work now and other applications should see noticeable performance improvements, especially on shadows.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Thanks to the work of Arjan GTK applications on macOS will use native window controls starting the 4.18 release. To preserve backward compatibility, this behaviour is opt-in; application developers can use native controls by setting the GtkHeaderBar:use-native-controls property, either in code or in UI definition files.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) says

I’ve been spending some time reworking all the regex expressions that Apostrophe uses for its markdown syntax highlighting and document statistics. They’re now more accurate and less prone to performance issues. They should be easier to maintain from now on, as I’ve documented them thoroughly and written new tests. They now adhere more to pandoc’s markdown flavour, as it’s the default for Apostrophe, instead of commonmark.

Third Party Projects

Introducing Refine 0.5.0, the GNOME Tweaks alternative leveraging the data-driven and composition paradigms. This version re-adds the Document font option, and renames “Middle Click Paste” to “Middle Click to Paste Text” with an accompanying subtitle.

0.5.0 also adds the capability to rearrange the titlebar’s window buttons. This new feature also lets you add the minimize and maximize buttons.

While we thoroughly tested right-to-left (RTL) direction and keyboard navigation with a screen reader, it’s worth noting that we’re no experts. We welcome feedback from those who use Refine in RTL and/or with a keyboard and screen reader.

You can get Refine 0.5.0 on Flathub

fabrialberio announces

Pins version 2.1 is now available! With this release the app grid will be more complete, thanks to fixes and improvements in loading apps, and more colorful, since Pins can now display app icons from non-standard locations. I have also added an option to show or hide system apps. Checkout the app on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.fabrialberio.pinapp

Shell Extensions

Foresight is a new GNOME Shell Extension that automagically opens the activities view on empty workspaces. It uses callbacks to monitor windows and workspaces (instead of actively checking on them on certain time intervals), which makes it very efficient and responsive.

Miscellaneous

Iverson Briones (any) says

Welcome onboard the GNOME l10n fleet, Filipino l10n team! Filipino, while having over 80 million speakers worldwide, had no localization effort up ‘til now. But fret not—you can now join the newly baked Filipino l10n team and translate away. #ItsMoreFunInGNOME🇵🇭

The Loupe image viewer app was the first to be completely localized to Filipino this week—set your system language then grab Loupe’s latest nightly build and take a peek! Second in the race is Audio Sharing which also sports a complete localization on the latest nightly build. Last but not the least, the GNOME UI for XDG desktop portals has also been fully localized. GNOME Software, Weather, and Amberol are next, with their localizations currently being molded in the oven. More apps and components to be 🇵🇭-ized soon!

P.S. Bisaya speakers, you will be next =)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#189 Global Shortcuts

Fri, 28 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 21 to February 28.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Thanks to the work of many people across multiple components, the GNOME desktop portal now supports the Global Shortcuts interface. Applications can register desktop-wide shortcuts, and users can edit and revoke them through the system settings.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Lukáš Tyrychtr finished working on the keyboard monitoring support in Mutter, Orca and libatspi. This means that Orca shortcuts will just finally work, including Caps lock as the Orca key, under Wayland, closing one of the last major blockers for the full transition away from X11.

Libmanette ↗

Simple GObject game controller library.

Alice (she/her) reports

after a long period of inactivity, libmanette has been ported to gi-docgen. The new docs are available at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libmanette/doc/main/

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Matthias Clasen says

Both GTK and mutter support the cursor shape protocol now. This will improve the consistency of cursor themes and sizing, and the interoperability with other compositors.

Third Party Projects

Televido ↗

Access German-language public TV

d-k-bo says

Televido 0.5.0 is available on Flathub.

Televido is an app to access German-language public broadcasting live streams and archives based on APIs provided by the MediathekView project.

As a major change in version 0.5.0, Televido now provides an integrated video player based on Clapper.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede announces

GirCore 0.6.3 was released. This release adds some missing bits to GObject-2.0.Integration, adds IDisposable support on interfaces and fixes a bug in several async methods. Check the release notes for details.

Gameeky ↗

Play, create and learn.

Martín Abente Lahaye announces

Gameeky 0.6.5 is out 🚀

This new release brings complete translations for Dutch and Hindi, thanks to Heimen Stoffels and Scrambled777 respectively. Additionally, it has upgraded its GNOME runtime and fixed some rendering issues.

If you’re interested in this mix of video games, coding and learning, I invite you to watch Gameeky’s GUADEC presentation from last year.

Archives ↗

Create and view web archives

Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis announces

Archives 0.4.0 is out with the ability to archive a right clicked link, all links in text selection and all links from a webpage individually. Additionally, it can now open ZIM files through Kiwix. Lastly, a search bar for searching in page was added, progress bars got redesigned and all third-party tools were updated to their latest versions.

Documentation

gi-docgen, the GIR-based C documentation generator got a new release. The most important change reflects a change in the GIR data introduced by gobject-introspection that allows “static” virtual functions (functions in the class structure that have no instance parameter). Some small QoL improvements to support narrow layouts, as well as cleanups in the generated HTML and styles. As usual, this release is available on both download.gnome.org and on PyPI.

Shell Extensions

Pedro Sader Azevedo announces

A few days ago, I released Blocker, my first GNOME Shell Extension.

It allows users to easily toggle system-wide content blocking. Behind the scenes, it uses a program named hBlock to change the computer’s DNS settings, so it does not connect to domains that are known for serving adverts, trackers, and malware. This strategy of content blocking has its limitations, and you can read more about them here.

Give it a go if that sounds interesting to you!

Miscellaneous

Thib says

I published a blog post about how the EU can use GNOME to kickstart an international, transparent, collaborative operating system and reduce its dependency on American corporations, and what role the Foundation and community can play in it.

https://ergaster.org/posts/2025/02/28-prosthetics-that-dont-betray/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#188 Software Fixes

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 14 to February 21.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Milan Crha has been grinding through and fixing multiple smaller issues and papercuts in gnome-software in the last few weeks, adding polish to the upcoming 48.0 release

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez reports

thanks to work by Om Thorat and Qiu Wenbo on the UI side, and many months of refactoring from all the maintainers, it is now possible to use different styles when highlighting text in PDF documents in Papers! This was one of the most requested features, and one we are very excited to share!

Third Party Projects

José reports

🚀 New Mingle Release: v0.20

v0.20 is here with some updates:

Tooltips for emojis and their combos: Hover to see what makes up a combo. Easy peasy!

Search button fix: Updated it to a toggle button so it stops disappearing on you.

New Adw.Spinner: Fancy new loading spinner.

Bug fix: Headerbar was ghosting on launch (window couldn’t move)

Favorites system: Coming soon™—almost ready!

Let me know if I broke something!

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.45.0 is out:

Phosh now detects captive Wi-Fi portals and shows a notification that takes you to your favorite browser when activated to log into the portal. When taking screenshots we now save thumbnails right away for file choosers and other apps to display. The compositor switched to wlroots 0.18 and things like debug log domains, damage tracking debugging or touch point debugging can now be configured at run time.

There’s more, see the full details at here

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Tobias Bernard announces

This week Keypunch was accepted into Circle! It’s an elegant little typing tutor to help you learn touch typing or improve your typing skills. Congratulations!

GNOME Websites

Jakub Steiner (jimmac) reports

Following the major redesign of www.gnome.org last week, the developer portal at http://developer.gnome.org has also been refreshed with a new look. The update brings it in line with GNOME’s modern design while keeping key developer resources easily accessible.

Shell Extensions

Weather O’Clock ↗

Display the current weather inside the pill next to the clock.

The shell extensions Weather O’Clock and Auto Activities have been ported to GNOME 48.

Miscellaneous

Cassidy James (he/him) says

I wrote a fairly comprehensive look at the safety story for apps and updates over on the Flathub blog.

If you’re an app developer or user who has ever been curious how Flathub helps keep its millions of users safe, give it a read!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#187 Triple Buffered Notifications

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 07 to February 14.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Today, just in time for this edition of This Week in GNOME and after 5 years, more than a thousand review comments, and multiple massive refactorings and rewrites, the legendary merge request mutter!1441 was merged.

This merge requests introduces an additional render buffer when Mutter is not able to keep up with the frames.

The technique commonly known as dynamic triple buffering can help in situations where the total time to generate a frame - including CPU and GPU work - is longer than one refresh cycle. This improves the concurrency capabilities of Mutter by letting the compositor start working on the next frame as early as possible, even when the previous frame isn’t displayed.

In practice, this kind of situation can happen with sudden burst of activity in the compositor. For example, when the GNOME Shell overview is opened after a period of low activity.

This should improve the perceived smoothness of GNOME, with less skipped frames and more fluid animations.

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

Julian Sparber (Away till Jan 7th) reports

The long awaited notification grouping was merged this week into GNOME Shell, just in time for GNOME 48. This was a huge effort by multiple parties, especially by Florian Müllner who spend countless hours reviewing code changes. This is probably one of the most visible features added to GNOME thanks to the STF grant.

GNOME Contacts ↗

Keep and organize your contacts information.

Adrien Plazas announces

Contacts received some small last minute changes right in time for GNOME 48:

its contact editor’s spacing have been overhauled to match other GNOME apps,

its birthday editing row and dialog got redesigned to not only look better but work better on mobile as well.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tobias Bernard announces

This week Drum Machine was accepted into Circle! It’s a delightful little app to play with drum patterns and prototype track ideas. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

Krafting - Vincent reports

SemantiK got two releases last week: 1.4.0 and 1.5.0. They both bring new improvements, code refactoring, more translation work (thanks to @johnpetersa19 for the Brazilian Portuguese translation), and a revamped language selector!

The next big step would be to create more Language Pack, if you want to help with that, feel free to contact me via Matrix!

Krafting - Vincent reports

Also, last week, I’ve been hard at work fixing bugs throughout all my apps, and making them fully responsive on small screens, making them perfect for Mobile Linux ! 🎉📱

Hex Colordle got some bug fixes and small improvements to message when you lose.

Playlifin Voyager and PedantiK got some UI tweaks and bug fixes

Reddy got some better image scaling, making it way better on small screens, as well as some library version bumps.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

Marcel Tiede says

GirCore verion 0.6.2 was released. It features support for .NET 9 and modernized the internal binding code resulting in better garbage collector integration and the removal of reflection based code. As a result there are several breaking changes. A new beginner friendly tutorial was contributed and can be found on the homepage. Please see the release notes for more details.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Due to a couple of unfortunate but important regressions in Fractal 10, we are releasing Fractal 10.1 so our users don’t have to wait too long for them to be addressed. This minor version fixes the following issues:

Some rooms were stuck in an unread state, even after reading them or marking them as read.

Joining or creating a room would crash the app.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

If you want to help us avoid regressions like that in the future, you could use Fractal Nightly! Or even better, you could pick up one of our issues and become part of the ~~problem~~ solution.

Events

Kristi Progri announces

GUADEC 2025 Call for Papers is officially open! Submit your paper by March 16th via this link: https://events.gnome.org/event/259/abstracts/#submit-abstract

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#186 Media Parsing

Fri, 07 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 31 to February 07.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

The LocalSearch filesystem extractor is switching from GStreamer to ffmpeg / libav for media file parsing in the next major release. GStreamer served us well for almost 20 years in this role as a media parsing library, but it was designed for media playback and not fast metadata extraction. It’s plugin support meant that it behaves differently depending which plugins are installed on a given system, which makes it impossible to fully test. The last few years saw the LocalSearch metadata extractor gain much better sandboxing, but due to the way GStreamer loads plugins, we had to poke several holes in the sandbox to make it work, and play a whack-a-mole game to blocklist any GStreamer plugins that wouldn’t work in the sandbox.

The new ffmpeg-based implementation is faster, and also safer due to tighter sandboxing. It supports all the media formats we need to parse, and in fact, on most systems GStreamer was already processing many filetypes using libav. Thanks to Carlos Garnacho for the merge request.

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

In GNOME 48.beta, the GJS interactive console will be asynchronous. You can, for example, create a window with a button, connect a signal handler, click the button, and the signal handler will run when the button is clicked. Previously, the signal handler wouldn’t run because it was blocked by the console waiting for input. (This doesn’t yet make await work in the interactive console, but it is a prerequisite.) Thanks to Evan Welsh for doing the thorough research here!

ptomato says

Also in GNOME 48.beta, we have an easier way to create GObject.Value thanks to Gary Li. Usually for C APIs that use GValue, GJS transparently substitutes native JS values. However, in some cases you need to use the GObject.Value wrapper in JS. Previously you would create an empty object, call init to set the type, and then store a value:
const value = new GObject.Value();
value.init(String);
value.set_string('a string');
Now you can just do it in one: new GObject.Value(String, 'a string');

GNOME Releases

Jeremy Bicha reports

The Debian GNOME team has announced that GNOME 48 will be included in Debian 13 “Trixie”. Debian 13 will be released later this year.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave ↗

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix reports

Shortwave 5.0 is now available, bringing background playback and completely revamped stream recording!

For more details, check out the blog post: https://blogs.gnome.org/haeckerfelix/2025/02/05/shortwave-5-0/

Third Party Projects

fabrialberio says

Pins (formerly PinApp) version 2.0 is now available! The new version is the result of a complete rewrite, switching from Python to C. This brings a lot of major and minor improvements, including a new grid view and support for autostart applications. Checkout the app on Flathub.

petsoi says

Words! 0.3 is now available with support for multiple dictionaries and different word lengths! I’ve also added a German dictionary. If you’d like to see your language included, feel free to submit a word list.

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The GNOME Shell 48 extensions porting guide has been released! If you need any help with the port, you can ask us on the GNOME Extensions Matrix Channel.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#185 Adwaita Sans

Fri, 31 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 24 to January 31.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Allan Day reports

GNOME changed its UI and monospace fonts this week, in a long anticipated change that is planned for GNOME 48. The new fonts are called Adwaita Sans and Adwaita Mono. Adwaita Sans is a modified version of Inter, and replaces Cantarell as the UI font. Adwaita Mono is a modified version of Iosevka, and replaces Source Code Pro as the default monospace font. This feature was implemented by Jamie Gravendeel, with last-minute assistance from Florian Muellner.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

libadwaita now provides API for accessing the system monospace and document fonts, both programmatically and from CSS.

Additionally, the .monospace style class uses the system font now, instead of monospace, so apps don’t need to access it themselves from the settings portal and gsettings anymore

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

The GTK developers held a hackfest in Brussels, covering various topics:

accessibility

text rendering

deprecations

new Android backend

GTK5 features

A full report will be published on the GTK development blog, so keep a keen eye for it

Text Editor ↗

Text Editor is a simple text editor that focus on session management.

Allan Day announces

Some news from a previous week: a collection of design updates have appeared in Text Editor, in time for the upcoming GNOME 48 release. The changes include a new document sidebar, which combines document properties and settings. There is also a new floating line/column indicator.

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Allan Day reports

Work continued on GNOME’s new Digital Wellbeing features this week. Changes were made to allow screen time to be viewed independently of the screen time limit feature, and a setting was added to allow screen time recording to be disabled. The labels in the settings panel were also polished. Much of this work was made possible by an Endless grant to the GNOME Foundation.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth (he/him) reports

This week Iotas was accepted into GNOME Circle. Iotas aims to provide distraction-free note taking, and lets you sync your notes across devices with Nextcloud. Congratulations!

Hieroglyphic ↗

Find LaTeX symbols

FineFindus says

A new Hieroglyphic update has been released, bringing a number of improvements:

Improved classifier, which now includes the nearly 500 user-contributed symbols, thanks to everyone who helped.

The backend infrastructure has been updated to make it easier for future improvements to the classifier.

The drawing area has been rewritten to use GTK4’s rendering capabilities instead of Cairo.

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl reports

This week we released version 1.8.4 of Graphs, it’s a minor release primarily focusing on the update to the GNOME 47 runtime:

Update to the GNOME 47 runtime, with support for accent colours.

The rubberband on the canvas has been improved, now it has rounded corners similar to Nautilus

Equation parsing has been improved, now handling edge-cases better. It’s now also completely case-insensitive, meaning “Pi” and “PI” are both acceptable variants of the greek letter π.

Meanwhile we’re working hard on the next major release. The latest main channel on our Gitlab now has support for actual equations spanning an infinite canvas, and operations are calculated analytically with the equations changing their names accordingly. We’ve also got a brand new style-editor with a live preview. Stay tuned for an announcement on this later on, in the meantime you can check out the upcoming release on the Flathub beta channel.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan announces

This week Dan Yeaw release Gaphor 3.0. This release is a major step forward. It contains a lot of UI updates. In addition Gaphor’s internal data models has been updated and improved. More details you can find in this blog post. You can find the latest version in Flatpak. macOS and Windows versions are available from our website.

Third Party Projects

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

How are you going to find your friends and coordinate end of day drinks when you’re lost in the middle of a large crowd in a big city? With the new version of your favorite Matrix client, of course! Here is Fractal 10.

The QR code scanning code has been ported to libaperture, the library behind GNOME Camera. This should result in better performance and more reliability.

OAuth 2.0 compatibility was added, to make sure that we are ready for the upcoming authentication changes for matrix.org.

Pills for users and rooms mentions show consistently in the right place instead of seemingly random places, getting rid of one of our oldest and most annoying bug.

Attachments go through the send queue, ensuring correct order of all messages and improving the visual feedback.

Videos were often not playing after loading in the room history. This was fixed, and we also show properly when an error occurred.

We were downloading too many different sizes for avatar images, which would fill the media cache needlessly. We now only download a couple of sizes. This has the extra benefit of fixing blurry or missing thumbnails in notifications.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

We have a lot of improvements in mind for our next release, but if you want a particular feature to make it, the surest way is to implement it yourself! Start by looking at our issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.1.4 was also released this week with some new features and fixes!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added a new Embed Thumbnails option in Preferences to enable/disable Parabolic’s downloading of thumbnails separate from metadata

Added a disclaimer about embedding thumbnails/subtitles when using generic file types

Fixed an issue where the incorrect previous video and/or audio format was selected

Fixed an issue where chapters were embedded even if the option was disabled

Fixed an issue where splitting media by chapters would result in incorrect media lengths in the split files

Fixed an issue where video and audio formats were not selectable on GNOME

Events

Kristi Progri reports

CFP for Linux App Summit 2025 is now open! Join us in Tirana, Albania on April 25-26th. Submit your paper by Feb 15th https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/7/

For more information and updates check our website: https://linuxappsummit.org/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#184 Upcoming Freeze

Fri, 24 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 17 to January 24.

GNOME Releases

In about one week from today, on February 1st, APIs, features, and user interfaces are frozen for GNOME 48. The release for GNOME 48 is planned for March 19th. More details and dates are available in the release calendar.

Third Party Projects

petsoi reports

This week, I released my very first app, Words!, a game inspired by Wordle. You can find it on Flathub.

Some features, like support for different dictionaries with varying word lengths and multiple languages, are still on my todo list.

Happy word hunting!

Giant Pink Robots! announces

Varia download manager got an update that’s probably its biggest since the first release.

The most important new feature is yt-dlp integration allowing for video and audio downloads from any supported website at any supported quality setting. These downloads are fully integrated into Varia and behave like any other download type.

New adaptive layout allows for smaller window sizes and supports mobile devices.

Way better handling of downloads for better performance and also to crush bugs. Downloads that were paused stay paused upon relaunch, which I think was one of the biggest issues.

More settings for torrents, allowing for adjustments to the seeding ratio and custom download directory. .torrent files can now be dragged onto the window.

You can get it here: https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb announces

Crosswords 0.3.14 was released. For this version, almost all the changes were in the underlying code and Crossword Editor. Improvements include:

libipuz is ported to GObject Introspection and has developer documentation. It’s much closer to a stable API.

Autofill is massively improved. Full boards are now solvable, and tough corners will fill or fail quicker

Selection of cells is saner, removing the need for nested tabs.

A preloaded dictionary from Wiktionary is included to supplement the word lists.

Enhanced substring matching added for cryptic indicators.

A preview window is added to check on a puzzle in development.

This is the first version of the Editor that is generally usable. If you’ve ever wanted to write a crossword, please give it a try and let me know how it goes.

Read more at the release notes

It’s available on flathub (game, editor) or in fedora

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#183 Updated Flatpak

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 10 to January 17.

Flatpak ↗

Last week, the Flatpak 1.16.0 was released. It’s the first stable release in years! A lot has happened in the meantime, some of the highlights are:

Listing USB devices, which in combination with the USB portal, allow for sandboxed device access

Accessibility improvements

Support for Wayland security context

… and more!

I’ve written about it in more detail in a blog post: https://feaneron.com/2025/01/14/flatpak-1-16-is-out/

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maximiliano 🥑 announces

Snapshot 48.alpha was just released. In this release we added support for reading QR codes.

The aperture library also gained this feature and uses the rqrr crate, meaning that it does not require to link against zbar anymore!

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

a few more improvements for libadwaita adaptive preview: the inspector UI is now less confusing and there’s now a shortcut that opens it directly (Shift+Ctrl+M). The API for opening it is now public and libadwaita demo now has an adaptive preview entry in its menu, along with inspector

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad says

Maps now has a re-designed user location marker, using a new “torch” to indicate heading, and using the system accent color

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Philip Withnall announces

Screen Time support has landed in the Wellbeing panel in GNOME Settings, which completes the round of merge requests needed to get that feature working across the desktop. It allows you to monitor your daily usage of the computer, and set a time limit each day. This is in addition to break reminders, which landed late last year.

Big thanks to Florian Müllner and Matthijs Velsink for their reviews of the work, and to Sam Hewitt and Allan Day for design work on the feature.

It’s now available to test in GNOME OS nightly images. If you find bugs in the feature, please file an issue against either gnome-control-center or gnome-shell, and label it with the ‘Wellbeing’ label.

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato reports

We also landed several improvements from Marco Trevisan that further improve performance in accessing GObject properties, like button.iconName or label.useMarkup, and make GObject methods use less memory when called from JS.

ptomato says

In GJS, the command-line debugger can now examine private fields of objects, thanks to Gary Li.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Podcasts ↗

Podcast app for GNOME.

alatiera says

New year, New release 🎉!

This release brings lots of small improvements to make everything a little bit better!

The following are now possible:

You can now mark individual episodes as played

The Shows will now scale based on the window size

You can close the window with the Control + W shortcut

While we also changed some internal things

Rework the download machinery to be faster and more efficient

Improved application startup times

And fixes a couple of pesky bugs

Automatically detect the image format for thumbnails

Dates are now displayed and calculated using localtime instead of sometimes using UTC

Fix accessibility warnings in the Episode Description

Correctly trigger a download when thumbnail cover for mpris is missing

Correctly calculate the episode download size if its missing from the xml metadata

Third Party Projects

Refine version 0.4.0 was released. Refine is a GNOME Tweaks alternative I’m working on which follows the data-driven, object-oriented, and composition paradigms. The end goal is to have the convenience to add or remove options without touching a single line of source code.

Version 0.4.0 exposes the following features from dconf:

font hinting and font antialiasing options

background options

window header bar options

resize with secondary clicks toggle

window focus mode options

automatically raise on hover toggle

I also released version 0.2.0 before, which introduced a combo row for selecting the preferred GTK 3 and GTK 4 theme.

You can get Refine on Flathub.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2025.1.2 is here with fixes for various bugs users were experiencing.

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where the cookies file was not used when validating media URLs

Fixed an issue where the Qt version of the app did not select the Best format when the previously used format was not available

Fixed an issue where the update button on the Windows app did not work

Updated yt-dlp

Mahjongg ↗

A solitaire version of the classic Eastern tile game.

Mat reports

Significant improvements have been made to Mahjongg in the past week:

New mode to rotate between layouts when starting a new game (added by K Davis)

Added transitions/animations when starting a new game and pausing a game

Uses GTK 4’s GPU rendering to render tiles, instead of Cairo

Re-rendered the ‘Smooth’ theme for high resolution screens

No more delays when starting a new game, thanks to many optimizations

Reduced frame drops when resizing the game window

Various code cleanups and some fixes for memory leaks

These changes will be available in Mahjongg 48 later this spring. Until then, you can try them out by installing the org.gnome.Mahjongg.Devel Flatpak from the GNOME Nightly repository. Enjoy!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

In this cold weather, we hope Fractal 10.rc will warm your hearts. Let’s celebrate this with our own awards ceremony:

The most next-gen addition goes to… making Fractal OIDC aware. This ensures compatibility with the upcoming authentication changes for matrix.org.

The most valuable fix goes to… showing consistently pills for users and rooms mentions in the right place instead of seemingly random places, getting rid of one of our oldest and most annoying bug.

The most sensible improvement goes to… using the send queue for attachments, ensuring correct order of all messages and improving the visual feedback.

The most underrated feature goes to… allowing to react to stickers, fixing a crash in the process.

The most obvious tweak goes to… removing the “Open Direct Chat” menu entry from avatar menu and member profile in direct chats.

The clearest enhancement goes to… labelling experimental versions in the room upgrade menu as such.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 10.

If you are wondering what to do on a cold day, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#182 Updated Crypto

Fri, 10 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 03 to January 10.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

nielsdg reports

gcr, a core library that provides a GObject-oriented interface to several crypto APIs, is preparing for the new 4.4 version with the alpha release 4.3.90. It contains some new APIs for GcrCertificate, such as the new GcrCertificateExtension class that allows you to inspect certificate extensions. 🕵️

nielsdg says

GNOME Keyring has now finally moved to Meson and has dropped support for building with autotools. This will be part of the upcoming 48.alpha release.

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

lorenzw says

Many people might have seen it already, but a while ago we finally officailly moved our documentation from the old GNOME wiki to a new website: https://docs.vala.dev! This has been a long-standing task completed by Colin Kiama. The pages are hosted on https://github.com/vala-lang/vala-docs and everyone is welcome to contribute and improve them, we have already started to file tickets in the issue tracker and assign labels, especially for newcomers, so its easy to start helping out! We want to port a lot more docs and code examples from other locations to this new website, and thats not difficult at all! The website is built similar to all other new GNOME documentation websites using sphinx, so you don’t even need to learn a new markup language. Happy docs reading and hacking! :D

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Image Viewer (Loupe) 48.alpha is now available.

This new release adds image editing support for PNGs and JPEGs. Images can be cropped (tracking issue), rotated, and flipped. New zoom controls allow setting a specific zoom level and feature a more compact style. Support for additional metadata formats like XMP and new image information fields have been added as well.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

adaptive preview has received a bunch of updates since the last time: for example it now shows device bezels and allows to take screenshot of the app along with the shell panels and bezels

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave ↗

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix announces

At the end of the festive season I was able to implement one more feature: Shortwave now supports background playback, and interacts with the background portal to display the current status in the system menu!

Third Party Projects

Fabrix announces

Confy 0.8.0 has been released. Confy is a conference schedule companion. This release brings updated UI design, some quality of life improvements like recent opened schedules list, and fixes to schedule parsing. https://confy.kirgroup.net/

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2025.1.0 is here! This update contains various bug fixes for issues users were experiencing, as well as a new format selection system.

Here’s the full changelog:

Parabolic will now display all available video and audio formats for selection by the user when downloading a single media

Fixed an issue where some video downloads contained no audio

Fixed an issue where progress was incorrectly reported for some downloads

Fixed an issue where downloads would not stop on Windows

Fixed an issue where paths with accent marks were not handled correctly on Windows

Fixed an issue where the bundled ffmpeg did not work correctly on some Windows systems

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#181 Happy New Year!

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 27 to January 03.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Mutter can now be built without fonts rendering support allowing to get rid of Pango/Harfbuzz/Fribidi dependencies. When combined with the previously added options to disable X11/Xwayland, we should soon be able to drop Cairo as a dependency in this build configuration. This change has 0 impact on GNOME Shell extensions as GNOME Shell cannot be built without fonts rendering support. Compositors built using libmutter, might need to include clutter/clutter-pango.h header where they use any of the fonts rendering APIs.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave ↗

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix reports

Over the holidays I have significantly improved the recording feature of Shortwave:

Choice between different recording modes (“Save Everything”, “Decide for Each Track” and “Record Nothing”)

Directory in which recorded tracks are saved can now be changed

Minimum duration for tracks can be adjusted

New dialog window for tracks to display further information

New button to automatically save desired tracks after they have been completely recorded

Ongoing recordings can be canceled

Improved notifications, with direct option to automatically save the track or not to record

Third Party Projects

Introducing Refine, an app to tweak advanced and experimental settings in GNOME. It is an alternative to GNOME Tweaks, and is a pet project I’m currently working to experiment with PyGObject and dconf, while following the data-driven, object-oriented, and composition paradigms.

The entire codebase is made up of widgets that provide all the functionality needed to add an option. For example, instead of adding each option programmatically in Refine, the ultimate goal is to have it all done in the UI file.

For example, if we want to add an option to enable or disable middle click paste, all we need is the following code in the UI file:
$RefineSwitchRow {
  title: _('Middle Click Paste');
  schema-id: 'org.gnome.desktop.interface';
  key: 'gtk-enable-primary-paste';
}
That’s it. The RefineSwitchRow widget will do whatever it needs to do to ensure the option is available, grab the setting if it’s available, and display it to the user. Many of these widgets provide extra functionality, such as a Reset button.

You can get Refine on Flathub: flathub.org/apps/page.tesk.Refine

Everything else (source code, screenshot, etc.) is in the project website: tesk.page/refine, as well as the Flathub link.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.44.0 is out:

Phosh now shows the configured wallpaper / background in the overview (instead of just classic black) and has a button to unfullscreen on app thumbnails. We have done more notification style fixes (e.g. banners now disappear with an animation) and the configuration dialogs now use AdwPreferencesDialog (to be more mobile friendly) and GtkFileDialog to use the portal.

There’s more, see the full details at here

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#180 Image Editing

Fri, 27 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 20 to December 27.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Sophie 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ (she/her) announces

Image editing including crop, rotate, and flip has been merged into Loupe. Currently, only PNG images are supported. Support for JPEGs is in the works. There is a list of open issues for the current implementation. You can support my work financially on several platforms.

Third Party Projects

Sebastian Wiesner says

A new release of TurnOn is available. The new release adds network scanning: When scanning is on TurnOn now finds devices in the local network and offers to save them so that it can later turn them on.

TurnOn is a small GNOME utility to turn on remote systems such as NAS devices with Wake On LAN. It’s available from Flathub.

Vladimir Kosolapov says

Netsleuth 1.1.0 is here! This update introduces a search provider for GNOME Shell, command-line interface and new calculable values.

The calculation history now stores up to 20 entries, allowing for quick retrieval of specific IP addresses directly from the GNOME Shell search.

For those who prefer a console experience, the command-line interface enables performing the same calculations as in the graphical version.

This update also introduces two new calculable values — “IPv4 Mapped Address” and “6to4 Prefix”.

Check it out on Flathub!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

🎶 Vive le vent ! Vive le vent ! Vive le vent d’hiver ! 🌲 And vive Fractal 10.beta! While everyone is resting for the holidays, we thought you could use a new release. It focuses on improvements and bug fixes, including:

Videos were often not playing after loading in the room history, this was fixed, and we also show properly when an error occurred.

Computing the size of media messages was slightly wrong, which meant that sometimes a grey line would appear below them. We rebooted the code and that problem is gone!

Our CSS file was a bit too big for our taste, so we decided to make use of SASS and split it.

We were downloading too many different sizes for avatar images, which would fill the media cache needlessly. We now only download a couple of sizes. This has the extra benefit of fixing blurry or missing thumbnails in notifications.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

GNOME Websites

Felix announces

Thanks to Brage Fuglseth (he/him), thisweek.gnome.org now supports the OpenGraph protocol, which means you can now get rich social media preview cards on sites that support it (e.g. Mastodon, Discourse, Reddit).

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#179 Reduced Memory Usage

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 13 to December 20.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Carlos Garnacho implemented a clever optimisation in the LocalSearch filesystem indexer, which reduces memory usage when crawling large folders. See the MR for details and a before and after comparison.

Khalid Abu Shawarib reports

User Sharing, is a small package that binds together various free software projects to bring easy to use, user-level file sharing to the masses. Earlier this week, a merge request has landed that ports all of the application code over from C to Rust! The file sharing service still retains the same functionality.

See this post for more details.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

libadwaita now has Adaptive Preview in GTK inspector, a way to test layouts on smaller screen sizes - similar to responsive layout mode in Firefox inspector, device toolbar in Chrome etc. See https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2024/12/19/mobile-testing-in-libadwaita/ for more details

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Adrien Plazas announces

Software received a brand new systemd-sysupdate plugin. That was one of the last pieces needed to complete the migration of GNOME OS from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate. Read more in this short blog post.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Titouan Real says

GNOME Calendar, your favorite calendaring application, got a much improved event editor for GNOME 48!

Adaptive Calendar Selector: The calendar selector dropdown has been updated to use a standard widget, fixing multiple issues along the way;

Better Date and Time Entries: entries feature better keyboard navigation and better parsing;

Modernized Layout: The new layout is more compact, easier to read, and is more in line with modern design patterns.

Support for timezone editing is also in the testing phase in this merge request. If you would like to help, you can grab the Flatpak artifacts (or build yourself using GNOME Builder), and report any bug you may find. We recommend only using a throwaway calendar for testing.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis announces

Tuba 0.9 is now available, with many new features and bug fixes!

✨ Highlights:

Audio Visualizer

Accent Colors and other GNOME 47 changes

Focus Picker

Account Suggestions for new accounts

Scheduled & Draft Posts

Full emoji reaction support for supported backends

FediWrapped

Viewing which ones of the people you follow also follow an account

Placing favorite lists to the sidebar

Poll animations, refresh and show results button

Windows installer

And much more!

Happy Holidays! ❄️

Third Party Projects

دانیال بهزادی announces

We’re excited to announce the release of Carburetor version 5.0.0, our user-friendly tool for setting up a TOR proxy effortlessly! This release comes with a special significance as we celebrate the longest night of the year, known as Yalda in Persian culture. Yalda symbolizes the endurance of darkness, reminding us that even the longest nights eventually give way to dawn. This resonates deeply with those living under tyranny, as we hold onto hope for a brighter future and the eventual liberation from oppression.

In a momentous turn of events, we also extend our heartfelt congratulations to the brave Syrians around the world on the departure of Bashar Al-Asad, a symbol of tyranny. We hope this new chapter brings them closer to freedom and access to a truly open Internet. With Carburetor, we aim to empower users to prioritize their privacy and security, ensuring that the tool is used for the right reasons—helping others and safeguarding personal information, rather than as a means of mandatory connectivity.

Happy Yalda and cheers to a brighter future! 🌟

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2024.12.0 is here! This update contains a redesigned Qt application, new features and various bug fixes.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to toggle the inclusion of a media’s id in its title when validated in the app’s settings

Added the option to export a download’s media description to a separate file

Restored the ability for Parabolic to accept a URL to validate via command line arguments

Fixed an issue where auto-generated subtitles were not being embed in a media file

Fixed an issue where downloading media at certain time frames were not respected

Fixed an issue where video medias’ thumbnails were also cropped when crop audio thumbnails was enabled

Fixed an issue where the previously used download quality was not remembered

Redesigned the Qt version’s user interface with a more modern style

Updated yt-dlp to 2024.12.13

Nick reports

Parabolic V2024.12.1 was also released this week! It contains various bug fixes for issues users were experiencing.

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where generic video downloads would sometimes incorrectly convert to another file type

Fixed an issue where subtitles were not downloaded properly

Fixed an issue where desktop notifications were not being displayed

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#178 Fuzz Testing

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 06 to December 13.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

TinySPARQL ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield reports

TinySPARQL is the database library that powers GNOME’s desktop search. Thanks to work by Carlos Garnacho, it’s now enrolled for fuzz testing in the OSS Fuzz project. You can see the current set of fuzz tests here.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now uses AdwSpinner widgets, and the icon for adding a place as a favorite has an animation effect when toggling on and off

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

In GJS we landed a patch set from Marco Trevisan that gives a big performance boost to accessing GObject properties, like button.iconName or label.useMarkup. Soon, expect further improvements speeding this up even more!

GNOME Development Tools

Sam Thursfield announces

gnome-build-meta now has automatic ref updates, thanks to Jordan Petridis and Abderrahim Kitouni. The updates were previously done manually by release team members. This means that continuous integration of GNOME modules happens more efficiently than ever.

An “update refs” merge request is generated twice daily, by the gnome-build-meta-bot. The CI tests that this builds across 3 architectures, and then one of the gnome-build-meta maintainers simply lets Marge Bot land the update.

We depend on module developers to help keep GNOME building. If you make changes in a module that could break the build, such as adding dependencies or changing how the build system works, please check the updates, and help the release team to fix any issues that come up. Thanks!

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Maintainers of GNOME modules now have access to a new service, integrated to CI pipelines, for releasing new versions of their projects, courtesy of Stefan Peknik and the Infrastructure team. Instead of creating release archives locally, uploading them to a server with scp, and running a script, we now have a service that takes the release archives built on the GNOME infrastructure using CI. The old system is going to be retired by the end of the week, so make sure to update your CI pipeline before the deadline for the GNOME 48.alpha release on January 4, 2025. More details are available on Discourse.

Third Party Projects

slaclau says

I’ve been working on some reusable calendar widgets based on Gnome Calendar and have put them together as a library. I’ve tagged an initial release as 0.1.0 (https://github.com/slaclau/gtkcal/releases/tag/0.1.0) so I can use them in another project but there are no published binaries (yet). The current working name is GtkCal.

Jan-Michael Brummer reports

Saldo 0.8.0 has been released. Saldo, an easy way to access your online banking via FinTS, has now an improved user interface and offers support for Quick Unlock and fingerprint unlocking. In addiion the official bank list has been updated alongside bug fixes.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#177 Scrolling Performance

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 29 to December 06.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

Peter Eisenmann reports

Khalid Abu Shawarib greatly improved Files’ scrolling performance in folders with many thumbnails. The changes resulted in an approximate 10x increase of FPS on tested machines. For details see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/merge_requests/1659

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Jeremy Bicha says

GTK’s Emoji Chooser has been updated for Unicode 16 . This is included in the new GTK 4.17.1 development release and will also be in 4.16.8.

Third Party Projects

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline version 2.1.0 was released. This release brings some major UI improvements to the channel page and video page, which were mostly implemented by lo. There are also many fixes included in this release, for example very long channel names and video title not allowing the window to shrink to narrow displays, or fixing a bug where the watch-later list was scrolled to the bottom at startup. Compared to the last TWIG announcement, there were also three minor releases fixing many more bugs, like bad video player performance on some devices or errors migrating from the old versions of the application.

Miscellaneous

Image Viewer (Loupe) landed in GNOME 45 with its own image loading library, glycin. The reason was that the previously used library GdkPixbuf did not fulfill the security and feature requirements we have for an image loader today.

In parallel to the ongoing work on glycin and Loupe, there have been thoughts on introducing glycin to the rest of GNOME. There are more details available in a new Move away from GdkPixbuf GNOME initiative. Contributions and feedback are very welcome.

You can also support my work on glycin and Loupe financially.

GNOME Foundation

ramcq announces

The GNOME Foundation is pleased to announce its Request for Proposals for contractors to complete the Digital Wellbeing / Parental Controls and Flathub Payments projects funded by Endless. Please see the GNOME Desktop-Wide Web/Network Filtering and Flathub Program Management posts on the project Discourse forums for the full RFQ details, where you can also ask any questions you have for the project teams. Both roles are open for applications until Wednesday December 18th and we look forward to discussing the projects with prospective applicants and reviewing your proposals.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#176 Command History

Fri, 29 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 22 to November 29.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato reports

This week, Gary added a feature to the GJS command-line interpreter: command history is now saved between runs. Look for this in GNOME 48.

Third Party Projects

xjuan says

Cambalache version 0.94.0 is out!Release notes:

Gtk 4 and Gtk 3 accessibility support

Support property subclass override defaults

AdwDialog placeholder support

Improved object description in hierarchy

Lots of bug fixes and minor UI improvements

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/11/26/cambalache-0-94-released/

nokyan announces

Resources 1.7 has been released with support for Neural Processing Units (NPUs), the ability to select multiple processes and swap usage columns for the Apps and Processes views.

Additionally, temperatures are now also displayed as graphs and there are a couple of improvements for AMD GPUs regarding media engine and compute utilization.

The update is of course available on Flathub. Enjoy!

Jan-Michael Brummer says

TwoFun 0.5.1 has been released. It’s a two player game for touch devices featuring smaller game to kill some time. This time user interface gained some smaller improvements and bugfixes. Enjoy!

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna announces

Some sad news to report this week: the GNOME shop is currently closed to new orders. If you have an outstanding order that has not yet arrived and have not already contacted me, please let me know by forwarding the order to info@gnome.org. If you have any experience with running an online shop like the one we have and have the time and patience to help me troubleshoot and explain it to me, please reach out as well! I would be most grateful.

Hope everyone in the US celebrating this week has had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#175 Magic

Fri, 22 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 15 to November 22.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

Gary Li added support for source maps to GJS. If you use build tools such as TypeScript for source code transformation, you can ship source map files alongside your built JS files and make sure your build tool adds the magic source map comment. You will then get the original source locations printed in stack traces and in the debugger.

Third Party Projects

Konstantin Tutsch announces

Lock v1.1.0 is here!

The user experience of encrypting data has drastically improved with the manual entering of a key’s UID being obsolete. You can now simply choose the key you want to encrypt for from a list of all available keys with just a single click!

Fingerprint access of keys has also improved. You can now copy a key’s fingerprint by clicking on its row during keyring management.

Available on Flathub.

Mateus R. Costa reports

Today I have released version 1.1.1 of bign-handheld-thumbnailer. This new version is a patch release with some small tweaks and I believe there won’t be much to add to the program for a while.

bign-handheld-thumbnailer, for those who haven’t heard about, is a thumbnailer for Nintendo DS and 3DS roms. It was created as a replacement for gnome-nds-thumbnailer (which only created thumbnails for NDS roms and has been recently archived), but also gained the ability to generate thumbnails for 3DS roms.

The new 1.1.1 version is available in a copr for Fedora 40, 41 and Rawhide (Fedora 39 is left out as it will be EoL in a few days).

For the next steps, and since gnome-nds-thumbnailer has been archived, it should be a good moment to try to get the project added into official distro repos. I will be attempting to going through the Fedora process, if you are on a different distro and this thumbnailer is useful for you, consider asking for an official package.

(Another possibility is shipping the thumbnailer as a Flatpak in the near future, if that functionality is ever added…)

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp says

Turtle 0.11 has been released.

Clean and reset dialog

A clean and reset dialog has been added to clean a repository from untracked files or reset the current branch to a specific reference.

Diff and log updates

It is now possible to compare the working directory to a reference in the diff dialog.

Renamed files are now shown as one entry in the commit table instead of a removed and added entry. Additionally the context menu in the log dialog has been extended by a push action to push the selected branch.

Minor updates

There are more minor updates, for the full list see the changelog

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2024.11.1 is here!

This update contains fixes for various bugs users were experiencing.

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where file names that included a period were truncated

Fixed an issue where long file names caused the application to crash

Fixed an issue where external subtitle files were created although embedding was supported

Fixed an issue where generic downloads were unable to be opened upon completion

Updated yt-dlp to 2024.11.18

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#174 Choosing Formats

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 08 to November 15.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

The Format Chooser dialog in GNOME Settings has been entirely revamped with merge request !2778, which implements Allan Day’s mockup. The dialog was ported from AdwWindow to AdwDialog, as well as from the deprecated AdwLeaflet to AdwOverlaySplitView, making it adapt better on mobile form factors. The style should look less heavy thanks to the flat design in the format previewer pane.

GNOME Development Tools

Sysprof ↗

A profiling tool that helps in finding the functions in which a program uses most of its time.

Sysprof received a round of improvements to the Marks Waterfall view, the hover tooltip now show the duration of the mark. The Graphics view also received some visual improvements, such as taller graphs and line rendering without cutoffs. Finally, Sysprof collector is now able to handle multiprocess scenarios better.

A new tool for Sysprof was added: sysprof-cat. It takes a capture file, and dumps it in textual form.

This is all in preparation to further profiler integration in WebKit on Linux.

Third Party Projects

Vladimir Kosolapov announces

Netsleuth 1.0.5 has just been released on Flathub!

This version features an adaptive interface that uses a split view on wide screens. The app utilizes screen space more efficiently across mobile devices, tablets and desktops.

For advanced users and specialists, a hexadecimal output format has been added. Now it’s possible to perform more complex calculations while still remaining offline.

dabrain34 announces

🎉 New Release Announcement: GstPipelineStudio v0.3.6 🎉

It’s a great pleasure to announce the release of GstPipelineStudio version 0.3.6 after nearly a year of hard work, enhancements, and testing! This release is packed with new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes that make your GStreamer pipeline design experience smoother and more efficient. 🆕 🚀 Upgrade Now!

To get the latest version of GstPipelineStudio, visit the project’s page and check out the release notes for more details. Whether you’re building multimedia applications, experimenting with GStreamer, or just exploring the possibilities of media streaming, this release has something for everyone.

Happy streaming! 🎬📡

Krafting reports

Hey people! I’ve just released Hex Colordle. It is a game inspired from Hexcodle, where you need to guess the hex code of the color displayed on screen.

You can adjust the number max. of guesses to your liking, and play as much as you want.

It is available now on Flathub

Krafting says

I’ve also release versions 1.1.0 and 1.2.0 of PedantiK.

There are a lot of bugfixes and refactoring, alongside some new features, such as the ability to show the page once you find it, close guessed words are now in gray and current guesses are in color.

More importantly, I started work to bring more languages to the application, in the next version you will see an English language pack, the same way I’ve done for SemantiK, for now the app is still French-only.

It is available on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.43.0 is out:

The quick settings in phosh got massively overhauled giving us nicer status pages and doing away with the long press to open them also custom quick settings can now have status pages too. Phosh now also picks up the accent color, we added a Pomodoro timer quick setting and save screenshots to the screenshots folder. There’s more fixes to the notification system, CSS and other parts of the shell and the compositor.

Check the full details here

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2024.11.0 is here!!

This update introduces some new features, including the ability to select a preferred subtitle format and a generic file type, and fixes many issues with downloads failing and not resuming correctly as well as other minor bugs.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to turn on and off yt-dlp’s verbose logging in the app’s settings

Added the ability to select a preferred subtitle file format in the app’s settings

Added the ability to select a generic file type that will prevent conversions of media files

Fixed an issue where some webm conversions failed

Fixed an issue where some files related to a download were being overwritten when they should not have been

Fixed an issue where the app crashed when handling too long file names

Fixed an issue where the app would not open due to infinitely attempting to recover downloads

Fixed an issue where the speed limit option was not configurable

Fixed an issue where the app did not self update on Windows

Updated yt-dlp to 2024.11.04

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#173 Text Annotations

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 01 to November 08.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Papers’ UX process for adding text annotations has changed. Before (left), it required two clicks to add an annotation. Now (right) the annotation will be added where the user right clicked. Additionally, this makes it now a lot more intuitive to add annotations on devices with touchscreens! Even further, annotations are now created centered and not with a displacement to the bottom right!

Third Party Projects

Last week os-installer version 0.4 was released featuring these changes:

Use AdwNavigationView (♥️) and other modern libadwaita widgets

Added Desktop selection page

Multiple-choice options for software/feature choices

Password/pin can have confirmation fields and minimum length

Optional username field added

Fixes and interal refactorings for performance improvements

Added translations (Arabic, Portuguese (Portugal), Romanian, Russian, Turkish, Urdu) and updated existing translations

Many thanks to all translators and everyone providing feedback! More features are already on their way.

If you are interested in designing graphics for the page headers, feel free to reach out in our Matrix chat.

Heliguy reports

I’m happy to announce that Warehouse has a major update! The user interface has been significantly improved, making the more powerful actions easier to use. This redesign also allows for Warehouse to make better use of larger screen sizes, showing content side-by-side. Improvements also include the ability to name Snapshots (application user data backups), support for custom installations, and of course, overall performance benefits.

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.flattool.Warehouse https://github.com/flattool/warehouse

Giant Pink Robots! announces

Varia download manager has gotten a new update this week. The main UI has been tweaked, with a new button to add .torrent files and a better layout for download progress cards. This update is mostly polishing what was already there, with important bug fixes, performance improvements and many other changes regarding general usability.

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.giantpinkrobots.varia https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel reports

The GirCore project released version 0.6.0-preview.1 containing updated C# bindings for the GObject stack inclding GTK 4.16 and libadwaita 1.6.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#172 Valencia

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 25 to November 01.

Open source is more than just writing code; it’s about people and the community. Right now, the world faces numerous crises, and this past week, another tragedy occurred - one that also affects members of the GNOME community.

Manu (he/they/she) says

The Valencian Country, among other Spanish autonomies has been hit by the worst natural disaster in its history. Entire villages have been completely flooded. There are more than 200 deaths so far that we know of, and more than 2000 people missing.

If you wish to help, Caritas is a trustful organization to donate to:

ES02 2100 8734 6113 0064 8236

Any donation Apostrophe receives the next two months will be also donated to one of the local Horta Sud associations that are working on the field. I will be also helping were help is needed.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

Peter Eisenmann added the :visible-page-tag property to AdwNavigationView - a helper for checking the current page by its tag

Alice (she/her) reports

the style class .dim-label that has always had a misleading name has been soft deprecated in favor of .dimmed. The old style still works same as before

Third Party Projects

Jan-Willem announces

This week I released Java-GI version 0.11.0! Java-GI is a GObject-Introspection bindings generator for Java, using the brand new foreign function interface of OpenJDK 22. It can be used to develop GNOME apps in Java.

This release features a lot of fixes and improvements, so make sure to check out the release notes.

For more information about Java-GI, visit the website, where you will find code samples in both Java and Kotlin. Additionally, the Gtk “Getting started guide” has been ported to Java and is now available here, and a couple new examples were added to the java-gi-examples repository.

Gianni Rosato says

We’ve got a new Aviator release for you! It’s packed with small bug fixes and an SVT-AV1-PSY update.

Bug Fixes:

We fixed the hicolor icon that was mislabeled as scalable.

We also fixed the audio bitrate resetting when you open a new file.

SVT-AV1-PSY v2.3.0 Improvements for Aviator:

You can now encode with odd (non-mod2) dimensions.

You can also encode at resolutions lower than 64x64, all the way down to 4x4.

The color reproduction and overall picture quality will be better when you disable “Perceptual Tuning.”

The color reproduction and overall picture quality with “Perceptual Tuning.” disabled has improved.

There will be general perceptual fidelity improvements when you enable “Perceptual Tuning.”

There will be general performance improvements, especially on ARM platforms.

Other Changes:

We removed the sharpness usage when “Perceptual Tuning” is enabled.

We’ve updated FFmpeg to version 7.1.

We’ve updated llvm to version 19 for project compilation.

We’ve updated to GNOME SDK 47.

Enjoy the new Aviator release! ✈️

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2024.10.3 is here! This update introduces some new features, including the ability to select a batch txt file with multiple URLs for validation, and fixes many bugs regarding website validation, localization of the app on Windows, and crashes on Linux.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added support for selecting a batch file with multiple URLs to validate instead of validating a single URL at a time

Added a recovery mode where downloads that were running/queued will be restored when the application is restarted after a crash

User entered file names will now be correctly normalized and validated in the Add Download dialog

Fixed an issue where YouTube tabs were not correctly validated

Fixed an issue where the app’s documentation was not accessible

Fixed an issue where UTF-8 characters were not displayed correctly on Windows

Fixed an issue where playlist names were not normalized on Windows

Fixed an issue where the row animations were choppy using aria2c on Linux

Fixed an issue where the app would crash when stopping all downloads on Linux

Updated yt-dlp to 2024.10.22

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

😱 What’s that behind you⁉️ Oh, that’s the new Fractal 9 release❣️ 😁 🎃

We switched to the glycin library (the same one used by GNOME Image Viewer) to load images, allowing us to fix several issues, like supporting more animated formats and SVGs and respecting EXIF orientation.

The annoying bug where some rooms would stay as unread even after opening them is now a distant memory.

The media cache uses its own database that you can delete if you want to free some space on your system. It will also soon be able to clean up unused media files to prevent it from growing indefinitely.

Sometimes the day separators would show up with the wrong date, not anymore!

We migrated to the new GTK 4.16 and libadwaita 1.6 APIs, including CSS variables, AdwButtonRow and AdwSpinner.

We used to only rely on the secrets provider to tell us which Matrix accounts are logged-in, which caused issues for people sharing their secrets between devices. Now we also make sure that there is a data folder for a given session before trying to restore it.

Our notifications are categorized as coming from an instant messenger, so graphical shells that support it, such as Phosh, can play a sound for them.

Some room settings are hidden for direct chats, because it does not make sense to change them in this type of room.

The size of the headerbar would change depending on whether the room has a topic or not. This will not happen anymore.

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

We have a lot of improvements in mind for our next release, but if you want a particular feature to make it, the surest way is to implement it yourself! Start by looking at our issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room.

Dev Toolbox ↗

Dev tools at your fingertips

Alessandro Iepure announces

After a long year of coding on and off (and balancing a lot of real life and university work!), I’m happy to finally share a new Dev Toolbox update! 🎉

This release packs a completely revamped UI for a smoother experience and new search functionality, making it even easier to find exactly the tool you need. You can also now mark your favorite tools to keep them in their own special menu, ready for quick access. And the fun doesn’t stop there; let me introduce three new tools:

JavaScript & CSS Minifiers to help you shrink those files down

A handy Base64 Encoder (huge thanks to @amersaw for the contribution!)

Plus, a handful of smaller improvements and bug fixes are sprinkled in to make your experience even better.

A huge shoutout to the translators who helped make this app accessible to more people around the world! 🌍

Dev Toolbox is available right now on Flathub.

Events

devrtz reports

📢 🎉.This week the FOSS on mobile devices Call for Proposals has been opened for FOSDEM 2025 🎉. 📢

We are excited to have your presentations, demos and more! 📈 Showcase (and witness) the latest and greatest in Mobile Linux technologies ☎️ next year in Brussels 🚀

For more information, see this post on devrtz fosstodon post

\o/ We hope to see you there \o/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#171 Point of Interest

Fri, 25 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 18 to October 25.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad says

Maps now has a redesigned UI for editing points-of-interests in OpenStreetMap, using libadwaita widgets, and AdwDialog.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Jialu Zhou has renamed the methods in GUnixMountEntry in GLib so they can be introspected properly (previously they couldn’t be used easily from introspected languages); see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4337

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez announces

Qiu Wenbo implemented using colors for highlight annotations in Papers! This was an often requested feature made possible due to the new mockups, and lots of refactoring under-the-hood

Pablo Correa Gomez reports

@omthorat implemented the new annotation window mockups in Papers, giving annotated documents a great new appearance! You can get the latest development snapshot in gnome-nightly

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina says

Warp 0.8 was released today. Warp allows you to securely send files to each other via the internet or local network by exchanging a word-based code, or scanning a QR code.

This release features quite a few stability improvements for QR code scanning, and lots of translation updates! The flatpak release was updated to the latest runtime and now supports accent colors.

Biblioteca ↗

Read GNOME documentation offline

Akshay Warrier reports

Biblioteca 1.5 is now available on Flathub!

The notable changes in this release are:

Updated Flatpak runtime to GNOME 47

Added gom documentation

Updated various library docs (libportal 0.8.1, vte 0.78, libshumate 1.3.0, libspelling 0.4.2)

Added support to persist window size across sessions

Removed irrelevant context menu entries in the webview

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Amberol 2024.2 is now available on Flathub! Amberol is a small music player with no delusions of grandeur, focused on the task of playing your local music in the simplest way possible. In this new release you’ll find:

support for external album cover images named folder (in both PNG and JPEG image file formats) in the same directory as the songs

the file selection dialogs used to add songs and folders will start from the XDG Music directory, if one is set

an updated MPRIS implementation, dropping the unmaintained mpris-player crate in favour of the mpris-server one

an updated playback implementation, using the GstPlay API instead of the deprecated GstPlayer

various style updates to reflect the changes in libadwaita UI elements

lots of localisation updates

As usual, you can install Amberol from Flathub.

Third Party Projects

Konstantin Tutsch says

Lock is now available on Flathub! Lock is a graphical front-end for GnuPG (GPG) making use of a beautiful LibAdwaita GUI.

Process text and files:

Encryption

Decryption

Signing

Verification

Manage your GnuPG keyring:

Generate new keypairs

Import keys

Export public keys

View expiry dates

Remove keys

Download on Flathub.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton says

Upscaler 1.4.0 was just released! Upscaler is an app that allows you to upscale and enhance images, be it your photos, digital art, and more.

This release introduces scaling factors, allowing you to upscale between a factor of 2 and 4. The image loading system has been reworked to decrease overall memory consumption. The preview image now has a drop shadow to better make the image distinguishable. Lastly, it fixes a bug where small window sizes made the preview image disappear.

Miscellaneous

Alice (she/her) announces

I blogged about implementing Steam Deck gamepad support in libmanette: https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2024/10/24/steam-deck-hid-and-libmanette-adventures/

GNOME Websites

Allan Day reports

GNOME’s wiki was officially retired this week. Its functions have already been replaced by other sites and, if you do need information from the old wiki, a static archive of the site is still available at wiki.gnome.org.

For more information, see the wiki the migration guide.

Events

Kristi Progri announces

We’re excited to announce that registration for GNOME ASIA 2024 is now open! For more details, feel free to check out our blogpost: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/10/23/registration-now-open-for-gnome-asia-2024/

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day reports

The GNOME Foundation Board is looking for input on the future of GUADEC. Please comment on the Discourse thread with your opinions on where GUADEC should be located, and what its focus should be.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#170 Portal Updates

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 11 to October 18.

Sovereign Tech Fund

The development version of Flatpak has received support for listing enumerable and blocked USB devices. This is the first step towards a fully featured USB portal, which is in the works.

Flatpak itself doesn’t expose nor blocks USB devices, but it provides the metadata for the USB portal to allow or deny an app’s access to particular devices.

With this mechanism, apps can request access to devices without opening holes in the sandbox (in this case, the sandbox hole is quite big; apps that access USB devices need to give access to all devices on the system).

In addition to that, app store reviewers can review ahead of time which USB permissions the apps will be requesting, which may add an extra layer of security and trust to Flatpak-based app stores like Flathub.

This work was only made possible thanks to Sovereign Tech Fund, various community members that helped reviewing and shaping up the feature, and Hub for pushing it to the finish line!

The Notifications portal received a major update, and now supports a variety of new features such as notification sounds, markup text in the notification body, and more.

A lot of it is described in this article on the Mutter & GNOME Shell blog. The grand plan is to unify notifications under the Notification portal.

Thanks to Julian Sparber (he/him) for working on this, and for Sovereign Tech Fund for funding this work.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

WebKitGTK ↗

GTK port of the WebKit rendering engine.

WebKitGTK is now able to report the accessibility contents of web pages even when running under a Flatpak sandbox, closing a major gap in accessibility on the Linux desktop.

Currently this requires unreleased versions of WebKitGTK and Flatpak, but releases are on the way.

This is hard to capture in a screenshot but here’s real proof of GNOME Web running as a Flatpak with the accessible contents available.

A detailed blog post about this work, its challenges, and how this was achieved, is being written.

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Cogitri announces

There’s finally a new release for tracker-rs, making it compatible with the newest gtk-rs libraries. This way, anyone using the latest gtk-rs can now use Tracker as their database backend :)

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Gert-dev reports

A few significant performance improvements for users with monitors directly attached to secondary GPUs common in high-end laptops are currently being finalized during review and in testing for mutter:

Avoid CPU-side stalls with NVIDIA secondary GPUs with monitors directly attached to it

Improve frame rate on monitors attached to secondary GPUs in copy mode

Pass damage rectangles to secondary GPUs in the copy path

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Chun-wei Fan (with some collaboration from Christoph Reiter) has added a CI job for building GLib on Windows on ARM64, which should help us catch regressions on that platform. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4342. If you’re interested in getting GLib (and the GNOME platform) to work better on Windows/ARM64 please get in touch 😀

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Clicking on search results at duckduckgo.com in Web (Epiphany) currently gives an error message. This seems to be an issue on DuckDuckGo’s side.

The Web maintainers are trying to resolve the issue with DuckDuckGo. Meanwhile, it is possible to work around this issue by opening DuckDuckGo’s settings and disabling the “Redirect (when necessary)” option in the “Privacy” category.

See !1654 for more details.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave ↗

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix announces

It happened! A new version of your favourite internet radio player is now available! Shortwave 4.0 brings a modernised user interface, a couple of new features, performance improvements, bug fixes - and much more!

Check out the blog post for more details: https://blogs.gnome.org/haeckerfelix/2024/10/18/shortwave-4-0/

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) announces

I’ve been working on reimplementing an obscure feature Apostrophe used to have: inline previews of images, LaTeX formulas, footnotes, web links and even word definitions. It was hard to spot as it was only available when you ctrl+clicked on text, but now the preview is also available through the context menu. Performance has also been greatly improved

Third Party Projects

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It’s time to experience La vie en rose! We just released Fractal 9.rc and to show our support 🩷 for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, we decided to change the accent color to pink. And it is also packed with bug fixes, take a look for yourself:

We used to only rely on the secrets provider to tell us which Matrix accounts are logged-in, which caused issues for people sharing their secrets between devices. Now we also make sure that there is a data folder for a given session before trying to restore it.

Our notifications are categorized as coming from an instant messenger, so graphical shells that support it, such as Phosh, can play a sound for them.

Some room settings are hidden for direct chats, because it does not make sense to change them in this type of room.

The size of the headerbar would change depending on whether the room has a topic or not. This will not happen anymore.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 9.

If you are wondering what to do on a rainy day, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. We are always looking for new contributors!

GNOME Websites

A list of all components of the GNOME project is now available on the development page. Components encompass everything from the Shell, over the icon theme, to libraries like GTK. The page is listing GNOME Core components as well as GNOME Circle components.

All the information about the components on the page is automatically collected from the projects .doap-files. You can help by updating or adding information to the projects and providing avatars for projects that don’t have one yet. The page’s readme has some more info on this.

Shell Extensions

Martin (he/him) announces

I released the Window Desaturation extension, which desaturates background windows, leaving the focused window “highlighted” by having all it’s color.

Miscellaneous

XDG Desktop Portal 1.19.0 has been released! It’s the first development snapshot of what will become the 1.20 release series. The highlights of this release are:

Many improvements to how the portals.conf config files are parsed. This includes respecting the order of portal backends specified for each key, having default fallbacks, and handling various edge cases better.

Files that are exposed through the Document portal now report their real path as the user.document-portal.host-path xattr property. Alternatively, apps can query the real path of a file using the new GetHostPath() D-Bus method of the Document portal. Apps that display a file path in its user interface are encouraged to use the real path.

Implement getlk and setlk, and honour O_NOFOLLOW, in the Document portal’s FUSE filesystem. This should make SQLite backups work on sandboxed apps, and improve the reliability of the Document portal in general.

Make the Background portal more robust when validating autostart files.

Massively improved documentation and website

Many, many leaks were fixed.

You can find the full release notes here.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#169 Wrapped Boxes

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 04 to October 11.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

libadwaita got another new widget - AdwWrapBox - similar to GtkBox, but wrapping children when they can’t fit onto the same line. This can be useful for e.g. displaying tag pills

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hieroglyphic ↗

Find LaTeX symbols

FineFindus announces

A new Hieroglyphic update has just been released. The classification backend is now powered by a machine learning model trained on the previously used classification data, improving classification speed and accuracy. However, due to a lack of good training data, some symbols are now less accurately classified. To improve the training data/accuracy, users can now optionally submit their recognized symbols.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan announces

This week @danyeaw released Gaphor 2.27.0.

Highlights of this release include lots of small improvements and usability fixes:

Export all diagrams easily from the GUI

New elements: Trigger and Actions for state machine transitions

Improved Picture selection and provide a default name

A macOS ARM (Apple Silicon) version

Flatpak version uses GNOME 47

Events

Pablo Correa Gomez announces

the GNOME Foundation is looking for volunteers to help organize and be at the GNOME stand during FOSDEM: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/call-for-help-for-a-fosdem-stand/24432 If you want to help with Outreach, this is your opportunity! If we don’t get enough people to sign up, we will not be able to apply to the stand

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

The GNOME Foundation Board published its minutes for the past four months this week. These can be found in two Discourse posts, one for June, and the other for July–September. This means that the board is now up to date with publishing its minutes. The board also published its board responsibilities, ethical conduct, and confidentiality policies for the first time. These were included in a new policies wiki page, which was created as part of the board’s migration off wiki.gnome.org (which is planned for retirement).

as promised in our communication last week, the GNOME Foundation Board of Directors has written an update on the financial status and budget approved between October 2024 and September 2025: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/foundation-2024-2025-budget-and-economic-review/24436. We hope to continue providing regular updates on financial work

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#168 Testing Portals

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 27 to October 04.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Julian Sparber is tackling adding tests for some tricky-to-test portal code in GLib 🙌 https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4176 — as always, adding tests has paid itself back by finding bugs, which he’s fixed

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

Automeris Naranja and Hari Rana have continued work this week to modernise GNOME Software’s UI with libadwaita 1.6 widgets, while Sid is working on making submission of app reviews not block the UI.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Video Trimmer ↗

Trim videos quickly.

Ivan Molodetskikh announces

Video Trimmer v0.9 is out with support for accent colors and improvements to the hotkey behavior.

Identity ↗

Compare images and videos.

Ivan Molodetskikh reports

For the new Identity v0.7 release, I implemented image loading via the glycin library. It lets you open newer image formats like AVIF and JPEG XL, and improves rendering for other images, like using the correct color spaces for regular JPEGs.

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry reports

Déjà Dup 47 is now available! This release features Restic support improvements and the latest adwaita widgets and accent colors.

Third Party Projects

Vladimir Kosolapov says

This week I released my first app — Netsleuth.

It’s a simple utility for the calculation and analysis of IP subnet values, designed to simplify network configuration tasks. There’s no longer a need to rely on various ad-laden websites with awkward designs, as Netsleuth is native and available offline.

Check it out on Flathub!

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.42.0 is out:

The lock screen now adjusts to smaller resolutions and we fixed a whole lot of bugs around (but not limited to) OSK text input when using text prediction - up to a point where we now enable it by default when the app requests it (and the OSK supports it). squeekboard saw another round of layout improvements and additions.

Check the full details here

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2024.10.0 is here!

This update features a brand new rewrite of Parabolic in C++. Users should now have a faster and more stable downloading experience, with the continued reliability and customizability loved by our users.

We have also redesigned the user interfaces on both the GNOME and Windows platforms to make it easier to find the Parabolic features you love and want to use. We have also refined and improved the options available when configuring individual downloads, playlists, and Parabolic as a whole. Besides new things, we have fixed tons of bugs throughout the downloading backend that users have been waiting for.

We hope you all love this release as much as we loved making it! A huge thank you to all users who worked with us in fixing issues, testing the betas, contributing translations and more ❤️

Here’s the full changelog:

Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ for faster performance

The Keyring module was rewritten. As a result, all keyrings have been reset and will need to be reconfigured

Audio languages with audio description are now correctly recognized and handled separately from audio languages without audio description

Audio download qualities will now list audio bitrates for the user to choose from

Playlist downloads will now be saved in a subdirectory with the playlist’s title within the chosen save folder

When viewing the log of a download, the command used to run the download can now also be copied to the clipboard

The length of the kept download history can now be changed in Preferences

On non-sandbox platforms, a browser can be selected for Parabolic to fetch cookies from instead of selecting a txt file in Preferences

Added an option in Preferences to allow for immediate download after a URL is validated

Added an option in Preferences to pick a preferred video codec for when downloading video media

Fixed validation issues with various sites

Fixed an issue where a specified video password was not being used

Redesigned user interface

Updated yt-dlp

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

Martín Abente Lahaye announces

Flatseal 2.3.0 is out! This new release has caught up with new Flatpak permissions, added Hindi translation thanks to Scrambled777, and updated its runtime to GNOME 47. Make sure to keep your GNOME runtime up-to-date to prevent some common issues!

Shell Extensions

Marcin Jahn reports

(Almost) all of my Gnome extensions do support Gnome 47 now. What’s even better is that all the updates came from contributors, so all I had to do was to merge a couple of PRs. Thanks!

Do Not Disturb While Screen Sharing Or Recording

Quick Settings Audio Devices Hider

Quick Settings Audio Devices Renamer

Dim Completed Calendar Events

Events

Deepesha Burse announces

GNOME Asia 2024 is happening in Bengaluru, India between 6th to 8th of December. We’re happy to announce that the call for proposals is now open and will close on October 8th, 2024. This is your chance to submit a proposal and speak at the conference!

You can submit your CFPs at: https://events.gnome.org/event/258/abstracts/ and find more info at: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/09/12/gnome-asia-2024-in-bengaluru-india/

This weekend, from Oct 4 to Oct 5, the Linux App Summit is taking place in Monterrey, Mexico. LAS is dedicated to collaboration on all aspects aimed at accelerating the growth of the Linux application ecosystem.

To attend remotely, register here. Videos from LAS will also be live streamed on the LAS YouTube channel.

GNOME Foundation

The last months, the GNOME Foundation Board of directors has been busy with budgeting and other strategic decisions, and we’ve written a small update to keep everybody informed: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/update-from-the-board-2024-10/24346 We will follow-up with a more detailed discussion of the budget in the following weeks

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#167 Linking Apps

Fri, 27 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 20 to September 27.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

a few more additions in libadwaita:

AdwNavigationSplitView now has the same :sidebar-position: property as AdwOverlaySplitView, inverting the navigation when collapsed (content as the root page, sidebar as the subpage)

AdwNavigationView got horizontal and vertical homogeneous properties, meaning it will preallocate the size needed to display any of the added pages, as well as any pages within the navigation stack, rather than just the currently visible page

AdwAboutDialog now has API for linking to your other apps directly from the dialog

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Christian Hergert has gone on a profiling rampage in GVariant and significantly reduced its memory allocations when handling smaller variants (which is very common); see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests?scope=all&state=all&author_username=chergert&milestone_title=2.83.0

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Mousai ↗

Identify songs in seconds.

Dave Patrick reports

Mousai 0.7.8 has just been released on Flathub, featuring several improvements:

The lyrics are now in its own view.

Navigation page names are now more consistent.

Song bar now adapts to smaller screens.

The overall package size is now smaller, thanks to cargo vendor filterer.

Loading buttons are now more modern, thanks to the new Adwaita widgets.

Third Party Projects

Aurea has released version 1.5, featuring several exciting new updates:

GNOME 47 support

Hot reload banner when metainfo is edited

Open metainfo file using Aurea

Reload banner using <F5>

Add Norwegian translations

Blueprint 0.14.0

Support me on Ko-fi Check it out on Flathub!

xjuan announces

I am pleased to announce a new Cambalache stable release, version 0.92.0!

What’s new:

Basic port to Adwaita

Use Casilda compositor for workspace

Update widget catalogs to SDK 47

Improved Drag&Drop support

Improve workspace performance

Enable workspace animations

Support new desktop dark style

Support 3rd party libraries

Streamline headerbar

Lots of bug fixes and minor improvements

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/09/26/new-cambalache-release-0-92-0/

Dave Patrick reports

Delineate, formerly known as Dagger, has just been released. This sleek new app allows is designed for editing and viewing graphs using the DOT Language. For all the details and features, take a look at the release blog post.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2024.10.0-rc1 is here!

Compared to V2024.9.0-beta3, this release adds a new Preferred Video Codec option in Preferences, an improved format selection backend, a new subtitles selection interface for individual downloads, and the ability to copy the command used to run a download when viewing its log.

These are the final changes that we intend to make for this release cycle and are aiming to release a stable version on Wednesday October 2.

Here’s the full changelog for this release cycle:

Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ for faster performance

The Keyring module was rewritten. As a result, all keyrings have been reset and will need to be reconfigured

Audio languages with audio description are now correctly recognized and handled separately from audio languages without audio description

Audio download qualities will now list audio bitrates for the user to choose from

Playlist downloads will now be saved in a subdirectory with the playlist’s title within the chosen save folder

When viewing the log of a download, the command used to run the download can now also be copied to the clipboard

The length of the kept download history can now be changed in Preferences

On non-sandbox platforms, a browser can be selected for Parabolic to fetch cookies from instead of selecting a txt file in Preferences

Added an option in Preferences to allow for immediate download after a URL is validated

Added an option in Preferences to pick a preferred video codec for when downloading video media

Fixed validation issues with various sites

Fixed an issue where a specified video password was not being used

Redesigned user interface

Updated yt-dlp

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Back to school, and Fractal is back too! The leaves are starting to cover the floor in our part of the globe, but you don’t have to shake a tree to get our goodness packed into Fractal 9.beta:

We switched to the glycin library (the same one used by GNOME Image Viewer) to load images, allowing us to fix several issues, like supporting more animated formats and SVGs and respecting EXIF orientation.

The annoying bug where some rooms would stay as unread even after opening them is now a distant memory.

The media cache uses its own database that you can delete if you want to free some space on your system. It will also soon be able to clean up unused media files to prevent it from growing indefinitely.

Sometimes the day separators would show up with the wrong date, not anymore!

We migrated to the new GTK 4.16 and libadwaita 1.6 APIs, including CSS variables, AdwButtonRow and AdwSpinner.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to fix one of our newcomers issues. Anyone can make Fractal better!

Shell Extensions

Auto Activities ↗

Show activities overview when there are no windows, or hide it when there are new windows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgcVp5RHy4Q

Auto Activities received support for GNOME Shell 47.

Get it on extensions.gnome.org

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#166 Forty-seven!

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 13 to September 20.

This week we released GNOME 47!

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, including accent colours, better open/save dialogs, an improved Files app, better support for small screen sizes, new dialog styles, and much more! See the GNOME 47 release notes and developer notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 48 (Spring 2025), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

The changes for Loupe 47 have mostly been subtle and in the background. But for Loupe 48, we are already full steam ahead of making a lot of more noticeable changes, including work on image editing. You can learn more in my latest blog post or even get weekly updates as a backer on Patreon or Ko-fi.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

the new development cycle has started, so libadwaita now has toggle groups as a replacement for linked boxes of exclusive toggle buttons. Having a dedicated widget not only provides easier to use API, but also uses a less ambiguous style that wouldn’t be possible with a generic box.

There’s also an inline view switcher using a toggle group. It works with AdwViewStack instead of GtkStack, and so AdwViewStack has an optional crossfade transition now, as it’s commonly needed in contexts where inline view switchers are used.

Meanwhile, the bottom bar in AdwBottomSheet can now be hidden, which may be useful for empty states in music players

Additionally, James Westman added a property to add banner to a preferences page, while Emmanuele Bassi added a few cubic bezier easing functions for AdwTimedAnimation

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

Julian Sparber (he/him) announces

I wrote, as part of the STF grant, a blogpost about focus stealing prevention in GNOME Shell.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton says

GNOME Calendar 47.0 was just released! There have been many improvements in regards to usability:

It is now possible to drag and drop ICS files into Calendar.

Port various widgets to their modern Adwaita equivalents: !436, !481

Hidden calendars are distinguishable by using the eye-not-looking icon.

The search activation was delayed. This avoids spamming the search backends, which improves the overall performance, reduces power consumption, and eliminates flickering in the interface.

Various fixes in the agenda sidebar: !374, !445, !464, !468

The Event popover was reworked and redesigned. It introduces a padlock icon for read-only events, properly separates each section, and it wraps/ellipsizes text properly.

The about dialog was ported to AdwAboutDialog.new_from_appdata. This makes it easy for us to include release notes without putting any effort. This means, starting from 47, it will now be easy to view release notes directly in Calendar.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Gleb Popov has contributed a new file monitor for BSD and macOS to GLib, which uses libinotify-kqueue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3657

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gregor Niehl announces

This week Binary was accepted into GNOME Circle. Binary makes working with numbers of different bases (e.g. binary, hexadecimal) a breeze. Congratulations!

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus announces

After almost a year since the last update, the new version of Eyedropper brings significant changes both to the user interface and under the hood:

A new color editor allows modifying the picked color

The color system has been completely rewritten, now using the palette library for more accurate color conversions.

If the system does not allow color picking, a warning page is now displayed (Thanks to Brage Fuglseth for the illustration)

Download the new version on Flathub.

Third Party Projects

tfuxu reports

The first version of Flood It has been released! It is a simple strategy game in which you need to flood the entire board with a single color in as few moves as possible.

Check it out on Flathub!

Ronnie Nissan says

Embellish has been ported from Go to Gjs, now with a lot smaller bundle size and new features:

Font previews

Font licences

A welcome screen

You can get the latest embellish on flathub

Mahjongg ↗

A solitaire version of the classic Eastern tile game.

Mat says

Mahjongg 47.0 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release contains several improvements, including:

Changes to the UI to follow the latest GNOME Human Interface Guidelines

Player names for scores, and the ability to clear all previous scores

Faster game startup times

A fix for unclickable tiles in the ‘Overpass’ layout

GNOME Foundation

Linux App Summit 2024 is two weeks away! This year’s conference will take place on Oct 4-5 in Monterrey, Mexico and all main track talks will be live-streamed for remote attendees. Registration is still open for both in-person and remote attendance, make sure to let us know how you plan to attend. More event details including the full talk schedule can be found on linuxappsummit.org.

The GNOME Asia 2024 Call for Participation is still open! If you would like to submit a talk or workshop for this year’s summit make sure to apply online by September 30. This year’s conference will take place in Bengaluru, India from Dec 6-8 and allow attendees and speakers to participate remotely. Learn more about GNOME Asia 2024.

The GNOME Foundation is searching for applicants for our open Executive Director position. We’ve extended the application deadline until September 25 and encourage qualified individuals who share our vision of promoting software freedom and innovation to apply. Learn more about the position and how to apply here.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#165 Signing Documents

Fri, 13 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 06 to September 13.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Thib says

This post is a digest of what happened in August in the STF team (a little late). You might have seen some updates from the team members directly earlier in TWIG! They say August is a productivity blackhole, but whoa look at this massive update!

I’m very grateful to the team for its dedication, and to the Sovereign Tech Fund who enables this work. The Foundation is preparing a crowdfunding platform to allow you to support this kind of work as well! More on this next month.

Encrypt user home directories individually

On Linux systems, users are traditionally managed in a specific file called /etc/passwd. It doesn’t make a difference between technical and human accounts. It also only stores very basic information about users, and can only be modified by root. It’s a very rigid users database.

AccountsService is a “temporary” daemon (since 2010) bringing to manage users and store more extensive information about them: profile picture, parental control settings, preferred session to log into, languages, etc. It manages /etc/passwd and its own database.

homed is a modern replacement for AccountsService. It provides encryption for user data, and paves the way for future exciting platform security and flexibility improvements.

Adrian worked with a user through some remote debugging about systemd-homed (systemd/systemd#33541 and following comments).

Modernize platform infrastructure

libadwaita

GTK is a popular development toolkit to create graphical apps in the free desktop. libadwaita is a library based on GTK providing the building blocks for modern GNOME applications.

Alice did libadwaita releases: 1.4.7, 1.5.3, 1.6.beta, and 1.6.rc. She also worked on Dialog fixes before beta (here and here), a CI fix as well as several reviews.

She shared thoughts on a common interface for platform libraries support in GTK in this issue.

Alice also worked on toggle groups

She added crossfade support to the view stack so we can use it in contexts where you’d want an inline switcher

She switched inline stack switcher to view stack, renamed to inline view switcher

And she started reworking toggle group api. That work is still ongoing

inline view switcher now supports needs-attention/badges.

Alice also he gave the tests (including accessibility tests) some love to make sure libadwaita is as reliable as ever and implemented a new demo.

She reworked documentation to make her work easier to use

Finally she spent quite a bit of time on reviews for PRs have been merged (here, here, here, and here and quite a few more) and on PRs that have not.

Toggle groups should be ready, waiting for 47 to branch now.

Shell notifications

If you have followed Julian’s GUADEC talk about notifications on the free desktop, you know that the current situation is suboptimal. Fortunately, the design team and Julian are coming to the rescue, and are also working on grouped notifications to make them less in your face.

Julian split out refactor part of of the notification grouping MR, so that it can be merged sooner. He also addressed comments and got his cleanup MR merged into GNOME Shell.

Julian rewrote glsl shader for fading notifications when a group is expanded. He looked into round clipping for mutter, which would be really nice for grouping. This will require a significant amount of non trivial work to do correctly.

Finally, he worked on notification grouping for GNOME Shell: after addressing the style suggestions he marked the notification grouping MR as ready.

Improve QA and development tooling

gjs bindings

Evan finished work on getting async support for GJS, compiling again and is debugging test failures.

He is working on updating async tests for the TypeScript bindings.

Finally, GLib async support needs additional work to fix Windows CI (hopefully the last roadblock 🤞).

systemd-sysupdated

systemd-sysupdate is an update system allowing immutable systems to apply lightweight delta updates. It helps image-based systems support immutability, auto-updates, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and providing a trust chain from the bootloader all the way up.

sysupdate is a CLI tool. In order to be able to use systemd-sysupdate, sturdier services are needed. sysupdated is a service that provides a dbus API for sysupdate.

sysupdated got a final re-review, and got merged into systemd. Adrian followed-up fixes after merging.

He rebased the incomplete versions bugfix, and got it merged, worked on optional features, major os upgrades, updatectl (a user facing CLI for sysupdate) bugfixes and more.

systemd-repart

systemd-repart is a tool that systemd runs on boot that non-destructively repartitions disks.

Adrian taught it to dynamically decide whether or not to create a separate boot partition. Depending on the existing layout of disk, repart will skip creating a dedicated boot partition if it can get away with it, which is one of the big missing features in repart before it can be an OS installer.

Improve the state and compatibility of accessibility

Joanie has been working on a metric tonne of updates in Orca. Most of the changes are rather technical and would be rather wordy in a TWIG update, but thanks Joanie for rejuvenating Orca!

Maintenance and modernization of security components

The free desktop standardises the storage and usage of secrets (such as passphrases or SSH keys) via the secrets specification. gnome-keyring was the backend implementation, and libsecret the client-side of said specification.

gnome-keyring and libsecret are written in C and lack maintenance. oo7 is a modern Rust client-side library that respects the secrets specification. Dhanuka is extending oo7 to implement the backend side of secrets management, and ultimately replace gnome-keyring, has been at it in August as well!

Secure APIs for Wayland/Flatpak

Flatpak

Georges handled Flatpak / Bubblewrap CVE-2024-42472, released xdg-dbus-proxy 0.1.6 with important fixes, coordinated more merges, and released Flatpak 1.16.0.

He also implemented a solution to the “impossible” Flatpak a11y issue (here, here and here). This accessibility issue revolved around the Flatpak sandbox preventing WebKit and Epiphany’s accessibility trees from being connected.

USB Portal

Flatpak doesn’t have USB permission. To access USB currently, the device=all permission must be used. This exposes all the devices on the machine.

We want to provide a way to allow selective access to USB devices from inside a sandbox like flatpak. This is access to the actual USB, not the devices build on top, like audio, input or mass storage.

Hub rebased the xdg-desktop-portal PR for the USB portal, and rebased the flatpak PR for USB. Finally, https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5855 landed.

Closing thoughts

Again, a massive massive thank you to the whole team who has been working on the STF grant, and our gratitude to the Sovereign Tech Fund who makes this possible. The team is working with all their heart to bring not only GNOME but also the free desktop as a whole forward.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

libadwaita 1.6.0 is out! see the blog post for details.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez reports

Thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer (Volkswagen), Papers now supports signing documents with digital certificates! If you have a digital certificate stored in your computer or in an Smart Card, as those stored in the national IDs of some states like Estonia or Spain, you no longer need an additional program to digitally sign your documents! See the Merge Request description for a walk-through of the UX!

Third Party Projects

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton announces

Upscaler version 1.3.0 was just released! The release is pretty large and includes some nice features and visual improvements:

Introduce queue system to allow users to upscale images right after the other

Add branding colors

Port to latest Adwaita widgets

Allow dropping remote images

Allow pasting images from clipboard

Make window draggable from anywhere

Delete temporary file when unused

Switch to Upscayl-NCNN from Real-ESRGAN ncnn Vulkan

Update and rework translation

Add Bulgarian translation

Unfortunately, I completely forgot that the GNOME 47 runtime isn’t released yet. The update will be available later once the GNOME 47 runtime is out. If you want to try it out, you can build it from source (roughly a few minutes) using GNOME Builder: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Upscaler#gnome-builder

Krafting says

Version 1.2.0 of SemantiK is out now. It is a word-guessing game.

This new version includes the ability to download language packs. The first language pack to be available is the English language pack, which you can download on Flathub through your software center of choice.

The UI is still in French, but I’ll be adding a translated UI in the next version!

You can download SemantiK from Flathub

If people want to help build more language packs, feel free to contact me!

xjuan says

Introducing Casilda - A Wayland compositor widget!

A simple Wayland compositor widget for Gtk 4 which can be used to embed other processes windows in your Gtk 4 application. It was originally created for Cambalache’s workspace using wlroots, a modular library to create Wayland compositors. Following Wayland tradition, this library is named after my hometown in Santa Fe, Argentina

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/09/13/introducing-casilda-wayland-compositor-widget/

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline version 2.0.0 was released. Pipeline lets you follow your favorite video creators, both on YouTube and PeerTube. Version 2.0.0 is a complete rewrite of the application, in order allow for easier maintenance, more features (some included in this version, some in future versions) and improve the user experience in general.

The highlights of this version are the ability to search YouTube and PeerTube for videos and channels and playing videos inside the application using the Clapper video player (while the option to play with any other external player is still available). Besides those highlights, the application should have feature-parity with previous releases of Pipeline. This includes in particular:

Displaying videos of your subscriptions in a single feed,

Filtering out unwanted videos, for example Shorts or videos from a series you don’t like,

Managing videos you want to watch later,

Importing your previous subscriptions from NewPipe or YouTube,

Download videos you want to watch offline.

You can get the latest release on Flathub, and feel free to chat with us in our Matrix room.

Miscellaneous

Jan-Michael Brummer says

Software development without Linux is no longer possible within an automotive environment. Therefore Volkswagen Group IT created and maintains a Linux distribution for their developers and contributes to many upstream projects. Jan-Michael Brummer speaks at OpenSUSE 2024 (https://media.ccc.de/v/4486-linux-at-volkswagen/oembed) about the starting goal to integrate into the existing environment, and highlights their integration problems and solutions with contributing to upstream: libproxy, OneDrive (gvfs/goa), PKCS11 (Secrets / Web), Digital Signing (Papers), …

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day announces

The GNOME Foundation has announced that hiring is open for its next Executive Director. Details about the position can be found on the GNOME Foundation website, at OpenSource Job Hub, and fossjobs.net. Please share the post with your networks and reach out to any candidates you might know. In other Foundation news, the Board of Directors had its regular monthly meeting this week, where it focused on budget planning for the upcoming financial year. We are also pleased to announce that Richard Littauer, the Foundation’s current interim executive director, will be continuing in his position until the end of November.

Rosanna reports

The big news this week from the Foundation is our opening up the search for a new Executive Director. Our current Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, is helping us with this search. More details about this job opening is available https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/09/13/search-for-new-executive-director/.

Earlier this week, I attended the monthly board meeting and went through a very rough, preliminary draft of a budget for the Board. Not intended to be a working budget, this draft is just a starting point to begin discussion. While it is up to the Finance Committee to hammer this draft into something usable, this exercise of going over it with the board at large was useful in showing our directors the format and structure of our yearly budget, and in explaining what the groupings and categories cover. I am looking forward with the rest of the Finance Committee on the next steps.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#164 Updated Translations

Fri, 06 Sep 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 30 to September 06.

Thank you to the translation teams for all the translation updates which happen in GNOME, particularly just before a release, like just now. It is really appreciated!

Third Party Projects

Emmanuele Bassi announces

A wild new stable release of Cairo appeared! It’s super-effective at fixing build issues and bugs on a variety of platforms and toolchains. Thanks to Federico Mena, Cairo now generates static analysis and coverage reports as part of the CI pipeline; the coverage reports are published, so if you want to contribute to the Cairo project you can now find where your changes can be most effective.

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.10 has been released.

There have been a lot of fixes and refactoring, notable changes:

Credential changes

For SSH repos ssh-agent will now be used by default. This makes it easier to use different keys with or without password protection. You can still configure a predefined ssh key in the settings.

It is now possible to use HTTPS repos with username and password. A userpass dialog will prompt for your credentials which can be stored in the gnome keyring. I was not able to test this feature myself, because I do not have access to a repository which allows HTTPS with password. But it seems to work.

File-manager plugin changes

A huge bottleneck, which caused nautilus to freeze up and worst case to crash has been fixed.

Unfortunately I found another issue with the update_file_info_full function, which I can reproduce on multiple distros. For the time being the turtle plugin uses update_file_info instead. This makes emblem calculation slower, but at least it runs stable again.

There is now a turtle emblem which will be shown for the repo main folder by default. The status emblem can be activated again in the settings. It is also possible to show both or none of them. This change further speeds up emblem calculation in folders with many (100+) repos, especially with the workaround mentioned above, and also makes submodules more visible.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2024.9.0-beta1 is here!

After a long awaited couple of months, Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ and features a redesigned user interface! Users should expect a faster and more reliable downloader.

We encourage all Parabolic users to give this beta a try and iron out all issues before the stable release (targeted for next week).

Here’s the full changelog:

Parabolic has been rewritten in C++ for faster performance

The length of the kept download history can now be changed in the app’s preferences

Cookies can now be fetched from a selected browser in Preferences instead of selecting a TXT cookies file

Parabolic’s Keyring module was rewritten. As a result, all keyrings have been reset and will need to be reconfigured

Fixed validation issues with various sites

Fixed an issue where a specified video password was not being used

Redesigned user interface

Updated yt-dlp

Shell Extensions

Is it hot in the Northern Hemisphere and cold in the Southern Hemisphere? Weather O’Clock has been ported to GNOME Shell 47! With this new version, it is possible to customize the display of weather information, choosing whether it appears before or after the clock.

Arca says

New updates for the Day Progress extension - circular indicators and GNOME 47!

Day Progress, the extension that lets you visualise how much time is left of your day has now been ported to support GNOME 47! There is now an (experimental) option to display the time elapsed/remaining as a circular (“pie”) indicator too. I haven’t run into any bugs with the new indicator style in my few days of testing but I’m still hesitant to call it stable, that’s why I have labelled it as ‘experimental’. You can download the extension at https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7042/day-progress/ and the repository is available at https://github.com/ArcaEge/day-progress where you can also report any issues you find.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#163 Public Transit

Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 23 to August 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad says

Maps now supports Transitous (https://transitous.org/ ), using a crowd-sourcing approach, backed by the MOTIS search engine for public transit routing (for the time being for areas that isn’t already supported by existing plugins).

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Thanks to work by Evan Welsh, GLib 2.83.0 (the next unstable release, due in a few months) will have support for sync/async/finish introspection annotations when built and run with a suitably new version of gobject-introspection, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3746

Thanks to Luca Bacci for putting in time to improve debuggability of GLib on Windows CI machines, this should help with keeping GLib running on Windows and Windows-like platforms in the future (more help always needed if anyone is interested)

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth announces

I’ve informally documented the GNOME Circle review procedure. Existing conventions are laid out and briefly explained, and the ways of which we keep member projects in check are formalized through the concepts of control reviews and group notices. My goal with this is to increase the transparency and consistency of how the Circle Committee operates.

If you’re already a member of GNOME Circle, a developer considering applying, or just a curious bystander, and have questions about this, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week Tuba was accepted into GNOME Circle. Tuba lets you explore the federated social web. With its extensive support for popular Fediverse platforms like Mastodon, GoToSocial, Akkoma, and more, it makes it easy to stay connected to your favorite communities, family and friends. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan reports

Unix file permissions can be hard to understand, especially for new linux users, that is why I wrote Concessio, an app to help users understand and convert between said permissions. You can get Concessio from flathub

Alain says

The new version of Planify 4.11.0 is here, packed with features and improvements that will make your task management even more efficient and personalized!

What’s New in Planify 4.11.0

1. Collapsible Sections: You can now collapse sections for a cleaner and more focused view of your priority tasks.

2. Task Counter per Section: Easily see the number of tasks in each section with the new task counter.

3. Pinned Tasks at the Top: Pinned tasks are now displayed at the top of each project, keeping them always in sight.

4. Overdue Tasks Indicator: The “Today” button now shows an indicator for overdue tasks, helping you stay on top of what’s important.

5. New Quick Add Keyboard Shortcuts: We’ve added new shortcuts to speed up your workflow:
- @ to add tags.
- # to select a project.
- ! to create a reminder.
6. Completed Tasks View: Check your completed tasks sorted by date and filter them by sections as needed.

7. Task History Log: Access the new task history log, where you can see when a task was completed or moved between projects or sections.

8. Improved Drag and Drop: We’ve fixed several bugs with drag and drop, ensuring a smoother experience.

9. Quick Find Task Detail: Now, when selecting a task in Quick Find, the task detail will automatically open.

10. Markdown Preference: You can now enable or disable the use of Markdown in task details, based on your preference.

11. Improved Keyboard Navigation: Keyboard navigation has been optimized to make your experience faster and easier.

12. Create Sections in Quick Add: If a section doesn’t exist, you can now create it directly from Quick Add.

13. Attachment Number Indicator: We’ve added a numerical indicator to show the number of attachments on each task.

14. Preference to Keep Task Detail Pane Open: We’ve added a preference that allows you to keep the task detail pane always open, making navigation faster.

15. Quicker Recurring Tasks: The option to repeat a task has been moved to the date and time selection widget, making the process of creating recurring tasks faster.

16. Improved Nextcloud Synchronization: We fixed several bugs related to task synchronization with Nextcloud.

17. Design and Optimization Improvements: Planify is now faster and consumes fewer resources, thanks to various design and optimization improvements.

A Heartfelt Thank You We would like to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone who supports the development of Planify by contributing financially. Your generosity helps us continue to improve and expand Planify, making it a better tool for everyone. Thank you for being a vital part of our journey!

Update now and enjoy an even more powerful and tailored task management experience. We’re continuously working to bring you the best in every release!

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.alainm23.planify

Emmanuele Bassi announces

After a year, there’s a new stable release of JSON-GLib, the JSON parsing and generation library that tries to be well-integrated with GLib data types and best practices. Version 1.10.0 introduces a new, extensive conformance test suite to ensure that the parsing code is capable of handling both valid and invalid JSON. Additionally, JsonParser has a new “strict” option, for when you need to ensure that the JSON data is strictly conforming to the format specification. The parsing code has been simplified and improved, and passes both static analysis and sanitisers. Finally, there are lots of documentation fixes across the API and manual pages of the command line utilities.

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman announces

Blueprint 0.14.0 is here! This release includes a bunch of new features, including several from new contributors, but the main highlights are:

Greatly improved decompiler (.ui to .blp) support, including a new CLI command for this purpose

Syntax support for string arrays and multi-value accessibility relations

QoL improvements to the CLI output and language server

A ton of bugfixes

Events

Daniel Galleguillos Cruz reports

GNOME Latam 2024 - Universidad de Antioquia, October 25th and 26th. Medellín, Colombia. A day to celebrate and expand the GNOME community in Latin America. Come and share experiences in the creation and use of GNOME technologies in our region.

What is GNOME Latam 2024? GNOME Latam 2024 is more than just an event; it’s a movement that brings together developers, users, educators, and free software enthusiasts to share knowledge, experiences, and collaboratively build a more inclusive technological future. Through a series of in-person and online activities, we aim to spread the latest updates within the GNOME community, encourage active participation, and create a space where everyone can contribute, regardless of their experience level or prior knowledge.

Our mission is clear: to drive the adoption and development of the GNOME environment in Latin America, promoting the values of free software such as freedom, collaboration, and transparency. We believe that access to technology should be a universal right and that everyone, from experts to beginners, has something valuable to contribute.

Note: The talks will be conducted both in-person and online.

https://events.gnome.org/event/249/

This event will be held in Spanish and Portuguese.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#162 Late Friday Edition

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 16 to August 23.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth announces

This week Resources was accepted into GNOME Circle. Resources lets you keep an extra eye on system resources with style. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

xjuan says

I am pleased to announce a new development release of Cambalache, getting us one step closer to a stable release for GNOME 47.

Whats new in version 0.91.3:

Support 3rd party libraries

Improved Drag&Drop support

Streamline headerbar

Ported treeview to column view

Read more about it at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/08/23/new-cambalache-development-release

Internships

FlatSync ↗

Keep your Flatpak apps synchronized between devices

IlChitarrista announces

FlatSync’s Ignored Apps implementation is now merged! It will be possible to make FlatSync ignore certain apps and automatically installed dependencies are excluded by default. Adwaita was also updated to 1.6 with the new Button Row and Spinner.

As Google Summer of Code comes to an end, having achieved the planned features, we’re now looking into further improvements and preparations for Flathub release and GNOME Circle acceptance. I’m very grateful for this Internship, it has been a beautiful way to start contributing; I want to thank everyone involved, especially my mentor Cogitri.

Keep tuned for further work!

Miscellaneous

Regina announces

Sharing an Independent study on “Assessing the Effectiveness of GNOME’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategies: Challenges, Opportunities, and Recommendations.” This article explores GNOME’s efforts in promoting diversity and provides actionable recommendations for improvement. Thank you to Robert ramcq , Federico federico , and Michael Downey for their reviews of this work. Your feedback is greatly valued. Details here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/assessing-effectiveness-gnomes-diversity-inclusion-regina-nkenchor-0iokf/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#161 End-to-End Tests

Fri, 16 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 09 to August 16.

Sovereign Tech Fund

At GNOME we have been using openQA with GNOME OS to run end-to-end tests for different components of our stack. These tests have proven useful, but come with some costs.

To tackle these costs, the team at Codethink has leveraged its previous work with sysext-utils and systemd’s system extensions. As a result, we came up with a workflow that integrates system extensions with development and testing pipelines. This provides an improved workflow for reviewers and testers.

New CI/CD components are now available to all GNOME modules, and we have integrated some of these in mutter and gnome-shell pipelines already.

This project was a collaboration between Codethink and the GNOME Foundation, through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF).

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

GDM and gnome-session can now be built without X11 support, following the steps of Mutter and GNOME Shell.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hugo Olabera announces

Wike, the Wikipedia reader for GNOME, has been updated to version 3.1.0. The most visible changes have to do with the migration of windows and dialogs to the new responsive widgets from libadwaita.

Two new languages have been added to the UI translations (Simplified Chinese and Hungarian), and many of the existing translations have been updated.

The user folder access permission in the Flatpak sandbox has been removed, which is no longer needed thanks to the recent changes implemented in Webkit.

Finally, the runtime version has been updated to GNOME 46 and features the usual set of minor tweaks and bug fixes.

Third Party Projects

Snoop ↗

Snoop through your files.

Philipp says

Snoop 0.4 offers a variety of little fixes and tweaks.

The search path and search string will now be checked for validity and a warning indicator is shown if a path is invalid or the search string is empty.

Paths containing a ~ or a space are now handled properly.

If you have installed the nautilus extension from the settings menu, there is now also a Remove button to uninstall it.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.41.0 is out:

Phosh gained a new Quick Setting to toggle Wi-Fi Hotspot on/off and a Bluetooth status page. The media-player widget now displays track position/ length and got a progress bar. Squeekboard got new layouts and you can now put the phone into silent mode when pressing Vol- on incoming calls.

There’s more. Check the full details here

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Brage Fuglseth announces

Ciao! Keypunch 3.1 is out, and it speaks Italian! This release also brings text generation support for Czech, Occitan and Polish, and UI translations for Occitan and Polish.

Thanks to everyone who has requested for their languages to be added and patiently tested the text generation implementations; keep the requests coming!

Get Keypunch on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/dev.bragefuglseth.Keypunch

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#160 Web Happenings

Fri, 09 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 02 to August 09.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Thib announces

it’s been a little while since you received STF updates, but here is a high-level status of what is being worked on and why!

The Sovereign Tech Fund contracted with the GNOME Foundation with those 8 objectives:

Encrypt user home directories individually

Increase the range an quality of hardware support

Modernize platform infrastructure

Improve QA and development tooling

Improve the state and compatibility of accessibility

Design a new accessibility stack for the Linux Desktop

Maintenance and modernization of security components

Secure APIs for Wayland/Flatpak

There is work going on in several areas, but for the sake of brevity, here are some highlights from the month of July.

Encrypt user home directories individually

On Linux systems, users are traditionally managed in a specific file called /etc/passwd. It doesn’t make a difference between technical and human accounts. It also only stores very basic information about users, and can only be modified by root. It’s a very rigid users database.

AccountsService is a “temporary” daemon (since 2010) bringing to manage users and store more extensive information about them: profile picture, parental control settings, preferred session to log into, languages, etc. It manages /etc/passwd and its own database.

homed is a modern replacement for AccountsService. It provides encryption for user data, and paves the way for future exciting platform security and flexibility improvements. Adrian made AccountsService integrate with homed in order to make the transition easier

He got the homed support for AccountsService MR merged. This MR was blocking all the homed MRs from landing.

Modernize platform infrastructure

GTK and libadwaita

GTK is a popular development toolkit to create graphical apps in the free desktop. libadwaita is a library based on GTK providing the building blocks for modern GNOME applications.

Alice opened an issue about platform library interface. She also did libadwaita releases: 1.4.7, 1.5.3, 1.6beta, 1.6rc.

She fixed issues on Dialog before beta:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1231

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1230

Notifications

There are multiple options for apps to send notifications to the system, each with different features and constraints. Julian works on unwrapping the current situation and turning the XDG portal notification API into the go to standard for notifications with a focus on accessibility, consistency across different desktops, extensibility and modern features. Julian works on improving the platform API for displaying notifications on GNU/Linux desktops with main focus on GNOME Shell.

Intents System

Several platforms offer for native apps to open https links (e.g. opening maps.google.com links in the Google Maps app). The free desktop doesn’t anything other than registering as handlers for custom schemes. Andy is working on an intents system to supports https url.

Improve quality assurance and development tooling

systemd-sysupdate is an update system allowing immutable systems to apply lightweight delta updates. It helps image-based systems support immutability, auto-updates, adaptability, factory reset, uniformity and providing a trust chain from the bootloader all the way up.

sysupdate is a CLI tool. In order to be able to use systemd-sysupdate, sturdier services are needed. sysupdated is a service that provides a dbus API for sysupdate.

systemd-repart is a tool that systemd runs on boot that non-destructively repartitions disks.

Varlink is a kinda simplistic IPC protocol that works early during boot, before the dbus broker has started.

Adrian Vovk is making steady progress on sysupdate, sysupdated, and Varlink support for systemd-repart.

Improve the state and compatibility of accessibility

Joanie is cleaning up Orca’s code and supporting new keygrabs.

Maintenance and modernization of security components

The free desktop standardises the storage and usage of secrets (such as passphrases or SSH keys) via the secrets specification. gnome-keyring was the backend implementation, and libsecret the client-side of said specification.

gnome-keyring and libsecret are written in C and lack maintenance. oo7 is a modern Rust client-side library that respects the secrets specification. Dhanuka is extending oo7 to implement the backend side of secrets management, and ultimately replace gnome-keyring

Secure APIs for Wayland/Flatpak

Georges released xdg-desktop-portal-gnome. He started documenting the Flatpak a11y situation (and why it’s currently unresolvable).

He also merged a11y-related patches for xdg-dbus-proxy (https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/pull/61) + flatpak (https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5828) + WebKit (https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/29052).

He finished and merged GLib documentation updates branch: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4113

And finally he merged gnome-shell and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome bits of the Notifications rework that Julian had worked on.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/xdg-desktop-portal-gnome/-/merge_requests/170

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3382

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

WebKitGTK ↗

GTK port of the WebKit rendering engine.

Michael Catanzaro says

I have fixed a notable bug in WebKitGTK that prevented cached (unused) subprocesses from suspending properly. WebKit would accidentally suspend the bwrap or flatpak-spawn supervisor process instead of the actual WebKit subprocess. With its supervisor process suspended, the actual WebKit subprocess would remain even after the application is closed, wasting memory. This fix will be present in WebKitGTK 2.44.3.

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Jan-Michael Brummer reports

GNOME Web finally received an automatic form filler implementation based on Abdullah Alansari initial work.

Michael Catanzaro reports

Arak has landed several commits improving sorting of bookmarks in Epiphany 47.beta! The previous mysterious sort order has been replaced with alphabetical case-insensitive sort, with an exception for Favorites bookmarks, which sort before non-Favorites.

Michael Catanzaro announces

Jan-Michael Brummer added a Privacy Report dialog to Epiphany 47.beta to better show how the Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature works. You can now see which tracking domains have been blocked on which websites, and conversely on which websites a tracking domain has been blocked. This doesn’t make any changes to the workings of Intelligent Tracking Prevention, which has been supported since Epiphany 3.38; it just provides new visibility into what it is doing.

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

I spent the last weekend doing some code reshuffling around the accessibility bits of Mutter / GNOME Shell, documented some parts of it in https://belmoussaoui.com/blog/19-accessibility-adventure/

libspelling

hergertme reports

libspelling got support for spellchecking off of the main thread to improve performance of large documents. Text Editor and Builder have both been updated to use libspelling for spellchecking features.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

slomo reports

gtk4-rs 0.9 and gtk-rs-core 0.20 were just freshly released, just in time for also being included in the GNOME 47 release.

This release is again relatively small, mostly providing bindings to new APIs and improvements to the glib::clone! and glib::closure! macros to work better with cargo fmt and rust-analyzer.

As usual, at the same time gstreamer-rs 0.23 and gst-plugins-rs 0.13, libadwaita 0.7 and other related crates got a new release compatible with the new gtk4-rs and gtk-rs-core releases and their own set of changes.

See https://gtk-rs.org/blog/2024/07/17/new-release.html for more details.

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan says

This week I releases v0.3.0 of Embellish, a simple nerd fonts manager, the updates include:

Upgrade to libadwaiata 1.5

Migrate to AboutDialog

Separate installed and available fonts

Consolidate the install and uninstall buttons.

You can get Embellish on flathub

GNOME Network Displays ↗

Stream the desktop to Wi-Fi Display capable devices

lorbus reports

GNOME Network Displays (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-network-displays/) v0.93.0 is out! GND allows for screencasting a window, display or virtual display to Miracast and Chromecast devices. With this release, a couple of issues were fixed and support for VAH264 gstreamer hardware encoding was added. GND is looking for new contributors to help finish the daemonification and dbus API addition efforts that were started as part of last year’s GSoC with the goal of integrating it more tightly with GNOME Shell and GNOME Control Center. Give it a try, user feedback is also very much appreciated! Stable releases are available on Flathub and nightly builds in the GNOME Nightly Flatpak repo.

Internships

IlChitarrista announces

As the last third of GSoC starts we’re almost done with the Ignored Apps implementation, it will soon be possible to make some apps local only. Drivers and Development Tools will also be excluded from synchronization by default as they are automatically installed as necessary. Many thanks for the design feedback by Jamie Gravendeel, Adwaita and GTK suggestions by Alice Mikhaylenko and code review by my mentor Cogitri. If you’re interested in following development, here’s the merge request.

As we’re ahead of schedule, we’re now starting to look into the necessary steps for a future release on Flathub and inclusion in the GNOME Circle!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#159 Mounting Disks

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 26 to August 02.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

FineFindus says

GNOME Disks now has a new standalone image-mounter dialog, which allows for mounting, viewing, editing, writing, and inspecting disk images. If the disk image is already mounted, an option to unmount it will be available. The dialog can be accessed by opening any supported disk image. Together with the GTK4 port this is expected to be released as part of GNOME 48.

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Michael Catanzaro announces

Unfortunately, due to changes in the Firefox account authentication process, we have disabled the Firefox Sync support in Epiphany 47.beta, 46.3, and 45.4. We don’t have any estimate for when Firefox Sync will return. For more information see this issue report.

Michael Catanzaro announces

Jan-Michael Brummer, with guidance from Jamie Gravendeel, has replaced the Epiphany bookmarks management popover with a sidebar. Additionally, the popover for adding a new bookmark has been replaced with a dialog.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

I created a short post, outlining how we upgraded Gaphor from GTK+ 3 to GTK 4. I hope it will help people in the process of upgrading their app.

Third Party Projects

Izzy (she/her) reports

Binary 4.0 is out now, featuring the new vertical design that is easier to use and more reliable. You can also now directly modify the output.

Additionally, base selections are now saved between sessions. And the base list is now ordered by base size.

Get it now on Flathub!

Nokse says

This week I have released a new version of Exhibit!

Improved settings with four default configurations for different file types and the possibility to save custom ones

Bundled four HDRI by default, but more can be added

Added a button to open the file in an external app

Automatic reload on file change

More ways to color models

Improved point cloud support

Updated F3D to latest version

Get it on Flathub

Alain announces

Discover the New Features in Planify 4.10! We are excited to introduce version 4.10 of Planify, our task management app. This update brings a host of improvements and new features designed to make your life more organized and productive. Let’s take a look at what’s new!

Easily Switch Between Task and Note In this version, we’ve added a new feature that allows you to easily switch between a task and a note. Now, you can quickly change the entry type according to your needs, making it more flexible and efficient to manage your ideas and to-dos.

Change History for Each Task Have you ever wondered when you made a modification to a task? With the new change history feature, you can now see all the changes made to each task. This functionality allows you to track and revert changes, ensuring you always have full control over your tasks.

Notifications for Tasks with Specific Times Planify now sends notifications when you create a task with a specific time. This feature helps you never miss an important appointment or crucial reminder. Set your tasks with times and receive real-time alerts to stay on top of your commitments.

Support for Integrating Multiple Todoist or Nextcloud Accounts For those managing multiple accounts, we have good news! Planify 4.10 now supports integrating multiple Todoist or Nextcloud accounts. Sync your tasks and notes from different accounts in one place, simplifying the management of your information.

New Website We are also thrilled to announce that Planify has a new website! Visit us at useplanify.com to learn more about our app, get support, and stay updated on the latest news and features.

We hope these new features make your experience with Planify even better. We are committed to continuously improving and adding functionalities that make managing your tasks and projects easier. Download version 4.10 today and discover all the enhancements for yourself!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Because we know you can’t get enough of us, we are back again, and this time, as foretold, it’s to announce Fractal 8!

There have been little changes since our release candidate, so let’s recap the main improvements since Fractal 7:

Mentions are sent intentionally

Authenticated media are supported

Draft messages are kept per-room and persisted across restarts

More links are detected in messages and room descriptions

Collapsed categories in the sidebar are remembered between restarts, with the “Historical” category collapsed by default

A banner appears when synchronization with the homeserver fails too many times in a row

The verification and account recovery processes have been polished

HTML rendering has been improved, with the support of new elements and attributes

As usual, this release includes other improvements and fixes thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

This version is available right now on Flathub.

We have a lot of improvements in mind for our next release, but if you want a particular feature to make it, the surest way is to implement it yourself! Start by looking at our issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room.

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The Extensions Port Guide for GNOME Shell 47 is Ready! https://gjs.guide/extensions/upgrading/gnome-shell-47.html

Miscellaneous

GNOME 47 enters feature, UI, and API freeze the night of this Saturday (Aug 3). The release of the beta version of GNOME 47 is scheduled for next week.

GUADEC 2024

Caroline Henriksen announces

GUADEC 2024 talk videos and photos are now available! You can find the individual talk videos in our GUADEC 2024 Playlist and photos from our venue in Denver in our shared album

We’ve also prepared two post-event surveys, one for in-person attendees and one for remote. Your participation in these surveys helps us improve future GUADECs so please take a few minutes to fill it out while the event is still fresh in your mind. Take the In-Person Survey Take the Remote Survey

GNOME Foundation

Pablo Correa Gomez reports

The GNOME Foundation Board of Directors is now fully onboarded, and has started working following GUADEC. We have provided a small update on the work done so far: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/update-from-the-new-board/22568 and we hope to continue providing regular updates in the following months!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#158 Mini Edition

Fri, 26 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 19 to July 26.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

GNOME Calendar users, rejoice! After 7 months of pain and suffering, we finally reworked the event details popover, which will be available in GNOME 47!

The new event details popover builds on top of the existing UI/code, while adding a few improvements and behavioral changes:

The popover displays the changes-prevent (lock) icon when the event is read-only.

Each section is properly separated with separators, with equal amount of margins.

Detected video meeting links no longer appear in both the location and meeting sections, but only in the meeting section.

When an event has no event note, the popover will always explicitly display that there’s no event description.

The action button adapts its icon and tooltip text depending on the event permission.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

schmiddi reports

Railway version 2.7.0 was released. This includes an improved dialog listing the providers, which now highlights the currently selected provider and furthermore separates the providers by region. One can now furthermore search for journeys by arrival time (took only 9 months for it to get merged). This release also contains minor fixes with some providers.

Third Party Projects

pieterdd says

Rclone Shuttle is a libadwaita GUI for rclone to interact with a wide variety of cloud storage providers. The latest update (0.1.4) adds support for downloading a local copy of certain files/folders.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#157 GUADEC 2024

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 12 to July 19.

GUADEC is already happening! You can find the complete timetable here.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

After adding TypeScript support, Angelo made Workbench able to use TypeScript for JavaScript diagnostics and completions.

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have released Authenticator 4.5.0. The release consists of the following:

backup: Add import of Raivo OTP files

qr scanner: Use back camera by default

search provider: Withdraw notification once the code is no longer valid

accounts: Refresh completion model when scanning from qr code

use latest libadwaita widgets

Without forgetting all the improvements brought to the camera widget through aperture library

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan announces

This week I released Embellish, a simple nerd fonts manager, the features include:

A beautiful Libadwaita design

Download and install nerd fonts from a list

Update installed fonts

Uninstall fonts

Fuzzy search

A CLI/TUI companion app (embellish-tui) for scripting and/or people who prefer the terminal

This is my first ever gnome app (and desktop app) and I am happy to be joining the community. You can get Embellish on flathub

JumpLink reports

In preparation for GUADEC, we have released version 4.0.0-beta.7 of the TypeScript type definition generator ts-for-gir this friday evening.

With this version, it is now possible to generate types locally without package.json support. This was a highly requested feature from the GNOME community to avoid the need for NPM. You can now easily generate this types, for example, with:
npx @ts-for-gir/cli generate Adw-1.0
Additionally, we have released a preview version of the upcoming GNOME Shell 47 types here and on NPM. This should hopefully make it easier for GNOME Shell extension projects to prepare their extensions for the upcoming version.

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week I released Keypunch 3.0. If you appreciate accuracy and legibility, you are going to love this update!

Monospaced font in the main text view

Text generation support for Bangla and Hebrew

Guillemet quotation marks for the French text generation

User interface translations for Hebrew and Italian, making Keypunch available in a total of 14 languages

You can get Keypunch on Flathub.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Did you miss us? Only two weeks after our beta release, we are ready to release Fractal 8.rc.

Here are the main goodies since Fractal 8.beta:

Draft messages are persisted in the database, allowing to restore them after a restart

A banner appears when synchronization with the homeserver fails too many times in a row

Links in room descriptions are detected in most places

Collapsed categories in the sidebar are remembered between restarts, with the “Historical” category collapsed by default

The history media viewers show properly when they are loading or empty

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 8.

If you want to spend your summer or winter coding, solving our issues is a great place to start!

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

Today is the first official day at GUADEC, but for our Board of Directors, Our Interim Executive Director, and myself, it’s day three of GUADEC-related events. Traditionally, the board meets in person two days before GUADEC, followed the next day with a meeting with our Advisory Board. This year, with some directors unable to be here in person in Denver, we have had some scheduling challenges and the Board meeting has spread out across three mornings. It has been satisfying helping the new Directors as they work together as a Board for the first time.

At the meetings I presented financials, gave input on Foundation procedures, and explained proposals on behalf of the staff. While all-day meetings are always tiring, it was good to be able to work through the backlog of issues that usually are decided at the GUADEC Board meetings.

In addition, I have had some fruitful discussions with Richard, our Interim ED, on the priorities and logistics of Foundation work.

Last night was the pre-registration party here in Denver, and it was wonderful seeing so many folks again! It was truly lovely to see familiar faces that have not been able to come to GUADEC in a while due to the distance.

While GUADEC has taken up most of my time and mental energies, regular Foundation work doesn’t stop. I have also been in contact with our accountants to make sure our finalized financial review is signed, worked on paperwork for other tax forms, made sure invoices are being paid, along with other minutiae.

If you’re in Denver please drop by and say hi! I am excited GUADEC is about to begin and looking forward to the coming days of talks, BoFs, and social events!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#156 Happy Hacking

Fri, 12 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 05 to July 12.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

This week we express special thanks to all the people outside of the team who review our work such as Felipe Borges, Matthias Clasen, Jonas Ådahl, Christopher Davis, Ray Strode, Florian Müllner, Robert Mader, Bilal Elmoussaoui, Daiki Ueno, Jordan Petridis, Carlos Garnacho, Allan Day, Philip Withnall, Emmanuele Bassi, Sebastian Wick, and Lennart Poettering. Thank you!

Here are the highlights for the past couple of weeks

Nautilus file chooser portal

Antonio finished the implementation of using Nautilus as file chooser

App Intents

Andy revived the xdg-spec proposal for app intents

Andy drafted an implementation in GLib

URI handling

Andy updated the URI handling implementation in xdg-desktop-portal to make use of app intents.

Key Rack

Felix implemented changing keyring password

Felix improved UI / keyboard accessibility

Felix reworked how item attributes are getting displayed, the most common attributes are now getting shown in a more user friendly way and are translatable

Global Shortcuts

Dorota submitted a GlobalShortcuts demo to ASHPD

Dorota helped with the implementation in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome and solved follow up issues

Dorota drafted an implementation in libportal

Accessibility

Adrien landed replacing GtkTreeView in Baobab

Joanie made several improvements to braille support in Orca.

Joanie worked on using atspi_device_generate_mouse_event in Orca (necessary, but not sufficient, for mouse event synthesis in Wayland).

Matt recorded a demo of Newton on GNOME OS and published a blog post on the current state of the Newton project Update on Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility project

Matt documented the Newton D-Bus protocol for ATs

Matt made several improvements and fixes ahead of the integration of AccessKit in GTK to support accessibility on macOS and Windows

Adrien worked on the accessibility support for the GtkEntryCompletion replacement in Nautilus

oo7

Dhanuka is close to have keyring unlock prompt fully supported

GNOME OS

Adrian made systemd-sysupdate better at dealing with sysexts.

Martin published a blog post about the new developer tooling powered by sysexts.

Martin implemented “Build and publish system extensions for CI” in Shell and Mutter.

USB Portals

Hubert is making good progress on usb portal; he added tests and documentation for it

Notifications

Julian continued work on the notification portal specification v2, working with Georges and Sebastian to get the MR in shape. He also continued working on the various other parts of the new notifications, including the various portal backends and GNOME Shell.

GTK Platform Libraries

Alice started a discussion about a platform library interface.

GNOME Shell Overview

Jonas opened an MR for a more adaptive shell overview on small monitors

GUADEC

A lot of the team members will be at GUADEC, we’re looking forward to meet everyone. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Martín Abente Lahaye announces

Building and testing system components is challenging, especially on immutable operating systems like GNOME OS.

To help solve the problem, at Codethink we developed a lean collection of tools called sysext-utils inspired by Lennart Poettering and Jordan Petridis. These tools streamline the developer workflow via system extensions, making iterating on system components safer and more effective.

More work is needed to perfect the experience so, if you are working on system components, we invite you to test these tools and share your feedback.

This project was developed in collaboration with the GNOME Foundation, through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF).

Sonny says

We started a pilot program to reward vulnerability reports and fixes.

https://yeswehack.com/programs/gnome-bug-bounty-program

From €500 to €10,000 depending on criticality. For now only GLib and libsoup is in scope but we will expand the list of modules and advertise as the program grows.

If you are a GNOME or freedesktop module maintainer and would like your module to join the pilot program; please get in touch.

In partnership with YesWeHack and Sovereign Tech Fund.

See Bug Resilience Program.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

libadwaita now has a new spinner widget, AdwSpinner, as well as a paintable variant, AdwSpinnerPaintable. This spinner can be used at larger sizes, still works with animations disabled and the paintable version can be used in contexts like the AdwStatusPage icon

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

jadahl reports

This week support for mixing HDR and regular content landed in Mutter and GNOME Shell. When the experimental HDR mode is enabled, GNOME Shell itself as well and Wayland and X11 clients connecting via Xwayland will now be displayed correctly instead of appearing too bright. While there is currently no way for clients to tag their windows as HDR, one can for the time being manually do so via looking glass, until the Wayland bits are ready.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Support for network monitoring on macOS in GLib has landed, written by Leo Assini: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3744

GNOME Incubating Apps

Showtime ↗

Watch without distraction

kramo says

Showtime is now available on Flathub. The app is a modern video player aiming to be the successor to Videos.

Download the app here.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week Valuta joined GNOME Circle. Valuta lets you quickly convert between currencies. Congratulations!

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

Last week Dan Yeaw released Gaphor 2.26.0. Gaphor is a SysML/UML modeling application.

The main improvements for this release is session recovery. Gaphor is able to restore your session after a crash. Also diagrams can now have stereotypes attached, which allows you to add extra data to a diagram.

A full list of changes and fixes can be found in the Change Log.

As always you can find the latest release on Flathub and the Windows/macOS versions can be downloaded from Gaphor’s download page.

Third Party Projects

JumpLink says

This week, I am happy to announce the release of ts-for-gir v4.0.0-beta.6. The ts-for-gir tool enables the generation of GObject Introspection types for TypeScript, facilitating the development of GJS projects using TypeScript.

Additionally, we have released the corresponding handwritten TypeScript types for Gnome Shell extensions, now available in version 46.0.0.

Casper Meijn announces

This week I released version 0.6.0 of Read It Later. This is a client for Wallabag, which allows you to save web articles and read them later. The significant changes are a redesigned “new article” user interface and faster startup times for accounts with numerous articles. Download on Flathub.

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

Today we’re announcing a significant leadership transition at the GNOME Foundation. Holly Million will be stepping down as Executive Director, with her last day being July 31. An Interim Executive Director, Richard Littauer, has joined the Foundation this week. Richard brings with him a wealth of open source leadership experience and will help ensure a smooth transition as we prepare for a new Executive Director search.

During the past year Holly achieved remarkable milestones, including drafting a five-year strategic plan, securing crucial fiscal sponsorships, and improving our financial operations. We extend our heartfelt gratitude for her contributions. The Board will begin the search for a permanent Executive Director soon. For more details, read the full announcement here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/07/12/gnome-foundation-announces-transition-of-executive-director/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#155 Overhauled Keyrings

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 28 to July 05.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Key Rack 0.4 has been released. This release contains all the work that Felix has done as part of STF. The version brings a completely overhauled user interface. But the changes go much further than a better look. Key Rack now allows to view all host keyrings as well to change passwords of keyrings. Passwords can now be found more easily via the new search function and new passwords can be added via the interface.

You can use Key Rack for to lookup password that apps have store or use it as a personal password manager with multiple keyrings.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

WebKitGTK ↗

GTK port of the WebKit rendering engine.

WebKit can now be profiled using Sysprof on Linux. This includes both the WebKitGTK and the WPE WebKit ports. WebKit is the first web engine on Linux to integrate with Sysprof!

For now, this integration exposes all pre-existing tracing points in WebKit. This includes JSC, WebProcess, and more. New tracing points are being considered for addition.

This is an important step for WebKit on Linux as it open the door for potential performance improvements, reduce resource usage, and more.

Third Party Projects

elvishcraftsman says

I’ve created my first GNOME app, Time Tracker, which is now available on Flathub.

Time Tracker is local-first and can sync through cloud storage (saving to a CSV file). This makes it able to load significantly faster than online-first time tracking software.

Time Tracker supports custom filtering, where it reports on the amount of time spent during a particular date range and by project.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.40.0 is out:

Phosh got (optional) dark style an mobile data quick toggles. One can suspend from the lock screen now and we have a bunch of bug and UI fixes. Phoc now supports a fling gesture to make opening and closing the panels a bit nicer.

There’s more. Check the full details here

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Brage Fuglseth reports

Bonjour! Sziasztok! 안녕! This week I released Keypunch 2.0. Get ready to practice typing in many new languages.

Text generation support for Bulgarian, Hindi, Korean, Nepali, Russian, Swiss German, and Ukranian

User interface translations for Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Spanish and Ukranian

More accepted ways to type certain characters, such as “oe” for “œ”

Better handling of scripts using intelligent input engines, like Korean Hangul

Recognition of Ctrl+Backspace

Special accomodations for on-screen keyboards and touch screens

A special thanks to everybody who has contributed orthographic information and tested the text generation and input machinery for their languages. Keypunch’s diverse language support would not be possible without you. You can get Keypunch on Flathub.

GDM Settings ↗

Customize your login screen.

Mazhar Hussain reports

I am calling for contributors for GDM Settings. Lately, I have been busy in my day job, and haven’t had much time to work on GDM Settings.

About 2 months ago, I requested the users for donations for the development of the app. At the time of writing this, we have $179.47 USD in our OpenCollective. I know it is not much, but meaningful contributions may be rewarded with little gifts (payouts) in the range of $30 to $50. If you want to work on something specific for some fixed amount of money, you can do that as well. Just reach out to me in GitHub Discussions.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please, don’t hesitate to reach out in GitHub Discussions.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It’s been all over the news, so you probably already have heard about what’s happening in France, but in case you haven’t yet: a new Fractal beta just dropped!

What have we been up to for Fractal 8.beta?

Mentions are sent intentionally

Authenticated media are supported

Draft messages are kept per-room

The verification and account recovery processes have been polished

HTML rendering should be more robust, as we switched to the same library already used by the Rust SDK to cleanup tags in messages

Speaking of HTML rendering, code blocks gained syntax highlighting, lists can be nested, numbered lists can start from an arbitrary number, the details tag is supported, and @room mentions are detected and rendered with a pill

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

As always, you can try to fix one of our issues. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Internships

FlatSync ↗

Keep your Flatpak apps synchronized between devices

IlChitarrista announces

We’ve finally landed the Initial Setup as part of GSoC, now FlatSync is configurable through a nicely designed UI. Many thanks for the feedback throughout development from my mentor Cogitri and various people in the Design channel.

Now I’m starting to work on implementing Filtering to bring more granular control over FlatSync’s behaviour.

GNOME Foundation

Allan Day says

The GNOME Foundation Board of directors has been getting its new members up and running this week. Newly elected directors have been joining the board Matrix channels, and training and briefing sessions have been scheduled for next week. Planning is also underway for the 2024 board annual meeting, which will happen ahead of GUADEC, on 17 July.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#154 Pride Day!

Fri, 28 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 21 to June 28.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

as a last minute change before libadwaita 1.6.alpha, we landed a new alert/message dialog style/layout. It covers AdwAlertDialog, AdwMessageDialog (minus a few features) and even GtkMessageDialog/GtkAlertDialog (as best as it can). It’s now using standard button styles, fixing the long-standing issue where suggested and destructive buttons would look the same when using red accent color, and generally refreshing the look

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

After various necessary cleanups in both Mutter and GNOME Shell, you can finally build Mutter as a Wayland-only compositor. GNOME Shell will automatically detect at build time whether Mutter was built with or without X11, with or without Xwayland and adapt to that.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu (he/they/she) says

Today is the international LGBTIQA+ pride day. As a queer person myself I wanted to celebrate, especially in a moment where our rights are questioned more and more. It’s available now on Flathub a new release of Apostrophe, with some small fixes and updated translations, but first and foremost new pride styles for the save animation. Thanks to Fina Wilke for the original implementation! Check Apostrophe on Flathub and, if you like it, donate to your favorite local queer association 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Michael Terry announces

Déjà Dup Backups 46 is now available!• New Adwaita dialogs and UI polish

It now uses Rclone for cloud support (more reliable than the Python libraries used before)

Better feedback in several error cases

The Restic backend is a lot more robust

Plus the usual bug fixes and translation updates Download from flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.DejaDup

Third Party Projects

Swapnil Devesh reports

I have released version 1.1.0 of my app Luminance https://github.com/sidevesh/Luminance and now its built using GTK4 and Libadwaita 🎉 TWIG-Bot

d-k-bo says

Televido 0.4.0 is available on Flathub.

Televido is an app to access German-language public broadcasting live streams and archives based on APIs provided by the MediathekView project.

As a major change in version 0.4.0, the mediathek search field now uses MediathekViewWeb’s advanced search syntax. Additionally, support for removing and reordering live channels and an option to copy the subtitles URL have been added.

Izzy (she/they) reports

Binary 0.3 is officially out!

New features and improvements include:

Conversions to and from octal (base 8) numbers

A cleaner headerbar with flat dropdowns for the base selectors.

Reworked number conversions to be more reliable and quicker.

Added translations for Finnish and German.

Get it from Flathub here: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.fizzyizzy05.binary

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis reports

Tuba 0.8 is now available, with many new features and bug fixes!

✨ Highlights:

Admin Dashboard

Advanced Search Dialog

Accessibility improvements

Graceful network recovery & in-app proxy settings

Post translations

Profile notes

Notification requests & filtering

Mini profiles when clicking avatars

Optional Clapper support

🏳️‍🌈 Happy International LGBTQIA+ Pride Day! 🏳️‍⚧️

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

GUADEC 2024 is only a few weeks away! Make sure to let us know how you’re attending by registering.

Remote Registration

If you plan to attend from home or at a satellite event such as in Berlin, please remember to register as a remote participant at https://events.gnome.org/event/209/registrations/181/. Knowing who participates in GUADEC (and where they take part) helps us make events as relevant and engaging as possible, and helps explain the reach and impact of our events to sponsors. Knowing how many remote participants we have also helps us continue to make our events accessible with a lower carbon footprint by justifying costs such as AV Teams and live streaming.

In-Person Registration

If you are joining us in Denver, Colorado make sure to register as an in-person attendee at https://events.gnome.org/event/209/registrations/177/. Signing up ahead of the conference helps ensure you receive all the important updates and information we email to registered participants. It also allows us to print your conference badge in time for early pick up at our July 18th pre-registration party!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#153 Proudly Colorful

Fri, 21 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 14 to June 21.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past couple of weeks

Completed and landed porting Baobab away from GtkTreeView.

Key Rack

Key Rack is a new application to manage desktop secrets and aims to replace Sea Horse.

Implement localization support

Add CI support

Passwords can now be added to a keyring. Thanks to the zxcvbn library, the password strength is displayed directly and guidance is provided on how the password can be improved.

Both the keys and the keyrings/apps can now be searched.

Added Flatpak File Monitor, which detects changes and automatically updates the views.

Setup

Setup is a new OEM style Installer for image based operating systems.

Fully implemented the EULA page. The License now comes from a file the distro controls. If the file is missing, the page is skipped. It can render markup now! So the EULA can have a bit of (limited) formatting.

Started work on the disk selection pages

Detect & warn about Intel Rapid Storage technology

Mocked-up the various possible behaviors of the disk selection pages, and still iterating on it with Sam

Started working on reading the data from udisks, instead of the mocked-up data. Not hooked into UI yet

Here is a video demo showcasing

language page from last week

EULA page

current state of disk selection flows

Global Shortcuts

The Global Shortcuts portal is a standard API allowing applications to register global shortcuts. These shortcuts can be used by apps to react to the user input, regardless of the input focus state. Besides the obvious advantages to support it in GNOME, its implementation is a prelimary step towards better screen reader support on Wayland with the Accessibility Shortcuts Portal

Continued asjusting to feedback for GlobalShorcuts in Settings and Shell

Added GlobalShortcuts portal to ashpd demo.

Video of Global Shortcuts in ashpd demo

Orca

Orca is the screen reader of the Linux desktop.

Created a document to help application developers make their application more accessible to screen reader users see Tips for Application Developers.

Improve presentation of static text exposed via description

Completed eliminating formatting strings for presentation generation.

Branch for user testing: Eliminate use of formatting strings for braille: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/088e39d0

Braille is the last thing still using formatting strings, so work in this area will soon be complete

Make ARIA posinset and setsize global

Make posinset and setsize attribute retrieval global: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/eb0b080da

This change makes it possible for the GTK developers to fix https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6765 without having to expose all objects in the accessibility tree

oo7

oo7 is a new secret service provider and aims to replace gnome-keyring and libsecret.

Completed implemention of the prompt, oo7-daemon is now able to access the GNOME Shell based prompt to complete org.freedesktop.Secret.Prompt calls

Video demonstrating oo7 triggering the GNOME Shell prompt to unlock the keyring:

Newton

Newton is the new Wayland native protocol for accessibility on the Linux desktop.

Published a blog post and demo Update on Newton, the Wayland-native accessibility project

Finished prototype of key grabbing implementation for Orca on Wayland, including support for arbitrary modifiers including Caps Lock. Had to insert key grabbing at a different stage of Mutter event handling to get it right.

GTK: Implemented support for the most important AccessKit actions, including the ability for ATs to change the caret position or text selection, which is important for the Say All command. Also debugged some crashes. https://gitlab.gnome.org/mwcampbell/gtk/tree/accesskit

Newton AT client libraries consolidated into a single repository

Nautilus File Chooser

Nautilus is the GNOME file manager. We are working on using it as the file chooser for the GNOME desktop.

4 of the preparatory merge requests landed

Part 1

Part 2 - Keyboard & Pad Shortcuts

Part 3 - Toolbar Turbo

Part 4 - Sidebar Shuffle

3 more requests were opened

Part 5 - Go Starred or Go Home

Part 6 - Copy and Pasta🤌

Part 7 - Deadly Modes

Glycin

A new library for sandboxed and extandable image loading

Fixes and docs for splitting C bindings into libglycin and libglycin-gtk4.

Added structure for having “editors” as addition to “loaders” for image formats for image editing in glycin. As a first example, JPEG now supports changing the image orientation if a respective Exif tag is present.

libadwaita

The platform library of GNOME

Generate standalone colors from bg colors

Finished AdwBottomSheet and made it public

Support nested slots in AdwMultiLayoutView

GNOME Shell

Created a GNOME Shell extension to get feedback about changing notification banner expension.

Issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7713

Extension: https://gitlab.gnome.org/jsparber/prototype-for-notification-banners-behavior

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

After a long wait, we have customizable accent colors!

If you maintain an app using libadwaita (and don’t override its accent color), make sure you don’t use hardcoded blue color where system accent color would make sense, or vice versa. (see docs)

Libadwaita apps will also pick up accent colors when running in environments such as elementary OS or KDE.

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Sophie (she/her) reports

Loupe made its first small step towards image editing. Rotating JPEG images that contain an Exiv entry for orientation, the change of orientation is now saved within the image.

This is made possible by glycin now supporting changes on images in addition to loading images. In contrast to some other image viewers, Loupe will not rewrite the image or even re-encode it with potential quality loss. Instead, it is just changing the one byte inside the file that’s responsible for determining the image orientation.

Support for more formats and more editing features will hopefully follow over time. If you want to support my work you can join my Patreon and get weekly updates.

Baobab

Chris 🌱️ announces

This week Disk Usage Analyzer (AKA baobab) landed multiple PRs that refresh the UI. Disk Usage Analyzer now uses GtkColumnView for its file tree, uses a new pathbar look inspired by Nautilus, and uses symbolic icons for the Devices & Locations page. We also got rid of some usage of deprecated APIs like GtkStyleContext where possible.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Auto suggest/complete landed in Workbench. The feature can be used to discover widgets, properties and write UI faster. You can try it out now in Workbench nightly, testers and feedback welcome. Kudos to James Westman for writing the language server making this possible.

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl announces

This week we pushed a minor update to Graphs, tackling a bunch of persistent bugs in the current stable release. The most exciting difference in this release is probably a major increase in start-up time, resulting mostly from the way we bundle style-previews now with the build. This change reduces total start-up time of Graphs by 1.5 seconds on my machine, reducing the do_activate stage from 1.8s to 0.3s.

Apart from some minor under-the-hood improvements and other bug fixes, the most likely changes to be noticed are:

Updates to translations, including added support for Hungarian

Further fixes and improvements to the regex logic in the equation generation. Now nested parentheses are handled correctly, an equation like sin(x+2(pi-x)²)+2 is now handled properly for example.

The minimum vertical height of the main window has been decreased significantly.

Delimiters are now handled correctly when importing data, even if an arbritrary amount of whitespace is involved.

Fixed an issue where the New Project dialog would not activate

As always, the latest release can be retrieved from Flathub. Credits for the original graph in the screenshot go to xkcd.

Third Party Projects

qwertzuiopy announces

This week I released my fist app, Libellus! Libellus is a small wiki application allowing you to browse through DnD without being distracted by ads or having to open a browser. It supports most of DnD including Classes, Races, Monsters Spells and Items. It is available on Flathub.

xjuan reports

New Cambalache development release 0.91.1 is out!

Key features:

Port to Adwaita

Custom wayland compositor widget

Read more at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/06/21/new-cambalache-development-release-0-91-1/

Cambalache is a tool to create UI for Gtk 4/3

Documentation

Dan Yeaw announces

PyGObject, the Python bindings for using GNOME platform libraries in your applications, received a big improvement to the documentation by adding tutorials. The source of them came from centralizing the magnificent work in the PyGObject-Guide by Rafael Mardojai CM, which was based on the PyGObject-Tutorial by Sebastian Pölsterl. Thanks to all the contributors to both of these projects and a community effort to relicense them under the LGPL. Check out the tutorials at https://pygobject.gnome.org/tutorials/.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#152 Bottom Sheets

Fri, 14 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 07 to June 14.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

AdwBottomSheet is now public, allowing apps to use bottom sheets outside dialogs. It also has an optional bottom bar, which may be useful for music player apps.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Pablo Correa Gomez announces

This week Papers, the Incubator app for viewing documents, had its first release published on Flathub! Now you can download a stable version instead of using GNOME nightly. We are hoping to get more testing and feedback from the community!

In the meanwhile, development continues at a high pace! Qiu Wenbo has continued porting many widgets to libadwaita, UI templates, and Rust, I have focused on cleanups, and as part of GSoC Markus Göllnitz has continued improving the UI! The top headerbar is now split in two, and search happens over the sidebar. Not only allows this to fit the UI in a phone size, but also provides better modularity, making the application more maintainable.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

schmiddi says

Railway version 2.6.0 was now published. This release refactors a lot of the backend of Railway, such that we can now support many more providers. As a start, Railway now supports SBB and the Transitous project. Adding new providers should be an easy task if one is proficient with the Rust programming language and the provider has an easy API one can use. To help anybody to contribute their favourite provider, in the case it is not yet implemented, we have extensive documentation on how to write such an implementation. In case you want to help out, feel free to write us a message. Even though this was the biggest change with this release, it was not the only one. We improved the user experience in some parts of the application, for example you will now be informed about the option to delete old journeys to clean out these bookmarks automatically. We also made the application more accessible, with support for screen readers for searching for stations.

Third Party Projects

DaKnig says

DewDuct v0.2.3 is released! currently working on behind the scenes things, so not many exciting news besides some bugs squashed and some performance improved ~

Please, if you have any ideas, contact me on Matrix! (Daknig on Matrix dot org). Even if you have no prior experience in GTK and are just meddling in Rust, I promise to help!

The situation with invidious being blocked is going to affect DewDuct, the future is uncertain; But, for now, enjoy the new released and see your bugs squashed!

The release would be available on alpine shortly after this post goes live!

I have released gir-parser, a complete parser of the GObject Introspection GIR files written in Rust. It can be used as a base for writing a documentation/bindings generator.

GNOME Websites

GNOME’s Discourse web forum now publishes topics for various blogs using their RSS feed, like:

the Foundation’s news blog

the GTK developers blog

the GNOME Shell developers blog

This Week in GNOME (hi!)

and more will follow in the future. You can use Discourse for comments, feedback, and discussions.

GNOME Foundation

Michael Downey announces

Along with our friends at KDE e.V. and Eclipse Foundation, the GNOME Foundation was recently invited to become an Associate Member of the new Matrix.org Foundation to help provide feedback on making the platform more useful for communities like GNOME to collaborate on free software development.

Strengthening partnerships between free software communities like ours is an important aspect of project sustainability. We remain grateful to the Matrix.org Foundation for providing the infrastructure used for GNOME’s rooms and Foundation member accounts.

As part of their recent Governing Board launch, I’m pleased to share that Cleo Menezes Jr. has been appointed to be GNOME’s first delegate to this group. Cleo will help advocate for GNOME in using and helping others use Matrix, so if you have any feedback or questions, get in touch.

Caroline Henriksen announces

The call for GUADEC 2024 BoFs and Workshops is open for one more day. If you would like to host an in-person or remote session make sure to submit your proposal by tomorrow (June 15): https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/06/04/guadec-2024-call-for-bofs-and-workshops/

Quick reminder to also register for GUADEC! This year’s conference runs from July 19-24, let us know if you’re attending in person or remotely by signing up here: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/registrations/

For anyone attending in person in Denver, we’re planning a number of social events so make sure to check the website for more details. We’ll be adding details for a pre-registration party on July 19 and options for a social activity on July 24 soon, but you can register for our July 22 family-friendly baseball game (Colorado Rockies vs Boston Red Sox) right now: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/page/331-colorado-rockies-baseball-game

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#151 Pride Month

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 31 to June 07.

This Week in GNOME is dedicated to the struggles of all lesbian, gay, trans, inter, bi, pan, asexual, aromantic, non-binary, and queer people.

LGBTQIA+ people have always been an integral part of our project, across all different roles. We wish to take this opportunity to thank you all from the bottom of our hearts for all your contributions to GNOME and to our community as whole.

We as a project have a fundamental responsibility to ensure the safety and well-being of everyone in our community. This can only be accomplished by prioritizing marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. To accomplish this we expect everyone to follow our Code of Conduct, we moderate our chat rooms via cross-community moderation lists and we believe in speaking up whenever something is not right. This takes a remarkable effort every single day, and we still have a lot to learn and to improve. Let us learn and grow together, to become the best we can be.

Our thoughts go out to all the people that have to fight for their right to exist. We stand with you and we fight with you.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past two weeks:

Tooling and QA

Martin published a post on discourse: Towards a better way to hack and test your system components. Feedback welcome!

Martin made an initial implementation of sysext-utils based on the proposal ahead.

Abderrahim made a GNOME OS single installer image that can install both the ostree and the sysupdate variants. The ostree variant can be dropped when sysupdate is no longer considered experimental.

Platform

Alice wrote a blog post about all of the CSS work

Alice landed AdwMultiLayoutView in libadwaita.

Sophie added option to apply image orientation to texture data in glycin.

Sophie split C bindings into libglycin and libglycin-gtk4 and added necessary features such that projects that don’t want/need to depend on GTK (liker mutter) can use glycin without depending on it.

Flatpak

Dorota added an internal API to GNOME Shell that provides additional functionality for managing key grabs, suitable for the GlobalShortcuts portal.

Hub fixed a leak in Flatpak that was spoiling the CLI output.

Hub wrote the Flatpak docs chapter on fallback devices.

António landed many refactors and the part 1 of FileChooser portal implementation for Nautilus.

Accessibility

Matt implemented support for the GtkTextView multi-line text widget in the GTK AccessKit implementation.

Matt fixed a bug in libadwaita that caused the accessibility tree under an AdwTabView or AdwViewStack to be inconsistent, leading to a crash in AccessKit.

Matt started key grabbing protocol support in Mutter/Orca to improve screen reader compatibility in Wayland.

Mutter

Orca

Georges fixed a bug in WebKit where accessible events aren’t notified

Multidisciplinary fix, pending reviews but the relevant people are MIA

WebKit: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/29052

Flatpak: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5828

xdg-dbus-proxy: https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-dbus-proxy/pull/61

Secrets

Felix added file monitor to Key Rack to watch for Flatpak app keyring changes

Felix landed a major refactor in Key Rack to merge logic for system and flatpak items.

Dhanuka implemented the secret prompt interface in oo7

Implemented org.gnome.keyring.Prompter interface

Implemented org.freedesktop.Secret.Prompt interface

Integrated secret prompt into oo7-daemon

Interoperability

Andy landed tons of things on GNOME Online Account

SRV lookup

Parallel SRV lookups for DAV

IMAP/SMTP autoconfig

Kerberos KEYRING support (big battery improvements)

Port to AdwDialog

Settings: don’t show account details when setup completes

Neill Whillans says

More visible CVE reports for gnome-build-meta Recently we have made a few changes to the generation and accessibility of CVE reports for gnome-build-meta.

These changes include the generation of additional CVE reports for both the vm and vm-secure manifests, for master and all future, supported release branches. We also make use of Gitlab Pages to automatically publish not only the CVE reports for the master branch, but also reports for each currently supported release branch. A list of these individual reports can be obtained through a newly added badge that can be found at the top of gnome-build-meta’s README.

This work was carried out as part of Codethink’s collaboration with the GNOME Foundation, through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF).

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Alice (she/her) reports

I wrote a blog post about the recent work in GTK to modernize its CSS engine, and the implications for apps using GTK and libadwaita: https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2024/06/07/css-happenings/

GNOME Incubating Apps

Sophie (she/her) reports

Showtime has been accepted into the GNOME Incubator. The GNOME incubation process is for apps that are designated to be accepted into GNOME Core or GNOME Development Tools if they reach the required maturity.

Showtime is slated to replace Totem, GNOME’s current video app. The reason is that Totem has now been unmaintained for nearly a year and still uses GTK 3.

You can help improve Showtime by testing the nightly version and contributing. The incubation progress will be tracked in this issue.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

Markus Göllnitz says

We have some great news about Railway! @schmiddi:matrix.org has done a tremendous job at boring up the backend code of the application, as well as its library counterpart. Railway is no longer limited to the HAFAS API. 🎉 That is not just a theoretical improvement: As the first newly supported network, you can test the Swiss SBB through search.ch.

If you use Railway and want to test this new network, or want to help us make sure we did not introduce obscure regressions, be sure to test our Railway beta release on Flathub beta: flatpak install https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/de.schmidhuberj.DieBahn.flatpakref. If you do test it: Thank You! And feel free to share feedback with us over at #railwayapp:matrix.org or at our issue tracker.

Aaaand … @schmiddi:matrix.org even went so far as to implement support for MOTIS. You never heard of that? It is used by an open data based routing project: the Transitous project. As they say about themselves, “Transitous is a community-run provider-neutral international public transport routing service.” If you hate the need to change the network in Railway, care about FLOSS server-side as much as client-side, and want to see open data in open formats, such as GTFS, excel, you will love this. In the beta release, you can find it as “Worldwide (beta) using Transitous,” but bear in mind that official providers are still more accurate, more up-to-date, and will stay for a reason. If you want to see that changed, you can get involved with said project.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

It took a bit too long but we have finally released a blog post that covers the changes that landed in the latest Rust bindings release. https://gtk-rs.org/blog/2024/06/01/new-release.html

Third Party Projects

Nokse reports

I have released Exhibit, an app to view 3D models, powered by F3D.

Some of the features are:

Support for many file formats, including glTF, USD, STL, STEP, PLY, OBJ, FBX, Alembic and many more

Many rendering and visual settings

HDRI or colored background

Export render to image

Drag and drop files

It installs mimetype and icon for supported file types

For now it only works with X11/Xwayland because the library can only be compiled to work with one compositor at a time.

Daniel Wood announces

Design - 2D CAD for GNOME has recieved an update with lots of changes. This update forms a foundation for more advanced drawing entities like dimensions. Highlights include:

Manage text and line styles from the preferences window

Update text and line style from the properties window

Highlight design entities on mouse hover

Fix opening files as arguments e.g. ‘open with’ from file browser

Improve Trim and Extend command selection highlighting

Fix behaviour when no commands have been performed

Prevent selection of items on locked or frozen layers

Fix ortho and polar snaps when typed point data is entered

Update rotate command to match typical workflow

Underline shortcut letter of command options

Use consistent prompt for command with options

Remove custom headerbar buttons from layers window

Use RGB colours internally for all colour definitions

Support DXF true colours

Fix issue with layers being updated with incorrect state when editing layer data

Draw entities using correct colour when part of a block, supporting colour ‘ByBlock’

Add Block command, enabling creation of blocks

Add Explode command, enabling decomposition of blocks into primitive entities

Add Hatch command and common hatch patterns

Update to the latest GNOME dev kit icons

Add Purge command, clearing unused, blocks, layers and line types

Show suggestions for invalid command input

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.dubstar_04.design

Keypunch ↗

Practice your typing skills

Brage Fuglseth reports

How fast can you type? Find out with my new app, Keypunch!

I’ve worked on this for the last couple of months, and it’s finally out. Keypunch lets you practice your typing skills with automatically generated pseudo-text in your language of choice. Alternatively, you can supply it with your own text, such as song lyrics, Wikipedia articles, and quotes. Get ready to accelerate your typing speed!

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/dev.bragefuglseth.Keypunch

Shell Extensions

Arca says

Day Progress: an extension that shows a progress bar of your day to help you track your time.

I actually released this last week, but it took another week for it to become stable enough to call it a stable release. Here’s how it works: you set the start and reset (end) times in the extension preferences (for example, the start and end of your workday) and it displays a progress bar of the current time in the top panel.

Features:

Customisable start and end times, including the ability to wrap around midnight

Option to show time elapsed instead of remaining

Customisable bar width and height

Option to display a bar with smooth, curved ends (experimental)

Customisable panel position and index

Shows percentage and time elapsed and remaining in the tooltip (see image below)

You can download the extension at: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7042/day-progress/ The GitHub repository is at: https://github.com/ArcaEge/day-progress

Internships

Pablo Correa Gomez announces

as part of GSoC camelCaseNick landed support for floating zoom buttons in Papers! This design pattern was part of the mockups for more than 5 years, but was never implemented! This is a first step to make the top bar fitting on mobile!

Events

Asmit Malakannawar reports

Hello everyone,

We’re thrilled to announce that the call for volunteers and the call for BoFs for GUADEC 2024 is now open!

If you’re passionate about making GUADEC 2024 a success and want to lend a helping hand, please fill out the volunteer form.

For those interested in presenting a workshop or leading a Birds of a Feather (BoF) session, we’d love to hear from you! Please fill out the BoFs form to submit your proposal.

Volunteer Form Link BoFs Form Link

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

My week has been very busy with financial things. I had meetings with our bookkeeper and our accountant. With their support, our books have never looked as good as they do now. In addition, working within our board-approved balanced budget has meant that our numbers look healthier as well. This point was made more apparent to me when our accountant asked if we had considered finding higher interest accounts for our funds. More research on this is now on my to-do list.

The Foundation’s Strategic Plan Draft https://foundation.gnome.org/strategicplan/ is still open for feedback. Please submit using the link on that page. While we value all feedback, having it all in one place makes it easier for us to make sure we don’t lose any of your views.

If you haven’t registered for GUADEC yet, please do so: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/registrations/! The earlier we know how many people are coming, the easier it will be for us to plan. And don’t forget to register for the baseball game as well. Go Red Sox!

We are still looking for more sponsors for GUADEC. If you or your employer are interested, please let us know!

Caroline Henriksen reports

In honor of Pride Month, we’d like to give a special shout out to our LGBTQIA+ community. Thank you for contributing your voices and efforts to GNOME, we appreciate all of your hard work!

We’d also like to invite everyone to join us in celebrating Pride Month at a special GNOME Social Hour on June 24 at 17:30 UTC. Come chat with contributors and Foundation members, and share ideas on how we can better support our LGBTQIA+ community. https://discourse.gnome.org/t/celebrate-pride-month-at-the-gnome-social-hour-june-24/21421

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#150 Multiple Layouts

Fri, 31 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 24 to May 31.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

libadwaita now has AdwMultiLayoutView, allowing to define multiple layouts and reparent children between them. This allows to completely reorganize UI (say, turn sidebar into a bottom bar, or a grid into a vertical box) by changing a single property, e.g. via a breakpoint setter

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench is now available on the GNOME Nightly repository, and we welcomed 2 GSoC students. You can read about it here https://blog.sonny.re/workbench-news

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

Newsflash can now play video attachments like those in video podcasts or youtube subscriptions. This is thanks to the amazing video player clapper, which is now also available as a library. In the process of integrating libclapper I generated rust bindings for it, that are available here.

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Brage Fuglseth announces

The 1st of June is right around the corner, so why not pick up the guitar and learn some catchy tunes for the summer? I’ve just published version 7.0 of Fretboard, which brings more accurate chord name prediction, note names on hover for the neck top toggles, and a couple of fixes for various small issues encountered since last release.

Get Fretboard on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

Alain announces

Planify 4.8: New Features to Enhance Your Task and Project Management! We are excited to announce the new update for Planify, our task and project management app. With version 4.8, we’ve added features that will help you organize and visualize your tasks more efficiently. Here are the most notable updates:

1. Markdown Support in Task Descriptions Bring your descriptions to life! You can now use Markdown to format text in your task descriptions. This means you can add bold, italics, links, lists, and much more, allowing for greater customization and clarity in your descriptions.

2. Markdown Support in Task Titles Want to make your titles more striking and descriptive? With the new Markdown support in task titles, you can do just that. Use Markdown to highlight important parts of the title, making your tasks easier to identify at a glance.

3. New All Tasks View We know managing multiple projects and tasks can be challenging. That’s why we’ve introduced a new view that lets you see all your tasks and projects in one place. This feature provides you with a comprehensive overview of all your work, making it easier to plan and track your progress.

4. Expand or Collapse Tasks Functionality For better visual management, you can now expand or collapse tasks. This functionality allows you to quickly show or hide task details, helping you focus on what’s most important at any given moment without getting lost in the information.

What to Expect from These Improvements? With these new features, Planify 4.8 becomes an even more powerful tool for managing your tasks and projects. Markdown support offers flexibility in how you present information, while the new view and the ability to expand or collapse tasks enhance the app’s usability and efficiency.

Update to version 4.8 and discover how these new features can boost your productivity and organization!

Introducing Aurea, an app for Flatpak application developers.

Aurea is a simple banner previewer that reads metainfo files and displays them as they will appear in Flathub banners, making app publication easier.

Kudos to Tobias Bernard for the design.

Get it on Flathub

DaKnig says

DewDuct 0.2.2: Wow! Couldn’t imagine I would get so many users! Thanks for all the feedback! New features this week:

Import your NewPipe subscriptions (but better)!

Or maybe manually subscribe to channels!

The subscription list is saved and reloaded automatically

Regarding flatpak, will work on it once the main feature is implemented: recent videos from your subscriptions. Please help via PR so that the flatpak will come out sooner.

The new version is available in alpine, on the testing repo, or on postmarketos edge. Check it out if you have a linux phone!

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp says

Overcoming flatpak limitations

Turtle 0.9 has been released, which finally brings better flatpak support.

The turtle service is now available in the flatpak version and uses dbus to communicate with the Nautilus extension. A new plugin installer dialog, which can be opened directly from the Settings dialog, allows you to install the Nautilus plugin file with a single click.

Additionally it is now possible to sign commits via the seahorse dbus interface.

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb announces

Crosswords 0.3.13 was released!

This version features several keyboard behavior cleanups for the main game providing a more natural feel when entering puzzles.

For the editor, we moved the autofill functionality moved in-line instead of being in a modal dialog. Autofilling has been made faster and more correct, as well.

Check out the release announcement for more information and download it from flathub!

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen announces

Final location proposals for GUADEC 2025 are due today! Make sure to submit yours by end-of-day or contact the Foundation if you have additional questions or need more time. More details and links to the submission form can be found here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/04/18/call-for-guadec-2025-location-proposals/

Holly Million announces

We have some exciting updates from the GNOME Foundation.

Executive Director Holly Million had a call this week with Tara Tarakiyee, our program manager at Sovereign Tech Fund, providing him with an update on the project work taking place under the Foundation’s current contract with STF and the Foundation’s plans to continue and expand the work. The updates included:

The contracted work continues to progress, and the Sovereign Tech Fund is very encouraged by what has been accomplished to date.

The areas of work currently being funded by STF are planned to continue and to be strengthened and expanded as part of our new, permanent GNOME Development Initiative, as described in our draft strategic plan – https://foundation.gnome.org/strategicplan/

The Foundation is reorganizing the project and hiring an additional program manager to work with current managers on the new Initiative.

We are finalizing a contract for transitional work with the new manager and will make a formal announcement next week.

We hope to significantly increase the amount of development work happening through the Initiative with a process that allows community suggestions for needed work and an application process for grants for proposed work.

The Foundation recently applied to the Open Tech Fund to strengthen the Initiative, including proposing to hire a permanent full-time program manager and to invest in other important work to support our community

The Foundation will apply for a new round of contract funding when the Sovereign Tech Fund reopens for applications in mid June.

We have launched the GNOME Development Fund, which will raise additional support from the community to fuel the development work possible through the Initiative. Starting immediately, donations made through the Fund will build the Initiative – https://www.gnome.org/donate/ – This Fund page will continue to develop, with counters, a backer list, and tiered benefits for backers at differing levels, and badges coming next. Donate today to support the future of GNOME.

In other exciting news, the Foundation has new professional bookkeeping systems in place, completed a financial review in preparation for a required financial audit next year, and at the completion of the second quarter of this fiscal year, the Foundation is performing under budget and is on track in our commitment to having a non-deficit year. We will share more details, including graphs and financial details soon.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#149 Installer Installment

Fri, 24 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 17 to May 24.

Sovereign Tech Fund

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

We’re currently facing a major issue from the GNOME Foundation side. We hope it will be resolved before it impacts the coordination of the STF project, but if not, the future of parts of the project is uncertain.

Here are the highlights for the last week:

Felix completed the the refactor of the Flatpak side of Key Rack. This is an important basis for the next steps (automatic updating of Flatpak items on changes, adding new items, etc.).

Adrien continued porting Baobab away from GtkTreeView and to GtkColumnView and ported Baobab to use CSS variables for Adwaita’s named colors.

Dorota continued work on her prototype portal implementation for testing, updated the portal trigger, and fixed the MR to shuffle around things in settings before the globalshortcuts part can go in, among other smaller things.

Joanie continued working on getting rid of formatting.py in Orca, and a number of other minor Orca issues and cleanups.

Abderrahim moved sysupdate configuration to the main sysupdate directory (as part of the extensions) and reviewed and merged an MR to split out debug to a sysext and tarball for debuginfod, which should help reduce image size.

Martín worked on various aspects of tooling for development and testing on immutable OSes, including putting together a developer story to solicit feedback, and writing a minimalist snippet for generating sysext images.

Neill worked on tooling for checking CVEs in GNOME OS, landing MRs to allow generate_cve_report.py and update_local_cve_database.py to be used by other builds and adding tables of unversioned elements of git/archive sources to generate_cve_report.py. He also wrote a script and modified CI to populate Gitlab Pages with the CVE reports for master and all stable branches.

Hub worked on adding USB portal support to ashpd. It can now exercise the portal, including obtain a device that can then then be opened with libusb (rusb). This allowed fixing many issues in the portal implementation, including assert on API misuses, and state handling.

Sam fixed several small issues introduced in the GNOME Shell high contrast refactor, including extraneous padding in icon-shadows, menu item background hover fixes, an app grid margin issue in Large Text mode, and a symbolic themed icon contrast fix in notifications.

Sam also continued work on the File Chooser Portal Open and Save dialog mockups, and updated mic sensitivity symbolic icons in Adwaita to fix visibility issues in the Shell.

Julian continued to work on the notification grouping in GNOME Shell and looked into focus stealing prevention, filing issues and implementing fixes for some of them.

Andy worked on Online Accounts, including porting to AdwDialog/AdwAlertDialog and separating OAuth2 browser process.

Dhanuka continued working on implementing the oo7-daemon Secret Prompt. They implemented base64 payload parsing for SecretExchange, implemented org.gnome.keyring.Prompter interface based on SecretExchange, and integrated SecretExchange into the prompt as a test.

Adrian worked on the new installer for GNOME OS, settling on the way the internals (navigation, deciding what page to show next, etc) will work and implementing most of the basic page layouts following the designs (though many of the pages don’t fully work yet).

Alice followed up on her GTK CSS variables work by adding better color functions (rgb() and hsl(), color()). This will allow handling colors in a more flexible way, e.g. deriving colors from other colors and having them look good and replace GTK-specific css functions like alpha() and mix().

Alice also landed a very nice performance fix for GTK spinners, which should make them smoother in apps.

On the Libadwaita front Alice landed a number of style fixes and other bugfixes, and made progress on making the bottom sheets used as part of AdwDialog a standalone public widget.

Sam updated many of the assets throughout Software, refreshing many icons and designing new ones.

Sam also fixed an issue with calendar text readability

Third Party Projects

Philipp announces

Snoop 0.3 was released!

It is now possible to install the Nautilus plugin with a button in the preferences dialog, if you installed it from flathub. A new preview dialog now allows to open a preview of the selected file at the specific line. This comes in handy especially for the flatpak version, which until now used the file launcher portal via Gtk.FileLauncher.

Also the threading and memory management was overhauled, which fixed some random but regular crashes.

You can find the latest version directly on flathub.

DaKnig says

A new YouTube player has appeared! DewDuct is a mobile privacy aware YouTube player for the GNOME platform! Search and play videos, import subscriptions from NewPipe and more 😄 Currently packaged on Alpine Linux (sudo apk add dewduct). This was made for phones in mind! Linux mobile ahoy!

Please note that this is beta software. despite that, it’s quite usable for my personal use and I work on it actively!

Icon designs will be greatly appreciated!

Morphosis ↗

Convert your documents

Jamie Gravendeel says

I have been working on Morphosis, an app that can convert documents from one format to another. It supports Markdown, DOCX, PDF, and a lot more. It has just been released on Flathub!

GNOME Foundation

: After six months of dedicated work and invaluable input from our Board, Staff, and community members, The GNOME Foundation is thrilled to share the draft of our Five-Year Strategic Plan!

This plan is a collaborative effort designed to guide the future of the GNOME Foundation, and we want Your feedback to ensure it truly reflects our collective vision.

Check out the draft and share your thoughts through our survey. Your feedback is crucial to shaping the direction of the Foundation: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/05/23/introducing-the-gnome-foundations-five-year-strategic-plan-draft/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#148 Variable Styles

Fri, 17 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 10 to May 17.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the last week:

Alice landed CSS variables in GTK 🥳

Alice also ported libadwaita to the new CSS variables, added —window-radius, synced AdwComboRow with GTK changes, added a default Adw(Application)Window size, fixed some dialog focus bugs and improved alert dialog styles in addition to various other bug fixes, refactors, and reviews.

Adrian is working on a new installer for GNOME OS. It’s still very early days though, so there isn’t a repo yet.

Felix started investigating how to allow changing passwords of secret-service collections.

Sam worked on the addressing the open questions with the file chooser designs.

Antonio continued work on the Nautilus file chooser, includign some refactoring to minimize code duplication between Nautilus and file chooser and implementing an adaptive file chooser layout following the latest mockups.

Dorota continued working on the global shortcuts portal, creating a prototype portal implementation for testing, finishing the GNOME Settings side of the portal (waiting for maintainer feedback), and addressing feedback to the mutter MR.

Joanie worked on various regression fixes and cleanups in Orca.

Matt worked on text support in the GTK AccessKit implementation. The implementation now supports GtkLabel, GtkInscription, and GtkText-based editable widgets (e.g. GtkEntry), including complex cases like bidirectional text and combining characters (e.g. some emoji). The implementation is now complete enough to support full screen reader access to single-line editable widgets. He also added passive key snooping to Newton’s AT client protocol (involving mutter, newton_consumer, newton_atspi_compat, and Orca), and fixed a number of bugs across the stack to get to the point of being able to record a working demo of the whole Newton stack with the GNOME Podcasts app.

Sam cleaned up the visuals of the floating bar in the file view in Nautilus.

Dhanuka worked on the oo7-daemon Secret Prompt, exposing oo7::crypto::decrypt and oo7::Key::new, and implementing SecretExchange for oo7-daemon.

Andy worked on Online Accounts, including IMAP/SMTP autoconfig, SRV lookups, content-restricted app passwords, WebDAV fixes for file access, and WebDAV fixes for Fastmail/mailbox.org.

Julian continued work on the notification portal implementation, rebased the GNOME Shell notification grouping MR and finished the MR to add new notification properties to GLib.

Jude worked on the GNOME OS migration from ostree to sysupdate, finishing the systemd sysupdate dbus service and implementing the sysupdate plugin in GNOME Software.

Neill worked on security tracking for GNOME OS, opening an MR make use of freedesktop-sdk’s CVE generation utility for reports, add vm and vm-secure reports, and store reports per build branch.

Sophie landed a D-Bus proxy fix for no longer requiring monotonic serials.

Jonas reviewed and merged a GNOME Shell MR to allow for 3+ fingers touchpad gestures, opened an MR to improve the captive portal dialog a bit, updated and landed the GNOME Shell overview spacing improvements, and worked on GNOME Shell docs for new contributors.

Hub worked on fixing the various issues in the USB portal.

Evan worked on fixing remaining issues in TypeScript bindings beta.

We are very happy to announce our partnership with Codethink to make GNOME OS a viable daily driver for QA and development.

Finish the migration from ostree to sysupdate

Add support for parallel branches

Decrease the image size

Tooling for development and testing on immutable OSes

Security tracking for GNOME OS

Allow testing GNOME Merge Requests

OpenQA improvements

You can ready about systemd-sysupdate integration at GNOME OS + systemd-sysupdate.

Neill Whillans reports

Working in collaboration with the GNOME Foundation, through the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), Codethink is currently involved in assisting with the migration from OSTree to systemd-sysupdate for GNOME OS updates.

Our latest blog post describes the benefits of using systemd-sysupdate; the migration work already carried out, and the remaining tasks.

Keep an eye on the Codethink blog where we’ll be sharing progress updates.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Matthias Clasen announces

The 2.42.12 release of gdk-pixbuf is now available.

This release fixes CVE-2022-48622 in the ani loader.

It also includes a change to the default build setup to only build the png, jpeg and tiff loaders by default.

To build other loaders, use the gif and others options:

meson configure -Dgif=true -Dothers=true

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

GTK’s CSS engine now supports custom properties (aka variables) and libadwaita is now making use of them. This means that apps can now use them instead of old named colors. As such, it’s now possible to override them per-widget instead of globally.

The new colors are documented at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/css-variables.html - for the most part it’s just a change in syntax, not in the available colors - since the old colors still need to work we can’t make more drastic changes until 2.0.

.error, .warning and .success style classes now also change the accent color respectively. For example, this means that a selectable label with .error style class will have a red selection as well, instead of blue.

The .opaque style class for buttons has been deprecated - instead, apps can simply use .suggested-action and override the accent color on it. This will also change the focus ring, and similarly, .destructive-action buttons have red focus rings now.

Apps are encouraged to migrate, but the old colors will keep working until 2.0. For example, @accent_color can be replaced with var(--accent-color), note the dashes in the names instead of underscores. See the docs for more info.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Liferooter reports

After almost two years Text Pieces 4.0 has ben released and now available on Flathub. The application was rewritten and redesigned from scratch.

New features and improvements:

Redesigned interface.

Redesigned terminology. Tools are now called actions, arguments are now called parameters.

The application became fully asynchronous and now long-running actions do not freeze the interface and also can be cancelled.

Added support for typed parameters. Now actions can have boolean or numeric parameters, not only string parameters.

Built-in actions are now written in Rust and well-tested, which means that they run faster and less likely to break.

Third Party Projects

Alain says

Planify 4.7.4: New Features and Enhancements for Better Project Management! We are excited to announce the release of version 4.7.4 of Planify, our task and project management application. This update brings significant improvements that will enhance your user experience. Here are the key highlights:

Support for Libadwaita 1.5 and Adaptive Dialogs: All dialogs in Planify are now fully responsive, improving usability on various devices.

Design, Usability, and Performance Improvements: Enhanced interface and smoother performance for a better user experience.

Updated Translations for Hindi and Chinese: More accurate and accessible interface for users speaking these languages.

These are just some of the new features and improvements you’ll find in Planify version 4.7.2. We hope you enjoy using these new tools to make your task and project management even more efficient and productive.

Download the update today and take your productivity to the next level with Planify!

Thank you for being part of the Planify community!

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.39.0 is out:

Phosh now has folder support (to organize your apps) and a night light quick setting. Phoc (with the help of gmobile) now gets the keys that should unblank/unidle the device via hwdb/udev. And the on screen keyboard squeekboard gets new layouts (Portuguese, Slovenian and Turkish (F- and Q-layouts)) as well as improvements to several existing layouts.

There’s more. Check the full details here

Documentation

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

kramo reports

Guidelines on using button rows have been added to the HIG. The widget is used to present actions with lists in some cases where we would have traditionally used regular or pill buttons. Developers are encouraged to take a look at the new guidelines and start using the widget where appropriate.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#147 Secure Keys

Fri, 10 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 03 to May 10.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past week

Andy is making progress on URL handling for apps. We are planning on advancing and using the freedesktop intent-apps proposal which Andy implemented in xdg-desktop-portal.

Felix completed the work to add keyring collections support to Key Rack.

Adrien worked on replacing deprecated and inaccessible GtkTreeView in Disk Usage Analyzer (Baobab)

Adrien worked on replacing deperecated and inaccessible GtkEntryCompletion in Files (Nautilus)

Dhanuka finalized the Keyring implementation in oo7.

Dhanuka landed rekeying support in oo7

Hubert made good progress on the USB portal and the portal is now able to display a permission dialog.

Julian added notifications spec v2 support to GLib GNotification

Julian created a draft merge request for new notification specs against xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

Antonio finished preparing nautilus components for reuse in a new FileChooser window. Ready for review

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

A series of fixes for a GDBus security issue with processes accepting spoofed signal senders has landed. Big thanks to Simon McVittie for putting together the fix (and an impressive set of regression tests), to Alicia Boya García for reporting the issue, and Ray Strode for reviews. https://discourse.gnome.org/t/security-fixes-for-signal-handling-in-gdbus-in-glib/20882

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Ear Tag ↗

Edit audio file tags.

knuxify says

Ear Tag 0.6.1 has been released, bringing a few minor quality-of-life improvements and a switch to the new AdwDialog widgets. You can get the latest release from Flathub.

(Sidenote - I am looking for contributors who would be willing to help with Ear Tag’s testing, bug-fixing and further development, with the goal of potentially finding co-maintainers - if you’re interested, see issue #132 for more details.)

Letterpress ↗

Create beautiful ASCII art

Gregor Niehl says

A new minor release of Letterpress is out! No big UI changes in this 2.1 release, mostly small touches here and there:

Images can now be pasted from the clipboard

Zoom is now more consistent between different factors

The Drag-n-Drop overlay was ~~stolen from Loupe~~ redesigned

The GNOME runtime was updated to version 46, which means the Tips Dialog now uses the new Adw.Dialog, and the About Dialog is now truly an About Dialog

The app has also been translated to Simplified Chinese!

I’m happy to announce that, in the meantime, @FineFindus has joined the project as maintainer, so it’s no longer maintained by a single person.

Third Party Projects

Alain announces

Planify 4.7.2 is here!

We’re excited to announce the release of Planify version 4.7.2, with exciting new features and improvements to help you manage your tasks and projects even more efficiently!

1. Inbox as Independent Project: We’ve completely rebuilt the functionality of Inbox. Now, it’s an independent project with the ability to move your tasks between different synchronized services. The Inbox is the default place to add new tasks, allowing you to quickly get your ideas out of your head and then plan them when you’re ready.

2. Enhanced Task Duplication: When you duplicate a task now, all subtasks and labels are automatically duplicated, saving you time and effort in managing your projects.

3. Duplication of Sections and Projects: You can now easily duplicate entire sections and projects, making it easier to create new projects based on existing structures.

4. Improvements in Quick Add: We’ve improved the usability of Quick Add. Now, the “Create More” option is directly displayed in the user interface, making it easier to visualize and configure your new tasks.

5. Improvements on Small Screens: For those working on devices with small screens, we’ve enhanced the user experience to ensure smooth and efficient navigation.

6. Project Expiry Date: Your project’s expiry date now clearly shows the remaining days, helping you keep track of your deadlines more effectively.

7. Enhanced Tag Panel: The tag panel now shows the number of tasks associated with each tag, rather than just the number of tags, giving you a clearer view of your tagged tasks.

8. Archiving of Projects and Sections: You can now archive entire projects and sections! This feature helps you keep your workspace organized and clutter-free.

9. New Task Preferences View and Task Details Sidebar: Introducing a new task preferences view! You can now customize your task preferences with ease. Additionally, we’ve enabled the option to view task details using the new sidebar view, providing quick access to all the information you need.

10. Translation Updates: We thank @Scrambled777 for the Hindi translation update and @twlvnn for the Bulgarian translation update.

These are just some of the new features and improvements you’ll find in Planify version 4.7.2. We hope you enjoy using these new tools to make your task and project management even more efficient and productive.

Download the update today and take your productivity to the next level with Planify!

Thank you for being part of the Planify community!

Giant Pink Robots! says

Varia download and torrent manager got a pretty big update.

Powerful download scheduling feature that allows the user to specify what times in a week they would like to start or stop downloading, with an unlimited amount of custom timespans.

The ability to import a cookies.txt file exported from a browser to support downloads from restricted areas like many cloud storage services.

Support for remote timestamps if the user wants the downloaded file to have the original timestamp metadata.

Two new filtering options on the sidebar for seeding torrents and failed downloads.

An option to automatically quit the application when all downloads are completed.

An option to start the app in background mode whenever it’s started.

Support for Spanish, Persian and Hindi languages.

Mateus R. Costa announces

bign-handheld-thumbnailer (a Nintendo DS and 3DS files thumbnailer) version 0.9.0 was intended to appear on previous week’s TWIG but due to performance issues had to be postponed.

Version 0.9.0 is notable because it finally introduced CXI and CCI (which were deemed too hard to implement for the original 0.1.0 code) and there were a few misc improvements. However it was pointed that the thumbnailer was loading full games to the memory (official 3DS games can weight up to almost 4 GB) even though there were some suggestions on how to improve that I still failed to initiallly make it work. At that point a COPR repo also became available to help distributed the compiled RPM.

Version 1.0.0 was intended to fix the performance issue once for all, but for more details I recommend reading the blog post about this release at my personal blog: https://www.mateusrodcosta.dev/blog/bign-handheld-thumbnailer-what-i-learned-linux-thumbnailer-rust/

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel reports

Gir.Core 0.5.0 was released. This is one of the biggest releases since the initial release:

A lot of of new APIs are supported (especially records)

Bugs got squashed

The library versions were updated to GNOME SDK 46 and target .NET 8 in addition to .NET 6 and 7

New samples were added

The homepage got updated

Anyone interested bringing C# / F# back into the Linux ecosystem is welcome to come by and try out the new version.

Miscellaneous

Dan Yeaw says

Gvsbuild, the GTK stack for Windows, version 2024.5.0 is out. Along with the latest GTK version 4.14.4, we also released for the first time a pre-built version of the binaries. To set up a development environment for a GTK app on Windows, you can unzip the package, set a couple of environmental variables, and start coding.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#146 Editing Markdown

Fri, 03 May 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 26 to May 03.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past two weeks:

Dorota created a standalone dialog in GNOME Control Center to let users choose/approve/reject when an app requests a Global Shortcuts

Dhanuka landed Add rekeying support for oo7::portal::Keyring in oo7.

Hub implemented the in-progress USB portal in ashpd to demo and test

Sophie landed libglycin: Add C/glib/gir API for glycin crate. This will let language bindings use Glycin. A first version of the C-API is for glycin is available https://sophie-h.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/glycin/c-api/. Via GObject introspections (https://developer.gnome.org/documentation/guidelines/programming/introspection.html) it is also usable with GJS, Python, and Vala.

Antonio is making great progress on using Nautilus as file picker.

Julian finalized the notification portal specs, reviews welcome!

Jonas landed a fix for a long-standing touch bug

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2946

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/5782

Jonas opened a merge request to improve GNOME Shell layout on smaller displays

Adrien opened an MR to replace deprecated and inaccessible GtkEntryCompletion in Nautilus.

The recording for Matt’s talk from Open Source Summit North America is now available, you can watch it on Youtube.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu says

After two years of development, I’m glad to announce that Apostrophe 3.0 is here! Almost every aspect of the application has seen improvements, from the obvious ones like the port to GTK4 and the refined interface, to several improvements under the hood. Among the new features are:

A new toolbar so you don’t have to remember markdown syntax

A more secure approach when opening and rendering files

Autoindentation and autocompletion for lists and braces

An improved Hemingway mode

The document stats will also show stats for the selected text

You can download it in Flathub

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench 46.1 is out!

See what’s new and details at https://blog.sonny.re/workbench-46-1

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

schmiddi announces

Railway version 2.5.0 was released. It contains updates to the GNOME 46 runtime, as well as the addition of the PKP provider (and removal of the INSA provider due to the API failing to search for locations). It furthermore now tries to query the remarks of journeys in the system-language, fixes a crash for the Spanish translation of the app and provides a fix for the RMV provider throwing an error.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

lwildberg reports

Last month Reuben Thomas completed his port of Enchant to Vala! Enchant is a spellchecking library also used in GNOME. Read the blog post about it and also his experience on porting another project (Zile) to Vala here.

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield announces

The Tracker SPARQL developers are very happy to welcome rachle08 and Demigod who will be joining the team as part of Google Summer of Code, working on a project to add a web-based query editor and generally improve the developer experience.

Sam Thursfield reports

In Tracker SPARQL, Carlos Garnacho worked around a non-backwards compatible change released in SQLite 3.45.3. This change causes errors that look like ambiguous column name: ROWID (0). The fix will be in the next stable release - see Discourse for more details.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

Automeris naranja has made headway into porting gnome-software to the shiny new AdwDialog (and other related new libadwaita APIs)

Third Party Projects

José reports

I’ve released my first app on Flathub! Mingle is a simple app to play with Google’s Emoji Kitchen and copy them to your clipboard. It is written in Vala and has been my little pet project these past few months as a learning exercise.

slomo reports

The GStreamer GTK4 video sink got support for directly importing video frames as dmabufs on Linux when using GStreamer 1.24 / GTK 4.14, in addition to the already existing support for importing OpenGL textures or video frames in normal system memory. This new feature is available in version 0.12.4 of the sink plugin.

This is especially useful for video players using hardware decoders or applications that display a video stream from a camera (via v4l2 or pipewire), and allows side-stepping the GL/Vulkan rendering of the video frames inside GTK under certain conditions and let the composition be done by the Wayland compositor or even directly pass the dmabufs to the GPU kernel driver. Doing so would reduce GPU utilization and by that frees resources for other tasks and reduces power consumption. See Matthias’ blog post on the GTK blog for more details about the dmabuf and graphics offloading support in GTK.

Alain reports

Planify 4.7 is Here! Discover the New Features and Improvements We’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Planify 4.7! This version brings a host of exciting enhancements and new features that will make your task and project management experience smoother and more efficient than ever. Let’s take a look at what we’ve added:

Advanced Filtering Function Now in Planify, you can filter your tasks within a project based on priority, due date, and assigned tags. Take control of your tasks like never before!

Custom Sorting in Today View Personalize the Today view by sorting your tasks the way you prefer. Make your day more productive by organizing tasks your way!

Instant Task Details With our new task detail view in the sidebar, you can quickly access all relevant task information while in the Board view. Keep your workflow uninterrupted!

Efficient Management of Completed Tasks Now, deleting completed tasks is easier than ever. Keep your workspace clean and organized with just a few clicks!

Attach Files to Your Tasks Never lose track of important files related to your tasks. With the file attachment feature, keep all relevant information in one place.

Celebrate Achievements with Sound Want a fun way to celebrate your achievements? Now you can play a sound when completing a task. Make every accomplishment even more satisfying!

Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements We’ve addressed a number of errors, from project duplication to issues with animation when adding subtasks. Additionally, we’ve updated translations in various languages, including Hindi, Bulgarian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.

Download the latest version of Planify on Flathub now and take your task management to the next level! For any feedback, suggestions or bug reports, please file an issue at the Github issue tracker.

Link Dupont says

Version 0.2.2 of Damask is here. This release has been in the works for a while, so contains a lot of bug fixes and UI improvements.

Wallhaven: correctly set aspect ratio in search query

Reset the refresh timer after a manual refresh

Wallhaven: refresh wallpaper when preferences change

Refresh wallpaper preview only when a preview is available

Set active source by selecting the row in the source list

NASA: rename row title to “NASA Astronomy”

Sort source list alphabetically

Add a setting to disable automatic refresh

Improve support for a default “no source” application state

Fix preview image dimensions

Remove the “manual” source (disable automatic refresh instead)

NASA: replace user-defined API key with a value supplied at compilation

Unsplash: replace user-defined API key with a value supplied at compilation

Wallhaven: add explanatory text for the API key field

EarthView: update photo source

Slideshow: allow any image type when filtering files

Download it on Flathub today!

Gameeky 0.6.4 is now available on Flathub. This new release brings minor fixes for running Gameeky on other platforms and it’s now fully available in Brazilian Portuguese 🇧🇷, thanks to Rafael Fontenelle. As a result of Rafael efforts, the offline documentation can now be translated using regular gettext-based tools and therefore much easier to do so.

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.8 has been released.

Retrieving the log commits and calculating the graph is now much faster. Opening up the log for, i.e. the gnome-shell repo, will now only take some seconds, if “Show all branches” is checked it will take roughly 15 seconds. Before it took roughly 1 minute 40 seconds, depending on your hardware of course.

There is now also a merge dialog available to merge a branch or commit into the current head. It is also possible to start a merge directly from the log context menu.

For easier usage, a help output has been added to both the turtle_cli and the turtlevcs python package, a bash completion file has been added and an emblem dialog has been added to the settings dialog.

And there are many more minor fixes and tweaks, see the full changelog.

Mahjongg ↗

A solitaire version of the classic Eastern tile game.

Mat announces

Mahjongg has received a whole slew of improvements in the last few weeks:

Complete dark/light mode support with separate backgrounds for each tileset

Faster loading times (almost instant, compared to the previous ~5 seconds for some tile layouts)

Moved tile layout switcher to the main menu, for easier access

Ported to newer GTK/libadwaita widgets, such as Gtk.ColumnView and Adw.Dialog

All known bugs addressed (issue tracker is empty!)

These changes are not released yet, but are available for testing in the nightly Flatpak package:
flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Mahjongg.Devel

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Here comes ~~the bride~~ Fractal 7, with extended encryption support and improved accessibility. Server-side key backup and account recovery have been added, bringing greater security. Third-party verification has received some bug fixes and improvements. Amongst the many accessibility improvements, navigability has increased, especially in the room history. But that’s not all we’ve been up to in the past three months:

Messages that failed to send can now be retried or discarded.

Messages can be reported to server admins for moderation.

Room details are now considered complete, with the addition of room address management, permissions, and room upgrade.

A new member menu appears when clicking on an avatar in the room history. It offers a quick way to do many actions related to that person, including opening a direct chat with them and moderating them.

Pills are clickable and allow to directly go to a room or member profile.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.

It is available right now on Flathub.

We are already hard at work for our next release, so if you want to give us a hand you can start by looking at our Newcomer issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room.

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) announces

Glycin is gaining support for other programming languages. Glycin is a library that features sandboxed and extendable image loading and is used by Image Viewer. It is written in Rust and so far only provided a Rust API. As part of my work for GNOME STF, it has now gained initial support for being used with other languages. The basis for this is the C-API. Via GObject introspections it is now also usable with GJS, Python, and Vala (untested).

The advantages of Glycin over the well-proven GdkPixbuf are improved security, more reliable and dynamically adjusted memory usage limits, and reliable termination of loading processes. Currently, the drawbacks include a slightly increased overhead and missing support for anything but Linux.

Google Summer of Code

Pedro Sader Azevedo announces

We are happy to announce that GNOME was assigned eight slots for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year!

GSoC is a program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. A number of long term GNOME developers are former GSoC interns, making the program a very valuable entry point for new members in our community.

In 2024, we will be mentoring the following projects:

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen announces

The GNOME Asia 2024 Call for Locations is open! If you are interested in hosting this year’s conference in your city make sure to submit an intent to bid by May 15, and a final proposal by June 6. More details about how to submit a proposal can be found here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/04/30/call-for-gnome-asia-2024-location-proposals/

The GUADEC 2025 Call for Locations is also open! For next year’s conference, we’re accepting bids from anywhere in the world. If you would like to bring GUADEC to your city make sure to submit an intent to bid today (May 3) and your full proposal by May 31. More details can be found here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/04/18/call-for-guadec-2025-location-proposals/

Registration is open for GUADEC 2024. This year’s conference takes place on July 19-24 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Let us know if you’ll be attending, remotely or in person, by registering on guadec.org. For anyone attending in person, we’ve organized a social outing to a Colorado Rockies baseball game! You can learn more and register to attend here: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/page/331-colorado-rockies-baseball-game

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#145 Quality Over Quantity

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 19 to April 26.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Matthias Clasen says

GTK 4.15.0 is out.

This release changes the default GSK renderer to be Vulkan, on Wayland. Other platforms still use ngl.

The intent of this change is to get wider testing and verify that Vulkan drivers are good enough for us to rely on. If significant problems show up, we will revert this change for 4.16.

You can still override the renderer choice using the GSK_RENDERER environment variable.

This release also changes font rendering settings by introducing a new high-level gtk-font-rendering settings which gives GTK more freedom to decide on font rendering.

You can still use the low-level font-related settings by changing the new property to ‘manual’.

If you are building GTK for a distribution, notice that some deprecated build options have been removed.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

FineFindus reports

I’ve released a new version of Hieroglyphic. This version features a new app icon by Tobias Bernard, refines the UI and improves the symbol recognition speed. You can download it from Flathub.

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl reports

This week we released version 1.8 of Graphs. This release mostly focuses on background changes to the code, but there’s still a number of nice quality of life changes that are interesting to highlight:

Graphs now has full support for touchscreen devices

Equation handling has been improved. Now it is no longer needed to add a * symbol between every single parameter upon multiplication, instead an equation such as y = 4sin(2x + pi) is handled without any issues.

Support has been added for additional trigonometric functions and their inverses, such as sinh and cosh. Now the vast majority of trig functions should work without any issues.

Help has been ported to Yelp, and can now be accesed directly from the app. This documentation is still a work in progress and will be expanded upon throughout this release cycle.

There is now a warning when editing a style with poor contrast between the labels and background colours.

Numerical entries throughout the application now indicate whenever an invalid input is given.

Multiple bug fixes were implemented, especially with regard to the equation handling in the curve fitting dialog.

Many different improvements have been added to the translation process such as more translatable strings, and added context to strings. Thanks for the feedback from the translation team :)

As always, the latest release can be found on Flathub. For any feedback, suggestions or bug reports, please file an issue at the GitLab issue tracker.

GNOME Foundation

ramcq announces

The board of the GNOME Foundation is pleased to share an update about finances, strategy, fundraising, and our exciting plans to bring more diverse and inclusive representation into how the Foundation is governed and can best support and promote the GNOME community. We’re adding two seats to the board from the upcoming election which starts next month, and are interested to speak with prospective candidates about what’s involved and how they can help.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#144 Better Printing

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 12 to April 19.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past week

We welcome Felix in the team 🎉. Felix is helping towards making Key Rack a viable password manager for the GNOME desktop.

We welcome Adrien in the team 🎉. Adrien is working on the initiative to stop using TreeView to improve accessibility.

Sophie started C bindings for glycin. It’s possible to get a GdkTexture for an image.

Sophie opened an MR to test bst cargo git with GNOME

Sophie fixed an issue in xdg-dbus-proxy that affected threaded DBus libraries like godbus or zbus.

Dorota is making good progress on global shortcuts portal support.

Send trigger when a key accelerator is deactivated (Mutter, review welcome)

Draf: Add globalshortcuts editing (GNOME Settings)

Joanie made tons of code cleanup in Orca - as usual - and

Improved Braille support 1 2

Converted WebKitGTK support to be based on the web script

Tobias added colorful illustrations to the GNOME Human Design Guidelines

Matt started working on AccessKit integration in GTK which will bring support for the new accessibiliity architecture and potentially a11y support on macOS and Window.

Matt prepared his talk “Modernizing Accessibility for Desktop Linux” he gave at Open Source Summit North American in Seattle. Slides available and the recording should be published soon, we will make sure to twig it.

Tobias refreshed the command search/palette concept.

Sam submitted a refreshed concept for the global shortcuts design.

Sam redesigned the network proxy settings.

Sam made a website for Orca, it’s now live at https://orca.gnome.org/.

Antonio worked on using Nautilus as the FileChooser portal on GNOME. He’s already wrote the backofice of the portal impelementation.

Julian notifications portal v2 work is ready for review! https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1298

Andy released GOA 3.50.1, with backported fixes for WebDAV, OAuth 2.0 URI handling & PKCE: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/tags/3.50.1

Alice implemented buttons rows un libadwaita https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1086

Evan finished the v4 beta of ts-for-gir - the new TypeScript bindings

Georges landed better printing support in Flatpak / portal

xdg-desktop-portal

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

Felix landed tons of code improvements in Key Rack

Dhanuka released gcr 4.3.0

Tom submitted a pull request to implement a dbus service for systemd sysupdate.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

libadwaita now has AdwButtonRow, implementing another missing pattern for boxed lists. Additionally, there’s a .boxed-list-separate style class now, that has each row in its own card with spacing between them, and AdwPreferencesGroup:separate-rows to toggle it for preferences groups

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

Dawid Osuchowski added app icons in notifications from GNOME Software (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/merge_requests/1964)

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now has dark mode variants for the default renderings (when no line color is available from a public transit provider)

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Podcasts ↗

Podcast app for GNOME.

Julian 🍃 announces

Podcasts 0.7.1 is out and can be found on Flathub. Most contributions come from nee. The highlights are:

Replace add button popover with a dedicated page

Add streaming support

Add additional keyboard shortcuts

Several fixes and performance improvements

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

This week @danyeaw released Gaphor 2.25.0.

The biggest update is a UI refresh: Gaphor’s UI now better follows the Adwaita style (feedback is welcome). The Property editor has be revised, so it can be used both from diagrams and the model browser. You can read the full list of changes in our ChangeLog. Builds for Windows, macOS and Linux Flatpak are available from the website and FlatHub.

Dialect ↗

Translate between languages.

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

We have merged support for the free DeepL API in Dialect. This resolves the most popular and oldest provider request in the app.

Third Party Projects

Sonny says

Retro; the customizable clock widget is now available on Flathub in v2

https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Retro

This new release comes with

Support both 12h and 24h clock format. It follows GNOME Date & Time preference while being sandboxed thanks to libportal new API for the settings portal.

Energy usage has been improved by using a more efficient method to get the time and by making use of the magic GtkWindow.suspended property to stop updating the clock when the window is not visible.

Better support for round clocks. The new GTK renderer fixed the visual glitch on transparent corners caused by large border radius. Retro now restores window dimensions and disables the border radius on maximize to make it look good, no matter the shape.

Controls have been moved to a floating header bar to stay out of the way and prevent interference with customizations.

Mahjongg ↗

A solitaire version of the classic Eastern tile game.

Mat reports

Mahjongg 3.40.1 has been released, and is available on Flathub.

This release fixes a few regressions in the GTK 4 port. Most notably, the game no longer freezes after finishing a round, and the tile layout can be changed when using a language other than English.

I will also maintain Mahjongg from now on. If you want to help out with development, e.g. replace deprecated widgets, feel free to submit a MR on GitLab.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

📣 👀 Fractal 7.rc 🆕 🎉

Account recovery, introduced during this cycle, could lead to an unclear situation where it was still incomplete even after successfully going through the process. We added some explanations on how to solve this. Thanks to anyone who tried it in the beta and provided us with feedback!

After fixing a focus issue upstream in GtkListView, we got rid of more focus issues in our widgets. That should make the room history completely accessible with keyboard navigation.

Third party verification, that happens in a direct chat, was partly broken as the banner about an ongoing verification was not showing up anymore. The culprit was found and we took that opportunity to improve the security instructions. Along with this bugfix, a coat of polish has been applied.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 7.

We always welcome any help we can get, come ask for guidance in our Matrix room.

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

Flatseal 2.2.0 is out. This new release comes with refined visuals, navigation and adaptive behavior, much more streamlined with the latest GNOME release. It also comes with bug fixes for edge cases involving global overrides and Greek translation by Athanasios Karachalios.

Documentation

Arjan announces

The PyGObject Documentation now has a new place at https://pygobject.gnome.org. This URL is easier to remember (and discover). Over time we also want to bring API docs and user guides/tutorials to this site, so we have one central place for everything Python.

Arjan says

The GNOME API docs for Python over at https://amolenaar.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/pygobject-docs/ have had a revamp over the past week. Thanks to Rafael Mardojai CM, property names are now properly presented. Properties and signals are also cross-referenced in the docs. Method signatures have been improved, based on the latest version of the pygobject-stubs project.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#143 Circle Updates

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 05 to April 12.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

After a lot of preparation, GLib has finally achieved an OpenSSF Best Practices ‘passing’ badge, which certifies that it follows a number of development and security best practices — see https://www.bestpractices.dev/en/projects/6011

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix reports

It has finally happened! The long awaited major update of Fragments is now available, which includes many exciting new features.

The most important addition is support for torrent files. It is now possible to select the files you want to download from a torrent. The files can be searched and sorted, individual files can be opened directly from Fragments.

Further new features:

Added torrents can now be searched

In addition to magnet links, *.torrent links in the clipboard are now also recognized

Prevent system from going to sleep when torrents are active

New torrents can be added via drag and drop

Automatic trashing of *.torrent files after adding them

Stop downloads when a metered network gets detected

Improvements:

When controlling remote sessions, the local Transmission daemon no longer gets started

Torrents are automatically restarted if an incorrect location has been fixed

Torrents can now also be added via CLI

Clipboard toast notification is no longer displayed multiple times

Reduced CPU/resource consumption through adaptive polling interval

Improved accessibility of the user interface

Modernized user interface through the use of new Adwaita widgets

Update from Transmission 3.0.5 to 4.0.5

More information can be found in the announcement blog post.

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Fina reports

Pika Backup 0.7.2 was released. It fixes a crash on the schedule page. It also resolves an issue with pre- and post-backup scripts being unable to send desktop notifications.

We have already made lots of progress towards 0.8 which will focus on code maintainability and UI refinements. You can support Pika’s development on Open Collective.

Blanket ↗

Improve focus and increase your productivity by listening to different sounds.

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

Blanket 0.7.0 has been released and is available on Flathub.

This new release features a redesigned user interface and uses the latest GNOME design patterns.

Other changes include:

Inhibit suspension when playing

Pause playback if the system enters power saver mode

MPRIS: Implement Play, Pause and Stop methods in addition to PlayPause

MPRIS: Implement Next and Prev methods for navigating presets

Updated Pink Noise sample

Changed train sound

Added preference to always start on pause

Third Party Projects

Krafting announces

Hello! This week I released SemantiK. It’s a word-game where you need to find a secret word, similar to Cémantix or Semantle. The default language model is in French, but you can use and import your own !

It is available on Flathub

xjuan says

New Cambalache stable version released! The app ui is now made with Cambablache and Gtk 4! Read more about v 0.90.0 at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/04/06/cambalache-0-90-0-released/

alextee announces

The GTK4/libadwaita-based digital audio workstation Zrythm has released its last beta version v1.0.0-beta.6.7.32 in preparation for a release candidate!

More info on our website. Zrythm is also available on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido reports

Phosh 0.38.0 is out:

Phosh now handles devices with rounded display corners better and supports count and progress indicators in lock screen launcher entries. On the compositor side we now handle always-on-top and move-to-corner keybindings and the on screen keyboard squeekboard got a whole bunch of layout improvements.

There’s more. Check the full details here

Events

mwu reports

TWIG-Bot We are ramping up for GUADEC 2024 and sponsorships are still available. We made it easier this year and put the different opportunities online! Click here for more info: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/registrations/212/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#142 Portalled Nautilus

Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 29 to April 05.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the last two weeks

We are thrilled to announce António is joining the team. António is a Nautilus (GNOME Files) maintainer and will work on a FileChooser portal implementation with Nautilus.

Georges opened a draft to support printing in WebKitGTK using the Print portal. This allows Epiphany / GNOME Web and other apps to support printing in their Flatpak configuration.

Georges added a new feature to the Print portal, to let apps tell which file formats they support. xdg-desktop-portal and xdg-desktop-portal-gnome.

Adrian finished the 1st iteration of his work to make homed more secure when used in combination with desktop environments.

Adrian implemented homed “secure locking” in GDM and GNOME Shell in which the home dir is re-encrypted and the key is evicted from memory.

Evan released the first beta release of TypeScript bindings for GNOME; see his individual update below.

Andy improved WebDAV interoperability in GNOME Online accounts

goabackend: fixes for generic WebDAV providers

goabackend: add DAV short-path for fastmail.com

Fixes for mailbox.org DAV

Enable PKCE/S256 code challenges for remaining providers

Sam is investigating UI issues with Microsoft 365 in GNOME Online Accounts.

Sam made initial mockups for an OS installer.

Sam updated the mockups for global shortcuts.

Dorota got the xdg portal GlobalShortcuts working. There is still a lot of work with integration and UI but this is a great start and we are confident we can ship it in GNOME 47. See her Mutter and GNOME Shell branches. She started submitting portions for reviews such as Send trigger when a key accelerator is deactivated.

Joanie added an InputEventManager to Orca to consolidate logic throughout the codebase.

Sophie investigated missing parts to get Key Rack to feature parity with Seahorse. By the way, we are hiring a Rust + GTK developer to work on Key Rack, don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Sophie added support for mirroring git repos to cargo bst plugin.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Junction ↗

Lets you choose the application to open files and links.

Sonny says

Junction 1.8 is available on Flathub.

Junction pops up automatically when you open a file or link to let you choose which app to open with.

Highlights of this version:

Better portrait/mobile support

Better touch support, long press brings desktop actions

Fix an issue with certain encoded characters in urls

Use GNOME 46

The app is now verified on Flathub and has a “High quality app data” rating

Miscellaneous

ewlsh reports

We are thrilled to announce the first beta release of new TypeScript definitions for GNOME! These bindings combine the efforts of ts-for-gir and gi.ts into a unified project under the gjsify organization. Since we announced this effort at GUADEC 2023, JumpLink and @ewlsh:gnome.org have been working continuously to identify areas for improvement in the definitions and how best to merge these two sprawling codebases. This fusion marks a significant milestone in our journey towards enhancing the TypeScript ecosystem for GJS and GObject-based libraries. Our collaboration shows the power of community-driven development and the remarkable achievements that can be realized when we join forces towards a common objective :) We’d also like to thank the STF initiative for sponsoring some time to explore TypeScript in GNOME. We’re excited to see what the future holds for JavaScript and TypeScript in GNOME! The new bindings have been published on NPM with the next tag and are ready for testing. We’ve tried to minimize breaking changes wherever possible and hopefully with new, advanced types the bindings “just work” 💙 Stay tuned for documentation updates and more!

JumpLink announces

Initial TypeScript types @girs/gnome-shell for GNOME Shell 46 released on NPM. Nice to see new contributions from individuals developing their own extensions and utilizing this project :)

Changelog since the first beta release: https://github.com/gjsify/gnome-shell/compare/45.0.0-beta9…main

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#141 Sleek Documentation

Fri, 29 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 22 to March 29.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week Biblioteca was accepted into GNOME Circle. Biblioteca lets you browse and read GNOME documentation wherever you are in a sleek and convenient way. Congratulations!

https://flathub.org/apps/app.drey.Biblioteca

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina reports

Warp 0.7 has been released with QR Code scanning support 📸. This feature allows to initiate a file transfer just by scanning a code on the receiving device. Thanks a lot to GNOME Camera for providing the widgets for a modern camera stack. 🦀

Obfuscate ↗

Censor your private information on any image.

Obfuscate 0.0.10 is out. The app is now adaptive and shows a confirmation when closing the app with unsaved changes.

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

Newsflash 3.2 is out. Some highlights are:

automatically scraping articles so you can read them offline

editing feed URLs

some performance improvements

You can read more here: https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2024/03/25/newsflash-3-2/

Déjà Dup Backups ↗

A simple backup tool.

Déjà Dup Backups 46.beta is out. This adds modern Adwaita dialogs, now uses rclone for cloud support (rather than disparate Python libraries for each service), and adds various smaller UI improvements. Install the beta from flathub-beta (flatpak install flathub-beta org.gnome.DejaDup) and please report any issues. Thanks!

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu reports

Since rendering random documents can be dangerous, this week I added a security feature to Apostrophe. It’ll offer the option to load potentially dangerous files with html and javascript deactivated. I also landed some patches that will unblock the last remaining issue that was preventing a GTK4 release: spellchecking. Hopefully I’ll be able to draft a stable release very soon. In the meantime betatesting is more than welcome. An updated build is already available on flathub-beta

Third Party Projects

d-k-bo announces

This week Televido received an update to use the new adaptive dialogs that were introduced in GNOME 46.

Televido is an app to access German-language public broadcasting live streams and archives based on APIs provided by the MediathekView project.

Since my first post here, it also got better mobile support, it supports downloading media using an external downloader such as Parabolic and the app is now available in English, German, Dutch and French.

ghani1990 says

Planify continues to evolve and enhance its user experience by introducing several exciting new features this week:

1. Quick Search Filters:

Users can now efficiently filter tasks by various criteria directly from the Quick Search bar. These filters include:

“Tomorrow”: To view tasks scheduled for the next day.

“Untagged”: For tasks without specific tags.

“Repeat”: To manage recurring tasks.

“Anytime”: For tasks with no flexible deadlines.

2. Completed View in Sidebar:

Users can easily access and review their completed tasks, streamlining the process of tracking progress.

These updates enhance Planify’s overall functionality and usability, making it an even more powerful and versatile tool for efficient task management.

Additionally, Planify has addressed several bugs and made performance improvements to ensure a smoother experience for users. 🚀📅🔍

Multiplication Puzzle 14.0 is out with modern Adwaita dialogs.

Tuba ↗

Browse the Fediverse.

Evangelos “GeopJr” Paterakis announces

Tuba 0.7 is now available, with many new features and bug fixes!

✨ Highlights:

Filter handling and editing

User and Post reporting

Ported dialogs to AdwDialogs

Tracking parameter stripping on paste

Syntax highlighting

Mutes & Blocks page

Recently used emojis in the Custom Emoji Chooser

Unread Announcements and Unreviewed Follow Requests banners

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Spring is here in Fractal land. Birds chirping, flowers blooming, and a new beta for you to try!

Staff’s picks for Fractal 7.beta:

Encryption support has been extended, with server-side key backup and account recovery.

Messages that failed to send can now be retried or discarded.

Messages can be reported to server admins for moderation.

Room details are now considered complete, with the addition of room address management, permissions, and version upgrade.

A new member menu appears when clicking on an avatar in the room history. It offers a quick way to do many actions related to that person, including opening a direct chat with them and moderating them.

Pills are clickable and allow to directly go to a room or member profile.

Many more improvements on the accessibility front, for better navigability with a screen reader.

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

As always, you can try to fix one of our issues. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Miscellaneous

barthalion reports

To improve transparency, Flathub now shows an explicit “unverified” badge for community-maintained packages.

Meanwhile, I’ve been working on improving the configuration of our content delivery network. Mythic Beasts donated a new caching server, which will reduce the load on the origin server. I have enabled shielding in Fastly to further improve the cache hit ratio. I’m also looking into configuring Fastly to use segmented caching to resolve issues with installation of large applications.

psauberz announces

The Sovereign Tech Fund is designing a pilot program for a fellowship to support open source maintainers working on open digital infrastructure in the public interest. They are asking for input from maintainers in a survey on their blog. If you are a maintainer, please take ten minutes to respond to the survey by Sunday, 7 April 2024.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#140 Forty-six!

Fri, 22 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 15 to March 22.

This week we released GNOME 46!

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, such as a new global file search, an enhanced Files app, improved online accounts with OneDrive support, remote login via RDP, improved accessibility, experimental variable refresh rate (VRR) support and so much more! See the GNOME 46 release notes and developer notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site will already be aware of some of the new features. If you’d like to follow the development of GNOME 47 (Fall 2024), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Besides helping with the GNOME 46 release (congrats everyone!); here are the highlights for the past week

This week we welcome Jerry, Tom, Neill and Jude of Codethink into the team.

Jerry and Tom got started with finishing sysupdate: Implement dbus service. This will allow apps such as GNOME Software, KDE Discover, … to support systemd-sysupdate

Neill got started making GNOME openQA more robust with

Needle cleanup script, for unused/expired needles

GNOME Shell sometimes fails to start

Julian implemented 9 new properties for notifications in xdg-desktop-portal such as icon (via fd), sound, actions, markup-body, …

Julian worked on making notifications in xdg-desktop-portal forward compatible by allowing unknown properties.

Dorota is working on an interface for global shortcuts in Mutter/GNOME Shell suitable for the global shortcuts portal (except listing shortcuts)

Dhanuka has been testing the Rust DBus Secret Service provider implementation in oo7 to replace GNOME Keyring

Jonas made improvements in audio integration #25, #26

Alice resumed work on CSS custom properties / variables support in GTK; animations are now supported.

Andy made a protoype to allow opening URLs with apps. The goal is for an app such as GNOME Maps to advertise support for and handle openstreetmap.org or google.com/maps URLs.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Christian Hergert added support for sub-millisecond timeouts in GLib using ppoll() (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3958)

Philip Withnall reports

Sudhanshu Tiwari has made a start on porting some of the GIO documentation comments to gi-docgen in https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3969

Emmanuele Bassi reports

JSON-GLib, the library for parsing and generating JSON data, is now capable of strict compliance with the JSON specification. To avoid breaking backward compatibility, strictness must be explicitly enabled by setting the JsonParser:strict property, or using the --strict option for the json-glib-validate command line tool. To enforce strict compliance, JSON-GLib now includes a whole JSON conformance test suite.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Sophie (she/her) announces

Decibels has been accepted into the GNOME Incubator. The GNOME incubation process is for apps that are designated to be accepted into GNOME Core or GNOME Development Tools if they reach the required maturity.

Decibels is a basic audio player that is supposed to fill the gap of GNOME currently not having a Core app that is designed to open single audio files. The incubation progress will be tracked in this issue.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Tobias Bernard reports

Railway has been accepted into GNOME Circle. It allows you to easily look up travel information across rail networks and borders without having to use multiple different websites. Congratulations!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

Workbench 46 is out on Flathub! Here are the highlights

Everybody is excited about them so I’ll start by saying you can try libadwaita 1.5 adaptive dialogs with the new “Dialog” and “Message Dialogs” demos in the Library.

Workbench now shows inline diagnostics for Rust and Python.

A new Library demo “Snapshot” was added to demonstrate one of GTK4 coolest feature.

26 additional demos have been ported to Python

5 additional demos have been ported to Vala

The GNOME 46 release notes includes all the changes between Workbench 45 and 46.

Thank you to all contributors

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Brage Fuglseth reports

Happy release week! Like many other apps, Fretboard has been updated to the GNOME 46 platform, taking advantage of the many platform improvements that have happened this cycle. It also recently gained the ability to notify you when there are no available variants of a chord in its internal chord set, prompting you to reach out and help improve it.

As always, you can get Fretboard on Flathub.

Third Party Projects

robert.mader announces

Livi 0.1.0 is now available on Flathub. Bundled with Gstreamer 1.24 and build against the GTK 4.14 it is the first desktop-targeting app to enable zero-copy Video playback by default in the Wayland ecosystem. Doing so enables highly power-efficient playback, closing the gap to other OSs or embedded environments. We expect quite a few people to hit driver bugs in the beginning - so in order to pave the way for other apps to pick up the technology, please help testing on you devices :)

Alain reports

Planify has received several updates this week, including bug fixes and design enhancements.

As part of the effort to apply for Gnome Circle, the user interface has been updated with new icons, design elements, and typography.

What’s new:

Performance of synchronization with Nextcloud has been improved.

It’s now possible to select the Pinboard view as the homepage.

You can now add a task to the Pinboard view from the contextual menu.

Various reported bugs have been fixed.

Akshay Warrier reports

Biblioteca 1.3 is now available on Flathub!

This release comes with several additions and improvements such as:

Added docs for GLib/Gio/GObject

Added support for web content

Improved searching UI

Added support for keyboard navigation in the sidebar

Added zoom buttons to the primary menu

Added shortcuts to view open tabs and toggle sidebar

Markus Göllnitz announces

Rumour has it there was a recent release of Usage – complete with ~~leaked~~ release screenshots.

So far, It looks like, it features an indicator for applications running in background.

Apparently, it is even displaying individual Android applications when you run Waydroid, now. That is something.

On top of it, I would say, the split of the performance view into processor and memory and the subsequent use of flat header bars works quite well.

Find it at a distro near you.

FineFindus says

I’m happy to announce the first release of Hieroglyphic, a forked and updated version of TeX-Match, which helps to find LaTeX symbols by drawing them. It’s available for download on Flathub.

Kooha ↗

Elegantly record your screen.

Dave Patrick says

Kooha 2.3 is now released on Flathub! While there are no groundbreaking new features, this release is focused more on fixes and quality-of-life improvements.

The following features and fixes are the highlights:

The area selector window is now resizable, making selecting an area more flexible.

The previously selected area is now remembered across sessions.

The current video format and FPS configurations are now visible in the main view.

The recording done notification now shows the duration and size of the recording.

Progress is now shown while flushing the recording.

Recording in stereo rather than in mono is now more preferred.

Audio stutters on long recordings are now properly fixed.

The preferences dialog is now more descriptive and provides a more convenient FPS selection box.

Incorrect recording orientation on certain compositors is now fixed.

For a more detailed changelog, check out the full release notes.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi reports

Flare version 0.14.1 was released. This release includes updating the dialogs to the new adwaita adaptive dialogs. Furthermore, we also have a new “new channel” dialog and channel information dialog. This release also contains a hotfix for newly linked devices not working with groups and another minor fix for an error in certain groups.

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

Sonny announces

Blueprint; the markup language and tooling for GTK is out in version 0.12

Here are the highlights ✨

Brand-new formatter to keep files tidy

AdwAlertDialog are supported

Emit warnings for deprecated features in GTK, GLib, etc

New IDE integration features

document symbols

“Go to definitions”

Code action for importing missing namespace

We also celebrate 70 applications on Flathub built with Blueprint.

Events

Deepesha Burse reports

The deadline for the GUADEC 2024 Call for Participation is closing soon! This year’s conference will take place in Denver, Colorado, from July 19th to July 24th and we encourage all interested contributors, speakers, and participants to submit their proposals before the deadline on 24th March. This is an excellent opportunity to share your insights, experiences, and ideas with the GNOME community and contribute to the success of GUADEC 2024. Please visit guadec.org to submit your proposals. If you have any questions or need assistance, feel free to reach out to the organizing committee at guadec@gnome.org. We look forward to receiving your submissions and seeing you at GUADEC 2024 in Denver and online!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#139 Just Before the Release

Fri, 15 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 08 to March 15.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) initiative, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights for the past week:

We have been working hard on helping with and solving last minute issues for GNOME 46. This is the first GNOME release since we started the GNOME STF initiative and are very excited about our work rolling to millions of users.

Sophie opened a PR to support git dependencies in the Cargo buildstream plugin. This will make it much easier to work with GNOME core applications written in Rust.

Julian drafted images/sound support for notification portal V2.

libportal

xdg-desktop-portal

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

Matt now has an end to end prototype for the Wayland-native accessibility stack he’s been working on. He published an update and instructions to run it.

Jonas landed New gestures (part 2): Introduce ClutterGesture. This is one of the building blocks present in the GNOME Shell mobile project that we are working on upstreaming.

Alice released libadwaita 1.5

Sam made a website for Orca to replace the wiki page.

This week we welcome and thank Codethink for partnering with us. Codethink has been a long time supporter of the GNOME project and will be helping us improve developer and quality assurance tooling; with a focus on immutable / image based operating systems.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

Libadwaita 1.5.0 is out! See the announcement blog post for details

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) announces

Daniel Garcia Moreno submitted several merge requests to GNOME Calendar that allowed us to close 25 timezone-related issues! All of these changes are expected to land in GNOME 46.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/370

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/372

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/373

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-calendar/-/merge_requests/375

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Switcheroo ↗

Convert and manipulate images.

Khaleel Al-Adhami says

Switcheroo now supports exporting multiple images into one PDF file in update 2.1.0!

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Sophie (she/her) announces

Pika Backup 0.7.1 is out. It fixes a bug that prevented backup processes from lowering their CPU priority. A UI issue with scheduled backups was fixed as well.

If you missed the 0.7 release because we missed posting it on TWIG, you can learn more about it in my blog post. There is also a great video by Dreams of Autonomy that gives a wonderful introduction to Pika Backup.

You can support Pika’s development on Open Collective. Note that we are not affected by the Open Collective Foundation shutting down since our financial host is the Open Source Collective. The same is the case for almost all other open source projects. So please continue supporting them.

Impression ↗

Create bootable drives.

Khaleel Al-Adhami reports

Impression has received a new update 3.1.0 to support .xz compressed file format and fix a bug that was causing slow download speeds

Third Party Projects

Arjan says

This week @lazka (Christoph Reiter) released PyGObject 3.48.1.

This release contains a couple of noteworthy changes:

This is the first release using meson-python, and thus meson, instead of setuptools for PEP-517 installations. I.e. when installing via pip or similar.

PyGObject finally has proper support for fundamental types. That means that you can now work with things like GSK nodes directly from Python.

The documentation for PyGObject is now hosted on our GNOME hosting environment at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/pygobject/. We aim to have all PyGObject related documentation in one place.

Nokse says

I have released a new version of ASCII Draw with many improvements:

Greatly improved performance, now you can use a bigger canvases

Improved design to better match the GNOME style

Added stepped line and merged all lines and arrows in one tool

Added move tool to easily move part of your drawings

Improved default character list dividing them into palettes

Added custom palettes

Added primary and secondary character

Guido says

I’ve released livi 0.1.0. Thanks to Robert Mader the mobile focused video player now supports DMABuf import and can use GTK’s new GraphicsOffload widget to render videos more efficiently (given all other components in the stack support this properly already).

Aaron Erhardt announces

Version 0.8 of Relm4, an idiomatic GUI library based on gtk4-rs, was released on Wednesday with many improvements. The release includes several unifications in our API, more idiomatic abstractions and updated gtk-rs dependencies. Find out more details in our release blog post.

Gameeky 0.6.0 is out! This new release comes with improved compatibility with other platforms, several usability additions and improvements like:

An integrated development environment for Python.

An easier way to share projects.

New desktop icon thanks to @jimmac and @bertob.

Improved compatibility with other platforms.

And more…

Check the release blog post to learn more.

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna announces

This week, in between the minutiae of everyday things, I have also been looking into some of our policies and looking into updating them. Things like the employee handbook and travel policy are high on the list of things to update, to both keep aligned with regulations and best practices as well as streamlined for practicality.

I am currently in Pasadena, California attending SCaLE. I am going to be on a panel (https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/21x/presentations/where-does-linux-desktop-go-here) on Saturday at 2:30PM. It’s going to be a great time! I will also be staffing the GNOME booth there. Drop on by to discuss all things GNOME.

We also posted an opening for an Administrative Support Contractor (https://foundation.gnome.org/careers/). This person would be working with me to keep GNOME running and I am very much looking forward to reading all the applications!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#138 Refreshing Changes

Fri, 08 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 01 to March 08.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Here are the highlights of the last 2 weeks.

Accessibility

Dorotha joined the team to work on global shortcuts portal for GNOME and better screen reader support on Wayland.

Andy landed Spiel support in Orca #182

Spiel is a speech synthesis (TTS) API and framework

Orca is the screen reader of the Linux desktop

Hardware Support

Ivan published experiments on the extra frame of latency in GNOME Shell

Ivan benchmarked and measured latency of VTE (with Ptyxis), comparing together GTK’s three renderers (current GL, new GL, new Vulkan)

Jonas landed h264 (software) encoding for screencasts - recordings in GNOME 46 will be smoother on slow hardware and have better compatibility on the web

Dor landed variable refresh rate support

Platform

Tobias submitted a mockup for extending background apps with

Dynamic actions that can change at runtime

Show background apps in the dash with a dimmed dot indicator

Show the status string and actions in the dash menu

Julian opened a draft for notifications API/portal v2

Julian landed expandable notifications in calendar drawer - coming to GNOME 46

Julian solved unecessary cases of <Application> is ready notifications 1, 2, 3, 4

Flatpak

Hub landed supports for the settings portal in libportal

Hub opened a draft to implement fallback devices in Flatpak

Georges submitted a patch to support geolocation in sandboxed Flatpak WebKit applications

Georges submitted a patch to support Drag’n Drop in Flatpak WebKit applications

Home Encryption

Adrian landed Freeze user sessions for all types of sleep in systemd

Adrian landed session fields for user-record in systemd

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

This week GJS 1.79.90 was released, the release candidate for GNOME 46. In this release we have a crash fix and some preparations for performance improvements.

Also, have you ever tried using WeakRef or FinalizationRegistry in GJS and noticed … that they don’t actually work? Due to not realizing that we had to do something on our end to enable these when Mozilla added them to the JS engine, it turns out the WeakRef would actually create a strong ref, and the FinalizationRegistry’s callbacks would never be called. This is fixed now and you can use them with confidence because the functionality is now covered by tests! We also wrote documentation for Mozilla’s JS embedders repo to prevent problems like this in the future.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hugo Olabera announces

I just published version 3 of Wike, which is renewed to adapt to the new design styles in GNOME applications. It also adds some new features and the usual bunch of improvements and fixes.

Side panel redesign that is now located on the left.

New left bar that provides quick access to all side panel elements.

Search moves to side panel.

New design for the languages selection window.

Selection mode added to the bookmarks and history lists.

New option to hide the tab bar in desktop mode.

New option to show all languages in language links.

Added match counter for text searches.

Switching to libsoup for Wikipedia queries.

New and updated translations.

Thanks to all contributors and translators!

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina announces

Warp 0.7 beta 1 was released to Flathub beta. It includes experimental support for QR code scanning via PipeWire and the camera portal. This feature allows to initiate a file transfer just by scanning a code on the receiving device. Any feedback is much appreciated. 📸️

To install the beta, follow the instructions in the beta announcement.

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu says

Alice has done a bunch of work on Apostrophe to port widgets to their new libadwaita counterparts, as well as improving the overall styling

Third Party Projects

slomo says

The GStreamer team is thrilled to announce a new major feature release of your favourite cross-platform multimedia framework!

The 1.24 release series adds new features on top of the 1.22 series and is part of the API and ABI-stable 1.x release series.

As always, this release is again packed with new features, bug fixes and many other improvements.

Highlights

New Discourse forum and Matrix chat space

New Analytics and Machine Learning abstractions and elements

Playbin3 and decodebin3 are now stable and the default in gst-play-1.0, GstPlay/GstPlayer

The va plugin is now preferred over gst-vaapi and has higher ranks

GstMeta serialization/deserialization and other GstMeta improvements

New GstMeta for SMPTE ST-291M HANC/VANC Ancillary Data

New unixfd plugin for efficient 1:N inter-process communication on Linux

cudaipc source and sink for zero-copy CUDA memory sharing between processes

New intersink and intersrc elements for 1:N pipeline decoupling within the same process

Qt5 + Qt6 QML integration improvements including qml6glsrc, qml6glmixer, qml6gloverlay, and qml6d3d11sink elements

DRM Modifier Support for dmabufs on Linux

OpenGL, Vulkan and CUDA integration enhancements

Vulkan H.264 and H.265 video decoders

RTP stack improvements including new RFC7273 modes and more correct header extension handling in depayloaders

WebRTC improvements such as support for ICE consent freshness, and a new webrtcsrc element to complement webrtcsink

WebRTC signallers and webrtcsink implementations for LiveKit and AWS Kinesis Video Streams

WHIP server source and client sink, and a WHEP source

Precision Time Protocol (PTP) clock support for Windows and other additions

Low-Latency HLS (LL-HLS) support and many other HLS and DASH enhancements

New W3C Media Source Extensions library

Countless closed caption handling improvements including new cea608mux and cea608tocea708 elements

Translation support for awstranscriber

Bayer 10/12/14/16-bit depth support

MPEG-TS support for asynchronous KLV demuxing and segment seeking, plus various new muxer features

Capture source and sink for AJA capture and playout cards

SVT-AV1 and VA-API AV1 encoders, stateless AV1 video decoder

New uvcsink element for exporting streams as UVC camera

DirectWrite text rendering plugin for windows

Direct3D12-based video decoding, conversion, composition, and rendering

AMD Advanced Media Framework AV1 + H.265 video encoders with 10-bit and HDR support

AVX/AVX2 support and NEON support on macOS on Apple ARM64 CPUs via new liborc

GStreamer C# bindings have been updated

Rust bindings improvements and many new and improved Rust plugins

Rust plugins now shipped in packages for all major platforms including Android and iOS

Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes

Full release notes can be found at: https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/1.24/

Can Lehmann announces

This week, Owlkettle 3.0.0 has been released! Owlkettle is a declarative GUI framework for the Nim programming language based on GTK 4. This release wraps 27 new widgets and improves on the documentation:

27 new GTK & libadwaita widgets

Support for custom CSS classes & inline stylesheets

Generate interactive widget examples with the owlkettle/playground module

private and onlyState modifiers

Documentation website with guides on installation, application architecture and wrapping new widgets

See the full changelog here. This is a major release which contains breaking changes. A migration guide can be found here.

Thanks to all contributors!

rdbende reports

After almost two years, we released Cozy 1.3 last week! This release brings an updated user interface along with numerous bug fixes and improved performance.

The user interface has been ported to GTK4 and Libadwaita. Thus, Cozy benefits from the new style sheet, automatic dark mode, and utilizes the latest and greatest UI elements throughout the application.

Other changes include:

Improved mobile support

Smaller visual refinements to match the state of the art of GNOME apps

Dozens of bug fixes and performance improvements

Significant cleanup and improvements to the codebase

As always, updated translations thanks to all translators!

Many thanks to Julian Geywitz for the great app and codebase, and to all the contributors who helped make this release happen!

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.37.0 is out:

Wi-Fi networks can now be selected from quick settings

Add your own Custom quick settings via plugins

There’s a new caffeine quick setting using that

Support cutouts and notches of 16 more phones

There’s more. Check the full details here

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection ↗

A tweak tool to customize the GNOME Shell and to disable UI elements.

Just Perfection reports

Just Perfection extension is ported to GNOME Shell 46. We have a new feature in this version called window maximized by default to open all windows in maximized automatically. This version is named after English artist Edward Lear. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBMM8s2J2zI

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#137 Second Legendary Saturday Edition

Sat, 02 Mar 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 23 to March 02.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

The GNOME STF team is running too late today for the deadline. Sorry about that, we’ll be back next Friday with 2 weeks worth of updates. Have a great weekend!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) reports

GNOME Calendar 46 beta was released, bringing some exciting changes and additions:

Jeff Fortin worked on harmonizing the mini calendar’s week numbers with GNOME Shell.

Georges Stavracas ported every window to AdwDialog, and Dexter Reed ported the about window to AdwAboutDialog.

Rami Alkawadri fixed a bug in the creation popover where full-day events would show “00:00 — 00:00”.

Georges Stavracas ported the date selector to Settings portal.

Felipe Kinoshita added debug information to the about dialog.

Georges Stavracas ported from GtkLabel to GtkInscription for displaying events. Using GtkInscription for this use case increases performance.

Hari Rana added month separators, making it easier to distinguish beginning and end of each month.

Hari Rana added a lock icon for read-only calendars

Hari Rana improved the handling of event names, which adds visual feedback to when the event name is invalid.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Luca Bacci has improved file info queries on Windows, to improve the responsiveness of file choosers (in GIMP and everywhere else): https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3080

Michael Catanzaro reports

Last week I fixed a major performance issue in glib-networking causing the system certificate trust to be parsed repeatedly when running under flatpak or in other containerized environments that use p11-kit-server. Epiphany Technology Preview is now able to load https://www.cnn.com in 7-8 seconds for me, down from 31-35 seconds. You should notice network performance improvements in many flatpak apps. This fix will be released in glib-networking 2.80.rc and 2.78.1.

GNOME Incubating Apps

This week Qiu Wenbo replaced Papers custom thread scheduler with GLib’s GThreadPool. In consequence, multiple jobs are allowed to be scheduled concurrently (so for example, multiple pages can render at the same time), and we are no longer leaking every thread’s memory (the custom scheduler would never call g_thread_join)

Third Party Projects

Mateus R. Costa says

For the past few days I have been working on a new thumbnailer that follows the Freedesktop Thumbnail Managing standard for thumbnailing Nintendo handheld systems roms and files.

While a thumbnailer already existed only for .nds roms as gnome-nds-thumbnailer, I decided to do my own implementation written in Rust and try to add support to the Nintendo 3DS files as well. As you might guess, this was intended to be a way to practice Rust skills on a real-world project.

The resulting thumbnailer is bign-handheld-thumbnailer. It supports Nintendo DS .nds (although animated DSi icons are not supported and only the standard DS icon is used instead) files and for Nintendo 3DS .cia (3DS installer files, as long as a “Meta” section is present on the file containing a valid SMDH with the large icon data), .smdh (3DS banner metadata) and .3dsx (3DS homebrew, only if a extended header is present with SMDH data) files are currently supported. .cci/.3ds (actual 3DS rom) file support will be added in the future, as it seems to rely on mounting a virtual filesystem to extract the icon file.

The compiled release from the project is just shy of 1 MB of size. It was also a great learning experience, especially around extracting specific data from a file byte’s according to the file structure and around Rust error handling. Do note that there isn’t a .cia mime type installed by default, so I borrowed a definition from the Citra emulator which might need to be installed alongside the thumbnailer. Depending on how the thumbnailer is installed it might run into issues with the fact that nautilus runs thumbnailers inside a sandbox.

A Fedora RPM is pending to a future moment due to the Fedora repo crate versions being lower than the project’s, requiring either waiting for an update or downgrading the project’s dependencies.

Update from later in the week: I got some some help from @daknig:matrix.org about the binary size and managed to reduce it from ~990 kB to ~540 kB. This involved moving from clap to pico-args (which is better fit due to being way simpler and adding less size in the final binary) and also adjusting some compilation option from the release build to optimize for a smaller binary.

Giant Pink Robots! announces

Varia download manager has received many new features with the v2024.2.29-1 update this week.

Support for Firefox and Chrome/ium extension.

Initial torrenting support.

Remote mode that allows connection to a remote aria2 instance.

Background mode that allows the window to be hidden while still downloading.

Bug fixes and adjustments.

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp reports

Turtle 0.7 has been released.

It now runs a service application in background which will calculate the file manager emblems and is accessed via D-Bus. This drastically improves speed, eliminating roughly 80% overhead.

The packaging/debian branch has been updated and now can successfully build the deb packages on Debian and Ubuntu. There is also a turtle-nautilus-flatpak package, which comes in handy if you want to use the nautilus plugin combined with the flatpak.

There were also some minor bug fixes.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#136 New Papers

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 16 to February 23.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Accessibility

Joanie continued improving the Orca screen reader:

Finished removing all pyatspi code 🍾

New Keyhandling/Grabs

Event Manager: Add means to pause and clear the event queue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/967a32407

Check for device before adding a grab: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/c4a7b391f

Remove/Move speech-related hacks

See related https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/merge_requests/182#note_2009083

speech-dispatcher: Remove hack for newline followed by period: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/3a4001df6

speech-dispatcher: Move u00a0-> to adjustForPronunciation: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1957edb8a

Event spam + code clean up

Discovered and filed https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6449

Took the opportunity to clean up the Orca code that handles such issues: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/8faea2f7f

Ignore checked-changed events from non-showing widgets: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/48ebd3db2

Georges changed how WebKit makes accessible objects implement Hypertext, Hyperlink, and Text. This should unblock further accessibility work for Joanie and Orca: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/24956

Andy landed Spiel text-to-speech support in Orca:

Update Orca’s Spiel server along with change to upstream API:

SpielProvider changes: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/merge_requests/182/diffs?commit_id=4db5f96178652298b563c9e829689952cdc0fb4b

New events: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/merge_requests/182/diffs?commit_id=b1e66999690d88bb4cde5093ec6d958472cc80d8

Build Spiel from upstream: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/a93d512c3f37511c90c8aab68c14e1c8e526b722

Security

Dhanuka continued work on implementing oo7-daemon:

Opened a new PR to faciliate collaboration with Bilal https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/73

Make Algorithm enum public under unstable feature: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/72

Removed OnceLock<Keyring> and introduced Service::new() to initialize the Service containing oo7::portal::Keyring

Ported to zbus 4.0

New Accessibility Stack (Newton)

Matt is working on the AT-SPI compatibility library for Newton.

Extracted AccessKit AT-SPI implementation into a core library https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit/pull/352 as a prerequisite

Hardware Support

Jonas continued his work on various GNOME Shell things that are still on track for 46, including hardware encoding for screencasts and the new gesture API:

Debugged some more gnome-shell screencast issues with HW encoding and iterated on the MR (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2080), it will hopefully land once the gstreamer pipelines get an ack from the gstreamer folks

Rebased gestures part 2 MR: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2389

Helped the Outreachy students with mobile QA

Jonas continued to push fractional scaling forward:

Almost finished (only needs more tests) with the mutter monitor config work to allow toggling on “scale-monitor-framebuffer” by default: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3596

Sketched out two algorithms for migrating monitor configs in mutter and implemented them (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/commit/31c3d647d9ac792cc3b07f653dd4dcba75b8fc32?merge_request_iid=3596 for fancy ASCII art)

Updated Jonas Ådahl’s MR to g-s-d for Xwayland scaling: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-settings-daemon/-/merge_requests/353

Opened an MR to g-c-c for to configure Xwayland scaling: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2286

Worked with Tobias and Sonny on design for Xwayland scaling option in g-c-c

Dor continued his work on variable refresh rate support:

Made Mutter’s libdisplay-info dependency more visible to downstream packagers

Among other features, this is useful for https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3576

Mutter MR: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3582

g-b-m MR: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/2671

Rebased MRs on GNOME 46 beta and made minor changes following review comments:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/734

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3576

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2260

Georges is investigating Nvidia GPU issues with WebKitGTK

Ran a variety of WebKitGTK tests, builds, and apps on Nvidia

Reduced the scope of the bugs as a lot more seems to be functional now.

GTK3 and GStreamer videos might still have problems, working on it

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=228268

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=261874

:information_source: we are trying to make things work but this is not an endorsement that you should use Nvidia on Linux :)

Platform

Alice fixed some minor issues before the libadwaita 1.5 release

Fixed dialog dimming; fixed shade colors in dark in general in process: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1052

Fixed .devel styles on dialogs: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1051

Evan worked on merging the two GNOME TypeScript bindings https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir/pull/144

Evan started prototyping necessary changes in meson to move GNOME repos over to the GLib-based GI compiler

Andy put some finishing touches on the GNOME Online Accounts GTK4 port:

Design discussion: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/settings-mockups/-/issues/68

Resulting MRs: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/178, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2284

Julian continued his work on improving notifications:

Worked on refactoring notification code in GNOME Shell and expanding notification in calendar drawer https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3173

Looked into notification startup id/activation token:

Use correct platform data when activating application actions https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3198

gappinfo: Pass activation token from launch context to open_uri/file portal https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3933

Hubert is working on the device permission backward compatibility https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5681

Hubert landed memory leak fixes https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5683

Home Encryption

Adrian made major progress on integrating systemd homed for home encryption:

Landed blob directories in systemd 🎉 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30840

Fixed GDM hang when trying to unlock user locked & frozen by homed https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gdm/-/merge_requests/235

Fixed blob-dir-related systemd bug: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/31417 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31419

Contributed to design discussion about passwordless users https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/settings-mockups/-/issues/66

Opened an RFE about the lack of support for auditing in systemd-homed https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/31447

Brought homed up to feature parity with legacy users in gnome-control-center https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2306

Published a GNOME OS branch for testing and ironed out some isues

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/2681)

https://gitlab.com/freedesktop-sdk/infrastructure/freedesktop-sdk-docker-images/-/merge_requests/463

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/merge_requests/2661

Tracked down a systemd regression that completely breaks GNOME https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/31287

Continue work and addressed review on Homed update policy v2 https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31153

Landed new user record language fields, so that we can represent users who can speak multiple languages https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31206

Made gnome-initial-setup support homed https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/merge_requests/239)

Continued LKML discussion about deleting data out of memory on homed lock https://lore.kernel.org/r/20240116-tagelang-zugnummer-349edd1b5792@brauner

Rebased & finished up PR that makes systemd freeze user sessions more aggressively https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30612

GNOME Incubating Apps

Sophie (she/her) reports

Papers has been accepted into the GNOME Incubator. The GNOME incubation process is for apps that are designated to be accepted into GNOME Core or GNOME Development Tools if they reach the required maturity.

Papers is a fork of GNOME’s current document viewer Evince. Due to limited resources, the Evince project can currently not facilitate larger changes like the port to GTK 4 and Libadwaita. Those goals will now be pursued as part of the Papers project.

Papers has already been ported to GTK 4 and Libadwaita. The incubation progress will be tracked in this issue.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan says

Last week Dan Yeaw release Gaphor 2.24.0, the user friendly SysML/UML modeling application. Highlights of this release are:

Gaphor is now REUSE compliant. This makes it easier for third-parties to build on top of Gaphor.

Improvements in the CSS rendering. Styling can be applied much more fine grained.

Ear Tag ↗

Edit audio file tags.

knuxify reports

Ear Tag 0.6.0 has been released! Among other changes. this release brings:

various improvements to the “Rename Selected Files” feature, such as syntax highlighting and the ability to move renamed files to a folder (and create subfolders from tags);

a new “Extract Tags from Filename” option that can automatically extract tags based on a pattern;

options to remove all tags from a file or undo all currently pending changes;

…and a few small design tweaks.

Read more about this release on the 0.6.0 release page, or get the latest version from Flathub.

Third Party Projects

Maximiliano 🥑 reports

search-provider, your favorite Rust zbus-based library to interact with GNOME’s SearchProvider, just released its version 0.8.1, new in this version we add a new feature to turn gdk::Textures into icons that you can send over the bus, no more meddling with gdk_pixbuf::Pixbufs!

slomo reports

The GStreamer team is excited to announce the first release candidate for the upcoming stable 1.24.0 feature release.

This 1.23.90 pre-release is for testing and development purposes in the lead-up to the stable 1.24 series which is now frozen for commits and scheduled for release very soon.

Depending on how things go there might be more release candidates in the next couple of days, but in any case we’re aiming to get 1.24.0 out as soon as possible.

Preliminary release notes highlighting all the new features, bugfixes, performance optimizations and other important changes will be available in the next few days.

If you notice any problems, please file an issue in GitLab.

https://discourse.gstreamer.org/t/gstreamer-1-23-90-pre-release-1-24-0-rc1

Thanks for testing!

ghani1990 announces

This week, Alain unveiled Planify 4.5, bringing a wave of exciting design enhancements and powerful new features to the popular task management app.

Boost your productivity with these innovative additions:

Seamless Nextcloud Integration.

Simplified Task Migration from Planner

Enhanced Task Management: Experience the convenience of drag-and-drop task movement, allowing you to effortlessly organize your workload with a simple click and drag.

Clearer Visibility: Gain valuable insights with the “Always Show Completed Subtasks” option, keeping track of your progress and ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

Efficient Task Creation: Introducing the “Create more” feature, enabling you to swiftly add multiple tasks without interrupting your workflow.

Experience a Smoother User Journey:

Planify 4.5 doesn’t stop there. It boasts a sleekly redesigned date and time selection widget, further enhancing user experience. Additionally, several bug fixes have been implemented to ensure optimal performance and a seamless workflow.

GNOME Websites

federico reports

GNOME’s Code of Conduct has moved from the wiki to https://conduct.gnome.org. All the informational pages about the CoC Committee, procedures, etc. have moved from the wiki to https://conduct.gnome.org/committee

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The extensions port guide for GNOME Shell 46 is ready. If you need any help with your extension, please ask us on GNOME Extensions Matrix Channel.

Miscellaneous

barthalion announces

Flathub’s automatic build validation is more thorough now, and includes checks for issues we previously would have only flagged manually. We have also started moderating all permission changes and some critical MetaInfo changes. Last but not least, we have switched to libappstream, enabling specifying supported screen sizes for mobile devices, and other features available in the latest spec. More details on our blog: https://docs.flathub.org/blog/improved-build-validation/

Following the release of zbus 4.0, I have released a new version of ashpd and oo7. The releases consist of mostly bug fixes and reduced dependencies thanks to the zbus update. On top of that, oo7-cli, a secret-tool replacement is now available to install with cargo install oo7-cli

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#135 Experimental Maps

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 09 to February 16.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Accessibility

Joanie worked on De-PyAtSpi-ing Orca

AtspiDocument: done

Create AT-SPI2 based utilities for the document interface.: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/f36310b6e

Use AXDocument in chromium, gecko, and thunderbird scripts + bookmarks: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/ebe677317

Use AXDocument in the web script: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/7a3dc4871

AtspiComponent: done

Add an AT-SPI2 grab_focus function to AXObject and use it instead of pyatspi: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/a43dfffa3

Create AT-SPI2 component interface utilities: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/47c76e406

Use AXComponent in the event synthesizer: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1e004fe98

Use AXComponent in more places: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/a0602b147

Begin using AXComponent in scripts and Where Am I Presenter: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/2e595ce6a

Use AXComponent in script utilities and flat review: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/b6a87ff05

Use AXComponent in a couple of places missed before: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/c1761de2a

Remove code obsoleted by AXComponent: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1573c7d37

AtspiText: WIP

Last (known) use of pyatspi in Orca

Orca should be pyatspi-free when Orca v46 is released 🎉

Joanie removed some hacks from Orca

Remove broken _adjustPositionForObj hack: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1654dfa69

Remove the isShowingAndVisible hack: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/e857c5361

Remove isZombie; use AXObject.is_valid instead: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/5c3ef549f

Web: Eliminate (nearly all of) our text sanity-checks and hacks: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/0aab0e5da

Sam fixed some minor things in GNOME Shell

Style papercut fixes before freeze: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3165

Fixed the Screen Reader regression in Shell’s Alt-Tab interface: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3127

Andy continued work in integration Spiel with Orca

https://github.com/eeejay/spiel-demos/pull/1

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/merge_requests/182

New Accessibility Stack (Newton)

Matt is working on a client library for Orca and other ATs

Platform

Andy fixed some papercuts withthe gnome-online-accounts settings panel UI: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2891

Julian worked on making notifications in the calendar popover expandable and worked with Sam on refreshing the style https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3173

Andy, Tobias, and Sam worked on fixing papercuts with the gnome-online-accounts GTK4 port

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/162

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/164

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/175

We are investigating a solution for a UX regression AdwDialog https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/issues/797

Evan landed async support on gobject introspection https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/merge_requests/404

Async API support in GLib is deferred to next release https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3746

Looking at how to update meson in other projects to use the new GLib GI compiler instead of the old one without async support.

Evan is working on finishing merging the gi.ts and ts-for-gir codebases for GI-driven TypeScript bindings. MR here: https://github.com/gjsify/ts-for-gir/pull/144

Sonny landed AdwDialog support in Blueprint https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwestman/blueprint-compiler/-/merge_requests/177

Andy landed GTK4 port of GNOME Online Account

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/142

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2039

Andy landed migratation of existing WebDAV accounts in GOA https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/146

Hardware Support

Jonas worked on fractional scaling on XWayland https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3567

Jonas opened a mutter MR for fractional scaling on XWayland https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3567

Jonas landed screencast pipeline blocklisting (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2976)

we are very close to getting the HW encoder support merged https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2080

Dor worked on variable refresh rate support, which is still under review https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

Dor implemented small refinements to the Settings UI for VRR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/734

Dor added support for showing the VRR range of monitors in the Settings UI when possible:

Mutter: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3576

Settings: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/2260

Sam and Dor continued to iterate on the design for VRR in display settings

adjusted the design for the proposed list rows: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2523#note_2005469

Security

Dhanuka continued work on implementing the oo7-daemon: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/56

Fixed most of the issues (a few remains) flagged by Bilal’s review.

Fixed some clippy warnings found in oo7 client when the unstable feature is on: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/67

Updated oo7::portal::Keyring::create_item() to return portal::Item: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/68

Updated oo7::portal::Keyring API’s “attributes” parameter: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/69

Wayland & Portal APIs

Hubert worked on a number of flatpak/portal related things:

libportal settings support

Fixed test so the app fits on smaller screens: https://github.com/flatpak/libportal/pull/142

Settings API (in review) https://github.com/flatpak/libportal/pull/143

flatpak device support:

Proposed and started implementing a compatibility mechanism: https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/5681

Running the test with ASAN leak all over the place: PR https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5683

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

James Westman reports

Maps’ “Experimental Map” mode has a new look for GNOME 46! Features include:

Dark mode

Translated labels, where available

Large Text accessibility setting

Symbols for highway routes

Adwaita icons

You can read more about the new style in my blog post.

Also in experimental mode, you can now click a label and the info bubble appears immediately, no need to right click and choose “What’s Here?”.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

zeenix says

zbus 4.0 released. zbus is a pure Rust D-Bus crate that many GNOME apps and components rely on. The new version brings a more ergonomic and safer API.

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

Newsflash 3.1 was released. It brings quality of life improvements and bugfixes.

https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2024/02/12/newsflash-3-1/

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu says

Apostrophe’s bottombar has seen some improvements. Now the statistics button adapts to the available space, and a lot of under-the-hood changes have been made to the whole bottombar widget

Third Party Projects

ghani1990 reports

This week, Flashcards app has introduced some exciting changes that enhance user experience and organization:

Tags: Now, users can group flashcards within a set using tags. This feature streamlines organization and makes it easier to manage related cards.

Keywords: The app also introduces keywords, allowing users to group entire sets. These keywords serve as filters in the sidebar, making it effortless to locate specific sets.

دانیال بهزادی says

Love is in the air for privacy enthusiasts and individuals residing in tyrannical states. As a Valentine’s Day gift version 4.5.0 of Carburetor released with support for Snowflake and WebTunnel bridges, providing you with even more opportunities to seamlessly connect to the TOR network.

Built upon Libadwaita, Carburetor allows you to easily set up a TOR proxy on your session without getting your hands dirty with system configs. Initially designed to simplify the lives of GNOME enthusiasts on their mobile phones, it’s now fully usable with mouse and/or keyboard too.

ghani1990 says

A new update for Done,The ultimate task management solution for seamless organization and efficiency, is now available! This update includes a new design, a moved services bar, and the ability to expand task details from within each task.

Dexter Reed announces

Chats (aka Chatty) has been ported to use the modern libadwaita 1.4 widgets and sidebar by Chris Talbot, with some help from me (sungsphinx) and Bart Gravendeel (aka Monster).

You can view the pull request here: https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/Chatty/-/merge_requests/1317

xjuan says

I am happy to announce Cambalache’s Gtk4 port has a beta release!

Version 0.17.2 features minors improvements and a brand new UI ported to Gtk 4!

Available in flathub beta!

More information at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2024/02/16/cambalache-gtk4-port-goes-beta/

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

Sonny announces

AdwAlertDialog support was added to Blueprint. Blueprint is able to support new widgets automatically thanks to GObject Introspection but some widgets have custom builder syntax that needs to be added to Blueprint. Here is the merge request if you’d like to see how custom builder syntax works in Blueprint https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwestman/blueprint-compiler/-/merge_requests/177

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#134 High Contrast

Fri, 09 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 02 to February 09.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects. We didn’t get around to reporting our progress last week because many of us were at FOSDEM in Brussels, so this is work from the past two weeks.

Andy updated his GNOME Online Account work from last year Andy worked on Spiel integration with Orca Sophie added basic filtering of syscalls to glycin bwrap sandboxes via a seccomp allow list

https://gitlab.gnome.org/sophie-h/glycin/-/merge_requests/50

Currently tested on x86_64, i386, and aarch64

Hubert implemented high contrast hint portal setting in

xdg-desktop-portal-gnome

xdg-desktop-portal-gtk

libadwaita

libhandy

Sam made a bunch of tweaks to GNOME Shell stylesheet and High Contrast Sam made a new design for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) Settings Matt implemented the compositor side of Newton, the new a11y architecture prototype

Current protocol drafts: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mwcampbell/wayland-protocols/tree/accessibility

Provider implementation in AccessKit: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit/tree/unix2-prototype

Mutter implementation: https://gitlab.gnome.org/mwcampbell/mutter/tree/wayland-native-a11y

Test consumer implementation: https://gitlab.gnome.org/mwcampbell/newton-test-consumer

Dor made several improvements to Mutter related to VVR

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3549

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3560

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3561

Dor updated his VVR work and made it ready for review

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154#note_1998670

Dor continued experimentation for getting smooth cursor updates with the KMS thread

Adrian continued his work on systemd-homed integration

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30840

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30226

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31031

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31039

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/144

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31039

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31153

https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31206

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/146

Adrian is investigating behavior of kernel’s page cache when encryption keys are removed

https://lore.kernel.org/all/20240116-tagelang-zugnummer-349edd1b5792@brauner/

Jonas (Dreßler) continued improving Jonas (Ådahl) wayland fractional scaling branch Jonas started work on migrating monitor configs to the new format for enabling fractional scaling by default

Jonas updated the screencast MRs for blocklisting pipelines and hardware encoding

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2976

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2080

Jonas investigating an issue with variable framerate in screencasts

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7335

Julian refactored a lot of the notification API in GNOME Shell as part of https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3103

Julian landed

using libadwaita Avatar for gnome-initial-setup

using libadwaita Avatar for Settings

Use single notification Source for all system notifications

notification: Show symbolic icons in a circle and smaller

notifications: Add header for messages - GNOME Shell

Set the icon-name property as image hint instead of as app-icon - libnotify

Julian submitted an MR to use the proper hint for setting images for notifications in gnome-settings-daemon

Julian is working on image support in notification portal via passing an fd

Georges landed WebKit GTK4 accessibility support

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6827

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/23926

Georges fixed Gamepad support in WebkitGTK / Epiphany

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/23598

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/epiphany/-/merge_requests/1428

Alice implemented a window-backed mode for AdwDialog

used when the parent window is non-resizable, doesn’t support built-in dialogs or is null

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1037

Alice made a number of AdwDialog improvements

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1035

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1034

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1033

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1032

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1031

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1030

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1041

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1046

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1045

Alice released libadwaita 1.5 beta https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1049

Philip worked on splitting platform-specific docs in GLib (proof of concept)

Philip landed

stack allocation support to libgirepository

GIRepository GIR generation to avoid cyclical dependency

Evan landed

Refactor GIRepository GIR generation to avoid cyclical dependency

girepository: Update gir-compiler and use it to compile GIRs

Sam improved High Contrast support on the lock screen https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3154

Sam tested and fixed issues with RTL https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3150

Ivan investigated an input latency issue in Mutter https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7375

Joanie replaced autotools with meson in Orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/3a702c4cf

Joanie is working on removing more of pyatspi in Orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/issues/300

Joanie implemented using window coordinates insetad of screen when getting bounding boxes:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/3f80aee0f

Needed for GTK4

Needed for Wayland

Joanie finished removal of Orca’s overrides for character names for non-math content https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/issues/313

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Maxim Moskalets has added support for --version to GApplication: just call g_application_set_version() in your app to make use of it (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3889)

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Secrets ↗

A password manager which makes use of the KeePass v.4 format.

Maximiliano 🥑 announces

Secrets have gained numerous updates during this development season. At first, thanks to his work at Volkswagen, Jan-Michael Brummer has reworked the architecture to support different key providers beside simple key files. Based on this work he added YubiKey and PKCS11 (Smartcard) support. Furthermore Maximiliano revamped UI to make use of libadwaita navigation split view widgets. Last but not least Cleo Menezes Jr. OTP added a quick copy action to the entry rows.

Errands ↗

Manage your tasks.

ghani1990 says

Errands, shines brighter with its latest update this week, packing exciting new features and bug fixes to enhance your productivity experience. New Features:

Drag and drop tasks between lists

Markdown syntax highlighting in task notes

Progress bars for each task

Bug Fixes:

Reduced sync requests for faster syncing

Improved handling of edits with sync enabled

Improved translations

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl announces

Since Graphs is part of GNOME Circle, we’ve spent some time on updating the infrastructure. The codebase has now been moved to the GNOME GitLab, and translations are now done using the GNOME translation platform. The GitHub page remains available, but only mirrors the GitLab repository. If you wish to get involved or submit an issue, please turn to the GitLab page instead.

Furthermore, we’ve applied some minor quality-of-life changes since last time:

Label and title size in the stylesheets can now be set with finer increments.

Curves that are hidden are now no longer used when setting the limits of the canvas automatically.

The subtitle in the main application now shows the file location without the file name, which is already displayed above.

Some minor tweaks under the hood, which should result in slightly faster (about 0.3 s on my setup) start-up times.

We updated some strings, and updated the metadata to reflect the move to GNOME GitLab.

The latest release is available on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

Gianni Rosato says

Aviator 0.5.1! TL;DR, mostly SVT-AV1-PSY improvements. But still exciting, in my opinion!

The “Open GOP” toggle has been renamed to “oGOP”

Speed -1 and -2 are now supported with a warning when you go below Speed 3. Speed -2 can take over 8 hours for a minute of video on a Ryzen 9

New “Perceptual Tuning” checkbox toggles some new SVT-AV1-PSY features to “on” by default to improve visual fidelity at the cost of some metric scores

Surround sound encodes will now benefit from Opus’s multichannel optimizations

Video encoding defaults have been modified, re-enabling temporal filtering by default

ghani1990 reports

Varia download manager has received a new visual identity this week, new icon and a number of new features and improvements, such as:

A sidebar that hosts buttons for all downloads, downloads in progress, and completed downloads.

A setting for adjusting the simultaneous download amount.

Bug fixes and adjustments.

Martín Abente Lahaye announces

After three months of development, Gameeky reaches its first public release.

Gameeky is a learning tool in the shape of a game engine. Therefore, its primary goal is to provide a better learning experience for programming, arts and other STEAM-related skills. More about this rationale here.

This first release comes the following:

A game launcher to manage projects more easily.

A game client to play games cooperatively.

A scene editor to create and modify game worlds.

An entity editor to create and modify game objects.

A Python library for a LOGO-like experience.

Plugins support to extend the games logic and entities behavior.

An offline beginner’s guide.

The first thematic pack to create role-playing games in a medieval fantasy setting.

And more…

Gameeky is available in English and Spanish, including the beginner’s guide.

Check the release post for more information about this project and its future plans.

alextee reports

The Zrythm team has just released Zrythm 1.0.0-beta.6.3.11 featuring a brand new libadwaita-based greeter window among other improvements. Special thanks to Miró Allard for various contributions!

Many UI elements were ported to new libadwaita widgets

Visualizers have been moved to bottom bar while the header bar has been simplified/revamped and the secondary header toolbar has been removed

The welcome/greeter window has been revamped to look more like GNOME apps

Zrythm no longer depends on breeze icons and some icons have changed

A bug when copy-pasting audio regions after a BPM change was fixed

Zrythm is now fully REUSE 3.0 compliant (license issues reported by reuse lint have been fixed)

Miscellaneous

ghani1990 announces

David, is embarking on a mission to bridge the gap between the sleek Swift programming language and the established GNOME and Adwaita ecosystem. His efforts go beyond simply bringing Swift to GNOME. he’s actively building Adwaita for Swift, a framework specifically designed to create user interfaces for GNOME applications using an API remarkably similar to Apple’s SwiftUI. This intuitive approach promises to significantly reduce the learning curve for developers familiar with the SwiftUI paradigm, encouraging wider adoption of Swift within the GNOME realm.

Exciting New Developments:

David’s dedication extends beyond the Adwaita for Swift framework. He is actively contributing to the Adwaita-Swift library, introducing a wave of new features designed to further empower developers:

Support for auto-generated widget bindings

Support for setting a view’s visibility

Enhanced support for signals

Improved onClick observer

Adwaita for Swift’s intuitive API and the continuous improvements to the Adwaita-Swift library hold immense potential to attract new developers, it’s worth noting that this bridge also extends to existing macOS developers. This opens up exciting possibilities for attracting talent and fostering cross-platform collaboration, ultimately benefiting the GNOME ecosystem as a whole.

Flashcards: A Swift Showcase:

David’s recent project, Flashcards application, demonstrates Swift’s potential. Although still in early stages, Flashcards packs simplicity and power. Key features include creating, editing, viewing, and studying sets. Need to prepare for an exam? The test mode has you covered. Plus, importing existing Quizlet sets is a breeze.

This journey towards a more diverse and vibrant GNOME development environment continues, fueled by the dedication and foresight of open-source developers.

Dorothy K announces

As Outreachy interns,we have landed a gnome_locales testsuite to test locale changes for some languages with different alphabets ie. Russian and Japanese and RTL languages ie. Arabic. Check it out here: https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/3294#step/gnome_welcome_locales/13

Events

Sonny announces

FOSDEM is over, thanks to everyone for attending and organizing. Here is a selection of talks from GNOME contributors

A fully open source stack for MIPI cameras

Privacy respecting usage metrics for Free Software projects

Drop the docs and embrace the model with Gaphor

Enhancing Linux Accessibility: A Unified Approach

Wayland’s input-method is broken and it’s my fault

GStreamer: State of the Union 2024

The state of video offloading on the Linux Desktop

From Kernel API to Desktop Integration, how do we integrate battery charge limiting in the desktop

Caroline Henriksen reports

The GUADEC 2024 Call for Participation is still open! We are looking for proposals for both in-person and remote talks, as well as workshops and BoFs. If you have a talk you would like to share with GUADEC attendees make sure to submit it by Feb 18: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/01/10/guadec-2024-call-for-participation-opens/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#133 FOSDEM 2024

Fri, 02 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 26 to February 02.

Events

Cassidy James Blaede reports

Going to FOSDEM this weekend? Meet up with GNOME and Flathub folks!

GNOME booth and GNOME Beers

Flathub BoF and more

If you’re unable to make the Flathub BoF but still want to chat, you can catch the team around the GNOME and KDE stands.

See you there!

alatiera reports

We are organizing a GStreamer hackfest in Thessaloniki, Greece on May 27th-29th. In addition the #9 installment of the GNOME ♥️ Rust Hackfest series will take place in the days after 31st of May - 5th of July. For more details see the blogpost and the handbook hackfests page.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

The GTK developers are having a hackfest in Brussels right before the FOSDEM weekend. Lots of work on rendering, media, input, and accessibility. Look forward to a full report on the GTK development blog.

GNOME Websites

Allan Day announces

The GNOME Project Handbook was officially announced! This new resource provides all the information people need to participate in the GNOME project, including how the project works, how to get accounts and use project infrastructure, the release cycle, issue management, and much more. Everyone is invited to help keep the handbook up to date and accurate. The handbook is part of an ongoing to effort to the retire the GNOME wiki. More announcements about this will be coming soon.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Paper Clip ↗

Edit PDF document metadata.

Diego Iván M.E says

This week, Paper Clip v5.0 was released! This release brings a couple of quality-of-life improvements, enhancements and a shiny new feature:

Paper Clip now supports editing encrypted documents, thanks to a brand new dialog that allows users to open files protected by a password.

The DublinCore XMP metadata format is now synchronized with their PDF equivalents.

Updated translations, including French, Basque, Russian, Italian, Occitan and Spanish. Thanks to rene-coty, Sergio Varela, Ser82-png, albanobattistella and Mejans for their contributions!

Appdata improvements by Sabri Ünal

Get the latest release from Flathub!

Third Party Projects

SHuRiKeN says

Eeman app is now available on Flathub, made using GTK 4 and Libadwaita, this app lets you track and get notified of your Salah (prayer) timings, and lets you read the beautiful Quran.

ghani1990 says

A new version of Dosage app to Keep track of your treatments was released this week

this version (1.5.1) has many improvements, the most important of which are:

• It’s now possible to edit history entries • New preference to auto-clear history • New row style for select frequency • New row style for select date • New badge style for history confirmed item

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick announces

Denaro V2024.2.0 was released this week. This release contains some bug fixes to make your experience more stable!

Here’s the changelog:

Improved importing of QIF files

Fixed a bug where the app would crash when filtering transactions for certain dates (mainly leap years like this year 😅)

Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Miscellaneous

The feature freeze for GNOME 46 is closing in. Starting Feb 10 no changes to UI, features, and APIs are allowed without approval from the release team.

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

This week has been very busy for the Foundation staff. I started the beginning of the week meeting with our bookkeepers and discussing our books as well as our budget. Midweek was spent travelling to Brussels, where our Executive Director Holly and I spent yesterday meeting with the GNOME Board of Directors and today meeting with our Advisory Board. This weekend is FOSDEM, where I am looking forward to seeing folks stopping by our booth as well as at GNOME Beers Saturday night. I’ve already had a lot of very productive conversations here in Brussels and am sure there will be many more to come.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#132 Bottom Sheets

Fri, 26 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 19 to January 26.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny says

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Today we celebrate Sophie joining the team to work on Glycin to work on

Improved sandboxing for image loaders

GObject Introspection support to broaden interoperability with the GNOME platform

Accessibility

Joanie added a system information presenter in Orca

Joanie finished code clean-up and removal of pyatspi dependency for hypertext and hyperlink interfaces

Joanie started code clean-up creation of AT-SPI2 utilities for Orca’s accessible-text related functionality issue

Joanie made a proposal to facilitate text selection via ATK/AT-SPI2 across multiple objects at once (similar to what IAccessible2 created)

Joanie made a proposal to have an attributes-changed signal for object attributes

Joanie began converting Orca’s WebKitGtk support over to the generic web support currently shared by Chromium and Gecko.

Matt pushed a partial Wayland protocol extension for accessibility consumers (screen readers and the like)

Matt started implementation the accessibility extension as a proof of concept in Mutter

Tobias investigated where we still use TreeViews and started an initiative to port to more accessible widgets (e.g. ListView, ColumnView)

Evan landed gtk: Add AccessibleList to enable relations in bindings

enables languages like GJS and Python to pass lists of Gtk widgets to accessibility relations like LABELLED_BY in GTK4

started a GJS MR for it to apply a convenience override to automatically wrap JS arrays in Gtk.AccessibleList in the relevant APIs

Georges is working on WebKitGTK accessibility

experimented with a potential new GTK4 API to be consumed by WebKitGTK. The experiment was a success and it correctly bridged the web page DOM a11y tree with the rest of the program, which allows screen readers and other accessible technologies to read that. I’m currently cleaning up the code and discussing the approach with GTK developers.

published and improved Aleveny a tool to inspect the accessible object tree of apps.

Sonny helped with coordination efforts to land High Contrast hint on settings portal

Hub will work on GNOME backend implementation

Platform

Hub fixed a bug in flatpak-builder rename-appdata-file

Julian landed using libadwaita Avatar in gnome-initial-setup

Julian is working on extending the XDG portal notification API with sounds and images portal issue

Sonny started a proof of concept for a GTK linter

Stef joined the team and started working on GFileMonitor does not work with document portal

Evan made progress on async/sync annotations support in introspection, there are currently 4 MRs for it

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3797

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3853

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3830

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3746

Evan is investigating the amount of work needed to make WASM support in GJS production ready - currently evaluating the mergeability of multi-threaded promises and import maps

Philip fixed the following in GLib

Segfault in gi_function_info_prep_invoker

gibaseinfo: Fix use of stack-allocated GIBaseInfos

girepository: Drop gi_repository_get_default()

Reference cycle between GIRepository and GIBaseInfos cached by it

girnode: Document ownership and element types of internal structs

Philip released GLib 2.78.4 and 2.79.1

Alice finished and landed adaptive dialogs (see her individual update below)

Hardware support

Dor continued iterating on VRR configuration UX in Settings

Dor investigated and fixed a number of issues related to VRR

Remove assumption about fixed refresh rate in empty frame handling

Cursor movement becomes synchronized with main content updates after VT switch

Alice landed bottom sheets in libadwaita https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1018

Documentation https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/class.Dialog.html

There’s also a migration guide for porting apps to using it https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libadwaita/doc/main/migrating-to-adaptive-dialogs.html

Jonas (Dreßler) is investigating remaining issues in Jonas (Ådahl) fractional scaling branch

Security:

Dhanuka continued his work on implementing secret server/backend in oo7 https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/56

implemented CreateCollection and SearchItems on org.freedesOnceCellktop.Secret.Service interface

implemented Delete on org.freedesktop.Secret.Item interface

updated CreateItem on org.freedesktop.Secret.Collection to use oo7::dbus::api::properties::Properties

We are investigating and coordinating usage of systemd per-user encrypted credentials

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

AdwDialog has landed, along with AdwAlertDialog, AdwPreferencesDialog and AdwAboutDialog. There’s also a migration guide for all of the new widgets. The old widgets aren’t deprecated yet, but will be in GNOME 47

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Matthias Clasen says

The GTK 4.13.6 release out this week changes the default renderer to be the ngl renderer.

The intent of this change is to get wider testing and verify that the new renderers are production-ready. If significant problems show up, it may get reverted for the stable 4.14 release in March.

You can still override the renderer choice using the GSK_RENDERER environment variable.

Since ngl can handle fractional scaling much better than the old gl renderer, fractional scaling is now enabled by default with gl.

If you are using the old gl renderer (e.g. because your system is limited to GLES2), you can disable fractional scaling by setting the GDK_DEBUG environment variable to include the gl-no-fractional key.

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad says

Maps now shows an empty state for the favorites menu, and also allows removing favorites directly from the popover (with an undo toast). Also James Westman has improved GeoJSON shapelayer rendering, show descriptions for marked places, and also shows the layer name in the bubbles

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix announces

Fragments now allows you to search for added torrents 🔎

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

oo7, a Rust client library for interacting with the system keyring, received two new additions:

A rewrite of secret-tool, a cli application to interact with the keyring

A rewrite of the secret portal

On top of that Dhanuka Warusadura have been working on a server side implementation

badcel announces

I published the repository Maus containing an early stages Adwaita C# app which allows to configure a Microsoft Intellimouse Pro. Feedback is welcome.

Miscellaneous

Cassidy James reports

Flathub, the app store developed by KDE, GNOME, and independent contributors, has announced over one million active users! This means when you bring your app to Flathub—either independently or as a part of GNOME Circle—you’re reaching a potential audience of over a million Linux users.

Dorothy K reports

As Outreachy Interns,for the past couple of weeks Tanjuate and I have been working on implementing end-to-end testing for GNOME with openQA for Outreachy and our focus in the last few weeks has been a11y tests for GNOME OS.We have written tests for accessibility features ie, High contrast,Large text,Overlay scrollbars, Screen reader, Zoom, Over amplification,Visual alerts and On Screen Keyboard features.

Take a look at some of the tests we have added with a prefix “a11y-” here and this post for more context

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#131 STF Happenings

Fri, 19 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 12 to January 19.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny announces

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Alice continued work on bottom sheets https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/merge_requests/1018

implemented proper focus for bottom sheets

fixed docs for ported dialogs

implemented swipe to close for bottom sheet dialogs

split out the dialog support code from windows; experimented with putting it into tab pages: https://mk.nyaa.place/notes/9omtb0ugc3i50oiz

Georges started working on a11y support for WebkitGTK (GTK4)

Philip did various maintenance tasks on GLib

Many reviews in GLib

More libgirepository cleanups, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3155

More libgirepository cleanups, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3836

Writing unit tests for libgirepository, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3836

Validating GLib’s tests, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3837 and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3838

Reviewing gi-docgen docs linking changes, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3809

Evan continued working on GObject Introspection

Unblock adding g-ir-compiler into the GLib repository

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3830

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3797

Working on support for compiling g-ir-compiler2/gir-compiler from GLib

Async support for GLib in typelibs https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3746

Dhanuka continued his work on implementing secret server/backend in oo7 https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/56

Completed org.freedesktop.Secret.Collection interface implementation

Completed org.freedesktop.Secret.Session interface implementation

Tait

Got started looking into GTK+Mutter menu disappearing issue: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/issues/6277

Discussed accessibility key binding priority https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/at-spi2-core/-/issues/147

Jonas worked on improving app grid scaling on smaller laptop displays

Julian continued working on notifications

Created a separate MR for adding the new header to notifications in gnome shell https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3103

Rebased other outstanding MRs

Started working on a prototype for notification threading support in GNOME Shell and the rest of the stack

Julian continued working on using Libadwaita default avatars for new users

Got the avatar changes in gnome-control-center merged, required a rebase https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/merge_requests/1939

Fixed some followup issues from the review in Initial Setup https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-initial-setup/-/merge_requests/215

Matt continued working on support for the new Wayland accessibility protocol extension in Mutter and designing the protocol for assistive technologies and other clients

Hub

Draft PR of the internal doc for the document portal https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1265

Dor

Prototyped an alternative solution for VRR configuration in Settings following design feedback. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2523#note_1971322

Rebased VRR MR locally on top of GNOME 46.alpha

Investigated a Firefox (Wayland) frame pacing issue, preparatory MR https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/3521

Started looking into a plan to get VRR merged in GNOME 46 in experimental form with reduced feature set https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/3125

Sam

Settings:

Design input on the ongoing work to implement VRR support in Displays panel: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/issues/2523

New designs for how Text-to-Speech and speech providers can live in Settings: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/settings-mockups/-/issues/65

GNOME Shell:

fix regression in lockscreen focus style: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3118

fixes for newly introduced problems with the Dash on smaller resolutions https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3119

clean up, and small fixes for the calendar popover: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3120

investigated why Alt-Tab switcher lost text to speech support in 46.alpha: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7336

Various improvements to Adwaita Icons/Cursors

Adrian continued worked on blob dirs in systemd-homed https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30840

nirbheek reports

Last week, the foundation of a full Rust rewrite of GStreamer’s Real-Time Protocol (RTP/RTCP) network stack was created, with the effort funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund. You can read STF’s announcement on Mastodon.

RTP, RTCP, and SDP are standard specifications which constitute the basic building blocks on top of which widely-used real-time protocols like RTSP (Real-Time Session Protocol) and WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) have been created. You can read more about this and the project in general at https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/tech/gstreamer

The rewrite has several technical advantages over the existing C-based stack built ontop of GObject and GIO:

Improved memory safety: important when parsing untrusted network data

More flexible architecture: the existing RTP stack was “layer cake” which made adding new interactions and features hacky and cumbersome

Better performance: the previous architecture suffered from lock contention, excessive use of threads, and the overhead of repeatedly mapping and unmapping buffers due to the “layer cake” architecture

Easier for newcomers: the aforementioned “layer cake” of abstractions made it difficult for non-experts to understand the stack, and we expect new contributors to have an easier time helping, which helps with sustainability

Lower cognitive overhead: the revised architecture and the use of async Rust will reduce the effort required to write new features, refactor code, and generally increase maintainability

The new stack is in a functional and usable state, but lacks some advanced features that are needed for being a complete rewrite of the existing stack. You can follow the progress in the below merge requests:

New RTP manager and jitterbuffer

Measured to be about 50% faster, and the flexible architecture should make it easier to write another jitterbuffer implementation with dynamic latency

New RTP payloading / depayloading base classes

More payloaders and depayloaders will be submitted once the base classes have undergone code review and been merged.

New RTSP source element

Currently only live-streaming is supported, Video-on-Demand (VOD) is planned for the future

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

We released extra versions of GJS, 1.78.3 (stable) and 1.79.2 (unstable) to fix a regression that made extension preferences windows crash in GNOME Shell. The 1.79.2 release also contains several performance improvements from Marco Trevisan!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week Graphs was accepted into GNOME Circle. Graphs is a simple, yet powerful tool that allows you to plot and manipulate your data with ease. Congratulations!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench, the Code Playground for GNOME is out in version 45.4 🛠️ https://flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.Workbench

The highlights of this release are

Restore on-disk projects when starting Workbench

Open the Library on start if there are no projects to restore

Restore scroll and cusor positions on format and Run

Add “Copy” and “Select All” to Console

Add Vala formatter support

Add WebP image format support

Library: Add “Context Menu” demo

Library: Add “HTTP Server” demo

Library: 12 demos ported to Python, 4 to Vala and 2 to Rust

Use Biome instead of prettier as JavaScript formatter

Use GTKCssLanguageServer instead of prettier as CSS formatter

Fix Console style when toggling dark mode

Fix blank preview on demos with no code

Fix Style affecting other windows

Thanks to the following contributors Gregor Niehl, UrtsiSantsi, Sabri Ünal, Hofer-Julian, Roland Lötscher, Sahil Shadwal, Dan Yeaw, AkshayWarrier, Marco Köpcke, Diego Iván M.E, Sonny Piers.

Happy hacking / learning / prototyping

Boatswain ↗

A guiding hand when navigating through streams.

Due to a surprisingly popular demand, I’m preparing to add support for Elgato Stream Deck+ devices to Boatswain. For that to happen, Boatswain needs to be adjusted for new button types, a different USB protocol, and new input events. In order to test it, I’ll need a device, so I started a small fundraising campaign. You can read more here.

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu announces

I’ve been working on a new Layout Manager for Apostrophe to replace the now deprecated AdwLeaflet. This has been a nice opportunity to implement a tailor made solution for apostrophe’s panels which fully adapts to the app’s needs

Third Party Projects

ghani1990 says

Lorenzo Paderi has just released Collector, a new application that aims to be a Dropover alternative for GNOME. Collector allows users to quickly and easily drag files, images, text and links onto the Collection window, and drop them anywhere! Collector also supports a variety of features, including:

The ability to Open multiple Collector windows and customize their color

The ability to download images by Easily drag them from web browser.

The ability to group texts into a single, ready-to-use CSV file

If you are a user who is looking for an effortless Drag & Drop, I encourage you to check out Collector. It is a great option that is sure to meet your needs.

Gianni Rosato reports

Today, we have a very exciting development - Aviator has switched to an in-house custom fork of SVT-AV1 dubbed SVT-AV1-PSY!

Featuring development efforts from BlueSwordM (author of the previous custom fork Aviator has been occaisonally using), myself (Gianni), and others, this change will enable us to have much more control over the encoder’s development so that it aligns most effectively with Aviator’s number one priority: visual quality.

So far, SVT-AV1-PSY’s most noteworthy feature is a variance boost patch that appreciably improves intra- and inter-frame fidelity consistency across wide range of content. Visual fidelity per bit is estimated to have increased by up to 5% with this patch, which currently isn’t present in mainline SVT-AV1.

Even though this patch should inevitably make it to mainline, the gains from having more direct control are already being realized as we can implement features like this flexibly at a pace we decide.

Aside from that, FFmpeg has been updated to version 6.1, the SCM toggle has been replaced with a more useful Open GOP toggle, and the README has been modified to reflect some of these more recent changes with regard to SVT-AV1-PSY.

Thank you for using Aviator, and happy encoding!

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel announces

Gir.Core 0.5.0-preview.4 got released. It is the next step to the upcoming 0.5.0 release and adds a lot of public API for records. See the release notes for further details.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Fractal 6 is up and ready!

That’s right, barely 2 months after Fractal 5, we feel there have been enough improvements to grant a new stable release. You have probably noticed that we have adopted a version scheme similar to GNOME and will bump the major version with each new release.

The list of goodies:

Fractal can open Matrix URIs, it is even registered as a handler for the matrix scheme

The verification flow was rewritten, hopefully solving most verification issues

Room members can be kicked, banned or ignored from their profile

More notifications settings, global or per-room, were added

Times follow the format (12h or 24h) from the system settings

Tab auto-completion also works for mentioning public rooms, just start your query with #

It is available right now on Flathub.

This version is fully translated into 6 languages 🙌️ and we hope to get even more 📈 for the next one! Head over to Damned Lies if you want to give a hand.

We would also like to thank our new and returning contributors and our upstream projects.

For our next iteration, we already have a bunch of accessibility improvements waiting, and we plan to continue improving the room settings and the moderation features. Any extra work from you 🫵️ will be highly valued!

Events

The GNOME Africa community has been hard at work on organizing a preparatory Bootcamp for those who intend to apply for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and Outreachy internships.

The goal for this event is to equip participants with the necessary technical skills, project-specific knowledge, mentorship guidance, and community insights, thereby increasing their competitiveness and readiness to successfully contribute to GNOME during the application cycles of these internship programs.

The event will be held entirely online, so people from anywhere in the world are welcome to join. It will happen from January 22^nd to February 2^nd, so save those dates!

If you’re interested in attending, please register for the event in the following link: https://events.gnome.org/event/244/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#130 Bubble Expanding

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 05 to January 12.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Evan worked on adding the gir compiler sources to glib https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3796#note_1957818 and investigated updating the gobject-introspection GIR changes for async to be compatible with testsuite changes https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gobject-introspection/-/merge_requests/404

Matt’s project to prototype a new free desktop accessibility stack is now code-named “Newton”. The first draft of the Wayland protocol for applications/toolkits is available here: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mwcampbell/wayland-protocols/-/blob/accessibility/staging/accessibility/accessibility-v1.xml?ref_type=heads and the implementation of the toolkit side in AccessKit is available here: https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit/tree/unix2-prototype

Tobias worked on some initial mockups for URI handling settings https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/settings-mockups/-/blob/master/applications/apps-reset-handlers.png

Julian worked on notification bubble expanding

Joanie continued working on improving Orca:

Clear the cache recursively for table cells

Code cleanups and fixes specific to the new keyhandling/key grabs

Set up feature bindings on demand rather than in init

Various other cleanups and fixes

Sam landed a number of cleanups and improvements to the GNOME Shell stylesheet:

Cleaned up color definitions and the high contrast conditional so it can be more readily worked on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3097

Big refactor of button and entry drawing code so all elements of that type will appropriately inherit focus and high contrast styles https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3109

Fixed missing focus state visuals in Calendar popover so focus is properly tracked https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3102

Work and discussions around redesigning the Orca settings are also still ongoing https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/issues/240

Jonas resumed working on new GNOME Shell gestures with Carlos https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/2389

Jonas is looking into optimizing the shell overview for lower resolutions (1366×768 still is the second most popular screen resolution out there)

Adrian reimagined and reimplemented his approach for adding bulk directories to systemd-homed https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30840

We started working with Eitan Isaacson of libspiel and are excited about the future of TTS https://blog.monotonous.org/2024/01/10/Introducing-Spiel

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

Mutter has been receiving some documentation love recently

A brand new website made by Jakub Steiner https://mutter.gnome.org/

Re-organised and improved contributing guidelines by swick

Hopefully that will make it easier for you to send your first patch!

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Thanks to the design work by Jakub and Calvin, Loupe has now a new animation for switching images via keyboard and buttons. We got repeated feedback that the previous animation can cause dizziness for some people (including me) on larger screens. Therefore we no longer animate the image moving over the complete screen like on smartphones. Instead, in simplified terms, we only animate the image moving a small and fixed amount of pixels over the old image. On touchscreens and with touchpads the image can still be moved directly as before. Thanks to everyone who helped with feedback and testing.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Matthias Clasen reports

The GTK 4.13.5 release includes not one, but two new renderers. Their names are vulkan and ngl, and we also call them unified renderers, since they are built from the same sources. The new renderers can handle many corner cases correctly that the current gl renderer does not handle, and they offer advantages such as antialiasing and supersampled gradients.

The ngl renderer does not currently support GLES 2.

The new renderers are still considered experimental, and GTK will only use them if they are explicitly selected using the GSK_RENDERER environment variable. The default renderer is still the current gl renderer.

As part of this work, the GSK include files have been rearranged. It is no longer necessary to include renderer-specific headers for ngl and vulkan (and doing so will trigger deprecation warnings), and their constructors are always available.

The previously available experimental GdkVulkanContext APIs and the old Vulkan renderer have been removed.

Vulkan support is now enabled by default, and Linux distributions should build GTK with Vulkan. This requires the glslc shader compiler as a new dependency.

Vulkan is now also used for dmabuf support.

GNOME Contacts ↗

Keep and organize your contacts information.

nielsdg reports

Contacts can now import multiple vCard files at once and preview the contacts you’re about to import to avoid any mistakes. Already part of the 46.alpha release, so grab it while it’s hot!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw announces

Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, version 2.23.0 is now out! Thanks to the amazing work by Arjan, this version features the following enhancements for our use of GTK:

Move from Gtk.TreeView to Gtk.ColumnView and ListView for our Property Editors

Move from Gtk.FileChooserNative to Gtk.FileDialog

Move from our own custom Gtk.Revealer to Adw.Toast for our in-app notifications

Remove the scary filesystem access warning in FlatHub by using the Filesystem Portal for Flatpak

We also made other feature enhancements:

Support types for parameters

Restore windows in maximized and full-screen state

Fine grained CSS: elements in a presentation item can be changed from CSS (experimental)

Very long element names are now wrapped

Third Party Projects

Sophie (she/her) announces

Key Rack is an app to view passwords and other secret stored by other apps. With the newly released version 0.3 it not only supports secrets stored in Flatpaks but also global secrets on the host. The new version also bring support for showing binary secrets in hex representation.

Alain says

Planify 4.4 is here, design improvements and new features available.

What’s New:

Improved drag-and-drop sorting: Added a new animation and a new way of sorting making it cleaner and easier.

Support for sub-projects: Create a sub-project just by dragging and dropping or by using the magic button and dropping into the parent project.

Magic Button: Just drag and drop to add tasks wherever you want and in the order you want.

Board View: Have an overview of your tasks without losing sight of the details.

Using Adw.OverlaySplitView to have a collapsible sidebar.

Sections are now created from a Dialog and support color and a description.

Parent and child tasks: It is now easier to create subtasks, just drag the child task to the parent task and drop it.

New preference to configure whether to add the task at the beginning or end of the list.

Quick Add now allows you to select the target section.

Improved integration with Todoist, now allows you to create tasks with strange character content.

The description of a project is now editable instead of using a Dialog.

The design of the reminder creation has been improved.

Bug Fixed and Translations:

Portugués translations thanks to @godinhoana54.

Russian translation update thanks to @hachikoharuno.

Turkish translation update thanks to @sabriunal.

Bugs fixed #1089, #1081, #1099, #1087, #1009, #1008, #1007.

Izzy Jackson (she/they) says

Binary is an app to quickly convert between two different number bases, currently between Binary and Decimal. 0.1.3 is the latest release of the app.

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl says

This week we have finally released Graphs 1.7.0. It’s been a long process since the summer, but it’s worth the wait. To say this is our biggest release yet would be an understatement, just as reference, at the last release we were at a total of 1474 commits in the repository while this release is at 2653 commits.

These changes may sound somewhat familiar for those who’ve read the beta announcement two weeks ago, but here’s just a few of the major highlights of this release:

A major UI overhaul with a new default theme and new libadwaita widgets from GNOME 45.

A completely revamped style editor with previews for each style

Curve fitting functionality

Touchpad gesture support for navigating the canvas

Many small quality-of-life improvements, such as persistent settings, better equation handling, and streamlined preferences.

These are just the major highlights, but a more complete changelog can be found on GitHub. To install the latest version of Graphs, we recommend you to get it at Flathub! I’d like to thank everyone involved for making this release possible. Particularly my co-developer Christoph Kohnen, as well as Tobias Bernard, and Sophie (she/her) for all the feedback in the GNOME Circle application.

Documentation

Maximiliano 🥑 says

gi-docgen learned how to load favicons, see its docs for more info.

I also added a way to generate favicons for gi-docgen to Emblem!

There is a reference pull request at https://github.com/flatpak/libportal/pull/138.

Miscellaneous

eeejay says

I wrote an introductory blog post to libspiel, a new xdg speech API and framework https://blog.monotonous.org/2024/01/10/Introducing-Spiel/

GNOME Foundation

The GUADEC 2024 Call for Participation is now open! This year’s conference will take place in-person Denver, USA from July 19-24 and will be streamed online for remote attendees. We are looking for both remote and in-person submissions, workshop and BoF requests may also be submitted during this call. All submissions are due by Feb 18. https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/01/10/guadec-2024-call-for-participation-opens/

Caroline Henriksen announces

The GNOME Foundation is looking for volunteers to help staff our booth at FOSDEM. If you are attending in Brussels (Feb 3-4) and are interested in helping please take a look at our post on Discourse for more details: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/call-for-volunteers-gnome-booth-at-fosdem/18931

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#129 Hello 2024

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 29 to January 05.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects. Many of us were/are on holidays so we skipped last week TWIG. Here are the highlights for the past 2 weeks.

Dor Askayo is joining the team to continue their work on variable refresh rate (vrr) support in Mutter https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/merge_requests/1154

Andy worked on some follow up from the gnome-online-account refactoring

Remove GOA from gnome-initial setup

Remove the Fedora provider

Andy started working and investigating http handlers https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xdg/shared-mime-info/-/issues/199

Jonas sent Kernel patches for the Bluetooth stack

Disconnect bluetooth devices before cutting power to the chip via rfkill: https://lore.kernel.org/linux-bluetooth/20240102181946.57288-1-verdre@v0yd.nl/

Fix a mistake with scans where the wrong flags were checked and scans might not be started https://lore.kernel.org/linux-bluetooth/20240102180810.54515-1-verdre@v0yd.nl/

Improve logic + hardware support for establishing connections to more than a single device concurrently https://lore.kernel.org/linux-bluetooth/20240102185933.64179-1-verdre@v0yd.nl

Sam is working on a modern design for Orca settings https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/issues/240

Sam improved GNOME Shell theme and High Contrast

Sam fixed isues with symbolic icons and synced GTK icons https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/-/merge_requests/6686

Georges made a major contribution to xdg-desktop-portals documentation https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1253

Evan started working on making GTK 4 accesibility APIs available to languange bindings https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gjs/-/issues/392

Adrian added bulk directory support to systemd homed https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30646

Tobias is working on improving the GNOME Shell scrollbars design

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/issues/7288

https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/blob/master/notifications-calendar/dynamic-scrollbars.png

Hub is writing documentation for the internals of Flatpak

Philip and Matthias hard work of porting GLib docs to gi-docgen made its way into GNOME Nightly and is now available in the SDK

Tait is investiating improving accessibility modifiers for screen readers on Wayland https://github.com/xkbcommon/libxkbcommon/issues/425

Following our interest to improve text to speech, we are exploring ways to make it easier to distribute and discover TTS engines and are discussing libspiel with Eitan https://github.com/eeejay/libspiel

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Further work by Thomas Haller has landed in GLib, eliminating some global locks which serialised g_object_ref() and g_object_unref() calls across all threads. The locking is now per-object. This should speed up multithreaded programs. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3774

Philip Withnall announces

Thomas Haller’s work to fix a long-standing race in g_object_unref() has landed in GLib main (see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3064). Let us know if you spot any new crashes or misbehaviours with object refcounting!

Third Party Projects

dabrain34 reports

GstPipelineStudio 0.3.5 is here with 2024 . Happy new year GPS !

Here is the changelog:

logs: receive multiple log sources such as GST logs and messages.

settings: add a log level selection

rename gst_pipeline_studio to gst-pipeline-studio

can open a pipeline from the command line

دانیال بهزادی announces

Carburetor 4.4.0 released with a new OverlaySplitView to show detailed output and a set of main icons from Guardian Project’s Orbot.

Carburetor is an app built upon Libadwaita to let you easily set up a TOR proxy on your session, without getting your hands dirty with system configs. Initially aimed at simplifying life for GNOME enthusiast on their mobiles, it’s now fully usable with mouse and/or keyboard too.

Krafting says

Hello everyone, last year I’ve released Playlifin Voyager. It’s a tool to export and import playlists from and to your Jellyfin server. So you can reinstall your server and not lose your playlists if the libraries are the same. (You can also use it as a backup solution for your playlists!)

It is available on Flathub !

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2023.12.0 is here! This release contains many bug fixes for various issues users were facing across the app :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where split chapters were not renamed correctly

Fixed an issue where videos would not download greater than 1080p resolution

Fixed an issue where preferring AV1 codec would not properly select av1 videos

Parabolic will now remember the chosen file type for generic downloads

Redesigned the interface for the Windows app

Parabolic no longer depends on psutil

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Gregor Niehl reports

This week, Fretboard was accepted into the GNOME Circle, an app for looking up and visualizing guitar chords. Congratulations!

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

It is a new year 🎆️, and what better way to celebrate this than to release Fractal 6.rc? It has been only 2 weeks since our latest beta release, but we have been hard at work during the holidays.

Here is an excerpt:

Matrix URIs can be opened with Fractal, it is even registered as a handler for the matrix scheme

Our Join Room dialog now shows some room details as a preview upon entering an identifier or URI

The verification flow was rewritten to rely more on the Matrix Rust SDK, hopefully solving most issues that occurred before

Room members now have a profile page that allows, among other things, to kick, ban or ignore them

Speaking of ignoring users, the list can be managed from the account settings

The dialog to view an event’s source was reworked to show more details about the event

… and a lot of other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, it should be mostly stable and we expect to only include minor improvements until the release of Fractal 6.

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to contribute to an open source project, take your pick amongst our issues. Any help is very welcome!

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick reports

Denaro V2024.1.0 is here with many bug fixes to ring in the new year!

Thanks to @JoseBritto for working on the fixes for most of these issues :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where the generated ids of new transactions were incorrect

Fixed an issue that caused sort to behave inconsistently

Fixed an issue where dragging and dropping an account file was not working

Fixed an issue where help documentation was not showing in-app

Fixed an issue where some ofx files could not be imported

Fixed an issue where the calendar was not showing marked days after pressing the “Today” button

Fixed an issue where tag buttons would grow to super long sizes

Added more logging to help debug issues

Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb says

A new version of Crosswords was released. This version was focused almost entirely on improvements to the crossword editor, with significant changes under the hood. The editor now features additional panels to help write cryptic clues, as well as grid statistics. Read more details in the release blog post

Cavalier ↗

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick reports

Cavalier V2024.1.0 is here! This release contains some new features and improved drawing algorithms :)

Let’s dance our way into 2024 🕺🕺

Here’s the full changelog:

The wave box drawing mode now draws smoother bezier curves (Thanks @OggyP)

Users can now specify --fg aarrggbb or --bg aarrggbb command line arguments to change the foreground and background color of the running Cavalier instance respectively

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Google Summer of Code

During Google Summer of Code, Dave Patrick worked on rewriting Bustle. The work consisted of:

Switching from Haskell to Rust

Port to GTK 4

Modernize the UI & codebase

You can read about the GSoC progress at https://seadve.github.io/tags/gsoc-2023/ and the release is available on Flathub!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#128 Bye Bye 2023

Fri, 29 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 22 to December 29.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof announces

Khalid Abu Shawarib improved the discoverability of the custom folder icon feature in Files. Now there is an edit button and also, if a custom icon is set, a quick reset button.

This was a side effect of porting a few dialogs away from deprecated GTK dialog APIs

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Sophie (she/her) reports

Loupe nightly now uses the first alpha version of Glycin 1.0 to load images. This brings stricter sandboxing for image loaders when used outside of Flatpaks. It also limits the memory usage of loaders to avoid many accidental or malicious out of memory scenarios. The memory limitation is not available in Flatpaks yet.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Vlad Krupinski says

This week I released Errands 45.1 with some nice new features:

Support for multiple task lists

Tasks now have properties: notes, start and due date, priority, percentage of completion, tags

Improved synchronization with Nextcloud Tasks and CalDAV with support for multiple calendars and task properties

Import and export in “.ics” format

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix says

I added drag-and-drop support to Fragments, and implemented a new (optional) setting which automatically moves the torrent file to trash after adding it.

Third Party Projects

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Matthew Dennis made Phosh’s bottom bar smaller so there’s more space for apps like video players on your phone - especially in landscape. The screenshot features livi a little video player targeting mobile:

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data

Sjoerd Stendahl reports

Since the summer we’ve been working hard on the next release of Graphs. A full announcement of the next stable release will follow soon, but we want to give it a bit of time to do some more testing and final polish to make sure the next stable release is the best it can be. In the meantime, I’m happy to announce an official beta version which is feature-complete, and encourage anyone to give it a spin!

Some of the highlights of this upcoming release include, but are not limited to:

A major UI overhaul with the new GNOME 45 widgets

Brand new style previews

Curve fitting

Touchpad gestures are now supported on the canvas to zoom and pan the view.

Translations are now hosted on Weblate. Click the link if you want to contribute to translations. Currently we’re missing strings for Spanish and German, but help with other languages are always welcome as well.

To install the beta, follow the instructions on our Github page. Stay tuned for a full announcement for the stable release somewhere in the upcoming weeks!

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

This week I published Fretboard 5.0. It may not arrive in wrapping paper, but this timely release still includes some nice gifts:

An enharmonic indicator that lets you see when chords have more than one possible name

Automatic chord name formatting, turning your sloppily typed “bb maj7” into a beautiful “B♭maj7”

More consistent keyboard shortcuts

Enhanced accessibility for screen readers

German and Swedish translations, making Fretboard available in a total of 13 languages

If you would like to come with suggestions, report bugs, translate the app, or contribute otherwise, feel free to reach out! Download Fretboard on Flathub.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi reports

Version 0.11.0 of Flare got now released. This release brings many important fixes for bugs which made previous versions pretty much unusable for new devices. This includes a fix for syncing contacts, but also a fix for linking recently breaking. This release also includes many UI improvements, like an improved setup window which introduces users to Flare, lets them choose between using Flare as a linked device or as a primary device (this is currently still disabled as it still needs more extensive testing) and gives further information on what important bugs are still in Flare and how to get in contact. There were also many more minor UI improvements and also updates to the newest GTK and libadwaita versions.

You may have noticed that the last release of Flare was quite some time ago (about 4 months). This was due to aforementioned issues we had with contact syncing and linking; those first required upstream fixes and those fixes furthermore introduced some regressions which also needed to be fixed. This required in total eight beta releases for everything to be (hopefully) fixed.

That’s all for this week!

See you next year, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#127 Welcome News

Fri, 22 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 15 to December 22.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Adrian reworked some of homed’s internals to allow admins to change user settings without the user’s password https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/30109

Adrian made it possible to change homed passwords through AccountService https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/accountsservice/accountsservice/-/merge_requests/144?commit_id=d12301d8f7d6ee18bbc47a0825abb78fb89dfcb3#note_2214175

Adrian experimented with making the session lock through GDM. This allows homed to throw out the encryption keys to the home directory whenever the session is locked.

Joanie added a globally available Table Navigator to Orca https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/orca/-/commit/1a330fc42

Joanie made a number of keybinding and key-grab code clean-up, bug fixes, and improvements

Alice worked on bottom sheet resizing, ported message dialogs to the new system, and made it possible for dialogs to always use floating/bottom sheet presentation instead of switching automatically

Ivan tested a new Tracy dladdr() cache for callstack sampling. While it significantly reduces contention with GJS and makes it much more viable to profile GNOME Shell with callstack sampling, it still results in a little bit of contention overhead.

Georges pushed v2 of the USB portal

https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/pull/5620

https://github.com/flatpak/xdg-desktop-portal/pull/1238

Georges made the screenshot portal use GNOME Shell’s screencasting UI when available https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/2999

Julian is investigating adding scroll support to the Quick Settings popover, which would be very useful on small laptops

Julian worked on keeping symbolic icons at their nominal size, inside a circle https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3066

Philip made online docs for GLib/GObject/Gio use gi-docgen https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3037

Tobias added neighboring file access to the File Chooser Dialog mockup https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/app-mockups/-/blob/master/files/file-chooser.png

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) reports

Our new Welcome to GNOME site is now available via welcome.gnome.org. The page helps newcomers as well as more experienced contributors to get started with working in a new area within GNOME. The pages are currently available in Brazilian Portuguese, English, Indonesian, Russian, Swedish, and Ukrainian. Contribution instructions for apps are auto-generated with information specific to more than 90 apps. You can learn more in my introduction blog post.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

In Tracker SPARQL, new optimizations landed thanks to Carlos Garnacho which will significantly reduce peak memory usage and overall memory allocations during the indexing process. See the MR for full details.

Sam Thursfield reports

Carlos Garnacho landed some new functional tests in Tracker Miners that exercise failure cases in metadata extraction and potential escape routes from the sandbox. See the MR for details.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Thomas Haller has been working hard to fix a latent race in GObject, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3769

Third Party Projects

Alain says

Planify 4.3 has been released and is available on Flathub

What’s New:

Quick Add Improvements: Now supports project selection, due date, priority, labels and pinned.

Sidebar filter settings: It is now possible to re-order, hide filters and the task cutter.

Backup support: It is now possible to create a backup copy and import it from somewhere else. Planify will import all your tasks and settings.

Offline support for Todoist: You were without internet, keep using Planify with Todoist, the tasks will be saved locally and synchronized when the connection returns.

Bug Fixed and Translations

Russian translations thanks to @hachikoharuno.

Fix typos in welcome project #1079 thanks to @Jaques22.

Fixed error when displaying color in calendar events.

Bugs fixed #1076, #1073.

Krafting announces

Hello everyone!

I’ve released version 2.0 of Playlifin, I reworked most of the code to make it less prone to errors while also adding some new features!

New features include:

Removed the “Logs” function. Everything is logged through the console or a file

Added a setting to turn off SSL certificate verification (So it can work with self-signed certs!)

Added a status bar with the current progress instead of the Logs

Added a setting to also search Video, Audio or Both (Default: Audio)

Now using libadwaita widgets in the header bar

Now available on Flathub

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Let’s celebrate the winter (or summer) solstice with a new Fractal beta release! Even though Fractal 5 was released only 1 month ago, development has been going at a steady pace with a few new contributors, so we want our users to benefit from our progress.

The staff’s picks:

Restoring sessions from Secret Services other than GNOME Keyring has been fixed

Times follow the format (12h or 24h) from the system settings

Media history works in encrypted rooms

The accessibility of the sidebar was improved

More notifications settings were added, you can now set global and per-room behavior and even manage your keywords

A bunch of refactoring, notably the port to the glib::Properties macro from gtk-rs that helped us removed almost 3000 lines of code!

As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!

If you find yourself with time to spare during these end-of-year holidays, you can always try to fix one of our issues. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Miscellaneous

In week 3 of the Outreachy internship around end-to-end testing, our interns Dorothy and Tanju worked on testing GNOME’s accessibility features. The following tests landed in the ‘master’ branch of the openqa-tests this week:

a11y_seeing: Testing the “High Contrast” and “Large Text” features

a11y_hearing: Testing the Speech Dispatcher text-to-speech system

You can see an example test run here. Several more tests are in development and will land soon. See the project board to see what is coming up!

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

Save the date! GUADEC 2024 will take place in Denver, Colorado, USA and online from July 19-24. The Call for Participation and Registration will open soon, be sure to check guadec.org for those links early 2024.

For more information about GUADEC 2024, please visit the full news post: https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/12/20/guadec-2024-in-denver-colorado/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#126 New Apps

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 08 to December 15.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Philip landed libgirepository changes in GLib, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3703

Julian’s notifications grouping merge request is close to ready https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3012

Alice started implementing bottom sheets/adaptive dialogs and using them in Libadwaita https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libadwaita/-/commits/wip/alice/bottom-sheets

Dhanuka released libsecret 0.21.2

Dhanuka sent an initial PR to implement server-side dbus secret service interfaces in oo7 https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/oo7/pull/56

Evan is working on updating the sync/async APIs for the girepository migration to GITypeInstance

Philip got the MR for “GBytes variants for GSocket receive methods” ready https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3603

Over the past few weeks Andy worked on getting WebDAV support in GNOME Online Accounts over the line, and porting to OAuth2.0 and GTK4/Libadwaita https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-online-accounts/-/merge_requests/137

Andy wrote a blog post about this and more of his work on GNOME Online Accounts

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Carlos Garnacho added another layer of protection to the metadata extraction sandbox in Tracker Miners. This sandbox is a defense in case a security issue is found in one of the distro-packaged libraries that tracker-extract uses to parse user content. The sandbox now uses Landlock, a recently-added security API in Linux, to limit filesystem access on top of the existing protections provided by SECCOMP.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

libgirepository in GLib has just been significantly reworked to use GTypeInstance; expect more API breaks from it before its first stable release; see https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3703

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Paper Clip ↗

Edit PDF document metadata.

Diego Iván M.E says

Paper Clip v4.0 is here!

This new release brings some quality of life improvements and new features:

Paper Clip now supports XMP metadata! You can (finally) edit XMP properties for documents that support it and keep them in sync with the ordinary metadata.

Better thumbnails (again): Thumbnails now use less memory and load faster. This is specially noticeable for large documents, which now use 80-90% less memory. There is still room for improvement, so expect more changes in this lane in upcoming releases.

The About Window now shows debug information relevant for bug reports.

A Nautilus Extension for Paper Clip is now available in the Github repository. Thanks to DodoLeDev for working on this!

You can grab the latest release from Flathub

Third Party Projects

Gianni Rosato reports

My GUI for AV1 encoding, Aviator, just got a major speed boost! Encoding with Aviator 0.4.3 is now around 17-53% faster for presets 0 through 6 and 1-4% better quality for presets 7+. Here are the details:

Updated SVT-AV1 to a custom fork by BlueSwordM featuring changes from 1.8.0, including speed-ups for presets 1 through 6 that improve encoding speed by 17-53%. This fork features an adaptive quantization curve that boosts deltaq based on variance within superblocks. This is not available in mainline SVT-AV1

SVT-AV1 now features NEON optimization, making encoding up to a whopping 8 times faster than before on ARM-based platforms

Updated to GNOME 45 runtime

Minor changes in the codebase that should make it easier to add an Open GOP toggle in the future (currently breaks keyframe placement)

Download on Flathub !

#GNOME #Education #LearnToCode #VideoGames

If you’re interested in those topics you might also be interested in my upcoming “weekend” project.

[teaser] Gameeky: A new learning tool to develop STEAM skills

tfuxu reports

Halftone 0.5.0 improves on mobile users experience, by moving sidebar to the bottom on mobiles. It also comes with options retention, so now you can quickly dither multiple images using the same settings. Get this new release from Flathub

Dave Patrick reports

I’m pleased to announce Dagger, a new app used to edit and view Graphviz dot files!

hergertme reports

Prompt is a new terminal application that focuses on immutable and container-oriented desktops. It can be thought of as a companion terminal to GNOME Builder! You can read about how container technology was lifted from GNOME Builder as well as what it takes to design a robust terminal that can be shipped as a Flatpak at https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/12/14/prompt/

Alain reports

Planify 4.2 has been released and is available on Flathub.

This release contains numerous fixes and few other changes:

Icons size update.

Custom decoration layout support.

Improved colors in light theme.

Sort to-dos by project available.

Ability to configure or decrease the size of the sidebar.

Available configuration to change the start day of the week in the calendar.

Added the functionality to select the home page.

Uses new libadwaita widgets and GNOME 45

Bugs fixed #1053, #1026, #1042, #1041, #1037, #1035, #1015, #1001, #995, #946, #1055.

Railway ↗

Travel with all your train information in one place.

schmiddi announces

Version 2.2.0 of Railway was released. This release has many minor quality-of-live and UI improvements. It adds a filter for the provider list, and an indicator of when a journey was last refreshed. Railway now also saves the window size between restarts, disables some buttons while content is loading and furthermore does not collapse journey legs anymore when refreshing a journey. Railway can now also be translated with Weblate, and is already available in Dutch, French and German.

The full change log can be viewed in the release notes.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#125 Portalled USB Devices

Fri, 08 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 01 to December 08.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard reports

As part of the GNOME STF (Sovereign Tech Fund) project, a number of community members are working on infrastructure related projects.

Georges opened pull requests fo his work on the USB portal

added —usb and —no-usb to flatpak

portal API specification

experimental branch of Boatswain for testing

Julian fixed a lot of style and polish issues on the notification grouping MR

Jonas fixed hidden scrollbars taking up space in the layout in GNOME Shell

Joanie fixed several issues in Orca related to keygrabs, and some regressions from the giant table refactor

Evan Welsh is working on sync, async and finish annotations for GObject introspection

With the help of Daiki, Dhanuka completed porting the PAM module from gnome-keyring to libsecret

Areas we’re currently investigating:

Exploring the constraints and options for fractional scaling

We are looking at the state of speech synthetizers on Linux, particularly in relationship with the screen reader

We’re discussing the technical requirements for adaptive dialogs (bottom sheets)

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield reports

Some memory usage fixes landed in the Tracker SPARQL database library this week:

Fewer memory allocation operations when processing text (!637), thanks to Carlos Garnacho

Memory leak in tracker:strip-punctuation() fixed (!639), thanks to Lukáš Tyrychtr

Third Party Projects

Giant Pink Robots! reports

I released the v2023.12.7 version of Varia, a new download manager written with GTK4 and Libadwaita. Originally released a week prior, but now it has more essential features built in.

It’s available on Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.giantpinkrobots.varia

Krafting says

I’m pleased to announce the release of Playlifin, a simple tool that aids in importing your YouTube music playlists to your Jellyfin server!

It’s now available on Flathub.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.34.0 is out. This includes an updated Wayland compositor (phoc) that works with the recently released wlroots 0.17.0 adding support for new Wayland protocols like security-context-v1 (to limit protocol access for flatpaks). We also fixed night light support and drag and drop on touch screens.

Check the full details here

Miscellaneous

Felipe Borges reports

We are happy to announce that GNOME is sponsoring two Outreachy internship projects for the December 2023 to March 2024 Outreachy internship round where they will be working on implementing end-to-end tests for GNOME OS using openQA.

Dorothy Kabarozi and Tanjuate Achaleke will be working with mentors Sam Thursfield and Sonny Piers.

Stay tuned to Planet GNOME for future updates on the progress of this project!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#124 Fixes and Improvements

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 24 to December 01.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Tobias Bernard announces

As part of our infrastructure initiative funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund, a number of community members have been hard at work for the past weeks.

Some highlights of what landed this week:

Julian fixed a scrolling bug in GNOME Shell https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3023

Sam landed some more High Contrast stylesheet fixes in GNOME Shell https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-shell/-/merge_requests/3030

Sonny added builtin WebP support to GNOME Platform/SDK https://floss.social/@sonny/111505420648908207

Philip finished the work to drop gtk-doc support from GLib https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3037

Adrian reworked systemd-homed internals to allow an admin user to change a standard user’s account settings without the user’s password

Hubert has been hunting memory leaks in Flatpak and portals related project

New projects started this week:

Tobias is working on overhauling the design for “Open With” dialogs, adding support for apps to register themselves as URL handlers for a specific domain https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/blob/master/open-with/open-with.png

Evan Welsh joined the team to help on improving language bindings

Matt Campbell joined the team to work on the prototype for a new a11y architecture https://blogs.gnome.org/a11y/2023/10/27/a-new-accessibility-architecture-for-modern-free-desktops

We are working on a strategy for improving the experience of users with visual impairement

The team is collaborating with systemd for TPM backed secrets encryption and storage for the desktop keyring

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

gtk-doc has been removed from GLib and all the documentation is now generated using gi-docgen. Help is needed to update the syntax in doc comments to re-enable links in the documentation! See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/3037

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw says

Gaphor, the simple UML and SysML modeling tool, version 2.22.0 is now out! Some of the major changes include:

Add app preferences for overriding dark mode and the language to English. As part of this we helped improve libadwaita 1.4.0 support on macOS and Windows.

Proxy port improvements

Add allocations toolbox with allocate relationship item

Add members in model browser

Make line selection easier by increasing tolerance

Make model loading more lenient

The new version is available on Flathub.

Third Party Projects

دانیال بهزادی says

Carburetor 4.2.0 released with a new icons and it’s now on Flathub too. Carburetor is built upon Libadwaita to let you easily set up a TOR proxy on your session, without getting your hands dirty with system configs. Initially aimed at simplifying life for GNOME enthusiast on their mobiles, it’s now fully usable with mouse and/or keyboard too.

Pods ↗

Keep track of your podman containers.

Marcus Behrendt reports

I have released Pods in version 2.0.0. The biggest changes are that volumes are now supported and that the basic layout of the interface has been redesigned. Pods now has a completely new look, with a sidebar and new libadwaita 1.4 widgets.

Kooha ↗

Elegantly record your screen.

Dave Patrick says

Aside from a range of critical fixes, Kooha is getting a new UI to address previous design limitations and enhance the overall experience.

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi announces

A new release of gi-docgen, 2023.2, the documentation generator for C libraries using gobject-introspection. Lots of quality of life improvements, as well as larger changes, like:

parse the default value attribute for GObject properties

a complete redesign of the search results, with better output on smaller form factors

support for admonitions (note, warning, important) inside the documentation blocks

display the implemented interfaces in the class pseudocode description

add a link in extra content files to their source in the code repository

and much more…

You can download gi-docgen 2023.2 from the GNOME file server or from PyPI.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#123 Infrastructure Work

Fri, 24 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 17 to November 24.

Sovereign Tech Fund

As part of our infrastructure initiative funded by the Sovereign Tech Fund, a number of community members have been hard at work for the past weeks. Starting now we will send a weekly update of our progress on thisweek.gnome.org.

Some highlights of our progress so far:

Home Encryption

Adrian Vovk added support for systemd homed in AccountService. This is the first step towards safer encryption and a nicer user experience.

Sam Hewitt is working with Adrian on the designs and task definitions for home encryption.

XDG Desktop Portal

Georges Stavracas and Hubert Figuière are improving existing portals, doing various maintenance tasks on the project, and introducing some exciting new portal APIs, such as the USB portal. Things that have already landed include:

Drag and drop of folders will now work with sandboxed applications (Drop a folder from Nautilus onto Amberol)

Some bug fixes in the document portal, notably the one preventing ejection of USB flash drives (thanks Alex) and the one preventing using sqlite3 databases

Expanded website and developer documentation

The new USB portal is already capable of the following:

Creating and monitoring apps using USB devices through the portal

It has a permission to control which apps are allowed to use the portal

In the works is accessing USB devices with per-device, per-app permissions.

GLib

Philip Withnall is doing lots of maintenance tasks on GLib, including porting documentation to gi-docgen.

Secret Management

Dhanuka Warusadura ported the PAM module from gnome-keyring to libsecret.

This is the first step towards replacing gnome-keyring with oo7.

CSS Variables in GTK

Alice is adding CSS variables (aka custom properties) support to GTK.

Shell and Compositor Performance

Ivan Molodetskikh is improving the GNOME Shell/Mutter profiling instrumentation and adding integration for the Tracy profiler. As part of this, he had already discovered several actionable performance bugs. Thanks to Mutter maintainers, some of those have fixes pending or merged.

Notifications

Julian Sparber and Jonas Dreßler are working on improving notifications, both in terms of platform APIs and user interface. As part of this Julian is implementing grouping notifications by app in GNOME Shell.

GNOME Online Accounts

Andy Holmes is improving GNOME Online Accounts, including CalDAV/CardDAV support, port to GTK4, and replacing the embedded web view in favor of using the preferred browser for OAuth2. We’re also discussing more general improvements to the GOA architecture.

Accessibility

Sam Hewitt has fixed some accessibility issues in the GNOME Shell stylesheet. Joanie Diggs is reducing technical debt in the Orca screen reader, improving documenation, and rewriting table and table cell support.

Hardware Support

Jonas Dreßler is working on hardware-accelerated screencasts and improvements to the Linux Bluetooth stack.

Emmanuel Gil Peyrot (Link Mauve) is adding support for GL_KHR_robustness in Mutter. It allows the session to recover from a GPU driver crash. This is a requirement to unlock newer graphical features that aren’t well tested yet with GPU drivers.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps is now showing the “mode of transportation” icon instead of the generic filled circle start icon in the turn instruction list for turn-by-turn navigation as an extra detail and to act as a reminder as to what kind of routing it is showing

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Alexander Slobodeniuk has added a new g_log_writer_default_set_debug_domains() function in GLib which allows enabled debug logging domains to be changed at runtime without modifying G_MESSAGES_DEBUG in the environment (which can never be threadsafe)

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth announces

This week Switcheroo was accepted into GNOME Circle. Switcheroo lets you convert images to different file types and resize them. Congratulations!

The second app to enter Circle this week is Decibels. Decibels lets you play audio files in a beautiful, convenient, and intuitive way. Congratulations!

Solanum ↗

Balance working time and break time.

Chris 🌱️ reports

Solanum 5.0.0 has been released and is available on Flathub.

This release brings a minor visual refresh and few other changes:

Added the ability to view the release notes for the latest version

Swapped to a new audio player

Fixed the notification buttons

Miscellaneous translation updates

Dialect ↗

Translate between languages.

Rafael Mardojai CM reports

Dialect 2.2.0 has been released and is available on Flathub.

This release contains various improvements and bug fixes, these are the most destacable:

Now you can use Lingva Translate text-to-speech in addition to Google’s. There are also new translation providers for Bing and Yandex.

The preferences window has been redesigned to make it easier to change the settings for each provider.

Third Party Projects

Akshay Warrier says

Biblioteca 1.2 is now available on Flathub!

Biblioteca now supports tabs! Middle-clicking on the sidebar or documentation links now opens them in new tabs. It also received some other improvements and bug fixes such as

Fixed an issue where shortcuts window prevents app from closing

Fixed an issue where main window CSS leaks into other windows

Shows a status page in sidebar when no results found

Fixed layout with “Large Text” accessibility option

Girens for Plex ↗

Girens is a Plex Gtk client for playing movies, TV shows and music from your Plex library.

tijder says

This week Girens version 2.0.3 is released. This is a small update. In this version the old sidebar is replaced for an overlay sidebar. This will make the appearance of the application more inline with other Gnome applications.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

We just released Fractal 5! It is a full rewrite compared to Fractal 4, that now leverages GTK 4, libadwaita, and the Matrix Rust SDK. The two-and-a-half-year effort brings a new interface that fits all screens, big 🖥️ or small 📱, but should still look familiar to users of earlier versions.

It still offers the same old features you know and love, with a few additions. Highlights (italics is new✨ in 5):

Find rooms to discuss your favorite topics, or talk privately to people, securely thanks to end-to-end encryption

Send rich formatted messages, files, or your current location

Reply to specific messages, react with emoji, edit or remove messages

View images, and play audio and video directly in the conversation

See who has read messages, and who is typing

Log into multiple accounts at once (with Single-Sign On support)

It will be available in a few hours on Flathub.

For our next version, we intend to add missing key features, like notification settings, room settings and moderation… We also plan on improving the accessibility and polish the rough edges. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Extension Manager ↗

Browse and install GNOME Shell extensions.

firox263 says

Extension Manager 0.4.3 has been released and is now available on Flathub.

This release contains numerous fixes to sorting and search:

Updated search to be fully compatible with the latest version of extensions.gnome.org

Fixed a long running issue where correct search results were overwritten by a previous query

Fixed an issue where the global extensions toggle became ‘stuck’

Uses new libadwaita widgets and GNOME 45

In special news, Extension Manager has reached its one millionth download on Flathub. Thanks to everyone for the support! 🎉

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#122 Experimenting and Learning

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 10 to November 17.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench is a code playground and Library to learn, experiment and prototype with GNOME development and technologies. Download on Flathub

The highlights of the new 45.3 update are

Python support! Thanks to Marco Köpcke (Capypara) It comes with a whopping 52 Library entries already ported to Python thanks to Gregor Niehl (gregorni) and Urtsi Santsi.

Blueprint formatting is now supported and makes working with UI code much nicer, no more manual indentation fixes. Thanks to Gregor Niehl (gregorni) and James Westman (flyingpimonster) for the great work on Blueprint.

The Library received great QoL improvements. It will be faster to launch and Workbench won’t quit if the Library is still open. It now shows which language are supported for each demo and allows you to open a demo in a specific language directly. Thanks to Diego Iván

The offline documentation viewer graduated into a standalone application named Biblioteca and received a bunch of improvements. You can download Biblioteca on Flathub. Thanks Akshay Warrier for this great addition to the GNOME development toolbox.

But also:

Each Workbench window now has its own title

JavaScript linter now complains on unused or undeclared variables

13 Library entries ported to Vala

2 Library entries ported to Rust

8 Library entries were improved

Newcomers are very welcome to join our chatroom #workbench:gnome.org and get help to port a Library entry. It’s fun and a great opportunity to learn about GNOME development, a new programming language or even as first programming experience.

Last but not least, Tobias Bernard is organizing a Local-First workshop next Monday in Berlin where Workbench will be used together with the p2panda Rust SDK. See the announcement.

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix announces

Fragments now automatically detects metered networks, and stops down/uploading data. Thanks Philip Withnall for the initial implementation!

Third Party Projects

ranfdev announces

Notify received various improvements for users which are self hosting ntfy.sh. Support for basic http authentication has been added, so that you can subscribe to private topics and prevent bad actors from trying to snoop your notifications.

tfuxu says

Halftone has received this week a new, refreshed UI based on the new libadwaita 1.4 widgets, as well as a couple of bugfixes and new translations. As always, you can download it from Flathub, or check the other installation methods if you don’t use Flapaks.

paddis 🌻🐢 announces

This week I released a new version of Jellybean! It introduces many new helpful features, such as assigning icons to items! You can get Jellybean from Flathub.

Diego Povliuk reports

Dosage 1.2.0 is out with fixes and a new preference for notification sound - Download on Flathub

Akshay Warrier says

Announcing the first release of Biblioteca 🎉

Download on Flathub

Biblioteca is a documentation viewer for GNOME. It includes documentation from the GNOME SDK as well as VTE, libportal, libspelling and libshumate. Only gi-docgen documentation is supported at the moment.

We are planning to add support for other sources and formats in the future.

Happy hacking!

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2023.11.0 is here! This update is HUGE, read about all the changes below :)

Here’s the changelog:

Parabolic is now available for Windows using Windows App SDK and WinUI 3

Added support for auto-generated subtitles from English

Added the ability to turn off downloading auto-generated subtitles

Added the advanced option to prefer the adv1 codec for video downloads

Added the “Best” resolution when downloading videos to allow Parabolic to pick the highest resolution for each video download

A URL can now be passed to Parabolic via the command-line or the freedesktop application open protocol to trigger its validation of startup

Improved the design of the Preferences dialog to allow for better searching of options

The shell notification when a download completes now contains an “Open File” button to open the download directly

Fixed an issue where aria’s max connections per server preference was allowed to be greater than 16

Fixed an issue where enabling the “Download Specific Timeframe” advanced option would cause a crash for certain media downloads

Fixed an issue where stopping all downloads would cause the app to crash

Fixed an issue where some videos were not validated correctly

Updated to GNOME 45 runtime with latest libadwaita design

Updated to .NET 8.0

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel reports

Gir.Core 0.5.0-preview.3 got released. It is the next step to the upcoming 0.5.0 release and updates the bindings to GNOME SDK version 45. See the release notes for further details.

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.11.0 is here!

Here’s the changelog:

Disallowed whitespace-only group and account names

Fixed an issue where exported PDF values were incorrect

Fixed an issue where some system cultures were not read properly

Fixed an issue where scrolling the sidebar with the mouse over the calendar would scroll the calendar instead

Fixed an issue where leading or trailing spaces in group/account names aren’t discarded

Updated to GNOME 45 runtime with latest libadwaita design

Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Shell Extensions

Aryan Kaushik reports

GNOME Extensions now supports a new metadata key - “version-name”, which gives extension developers more control over their Extension versioning. For more details visit the GJS Guide.

oae reports

Pano - Clipboard Manager is updated with new features, bug fixes and Gnome 45 support

added support for Gnome 45 (A big shout-out to @Totto16 for his fantastic job in bringing the extension over to Gnome 45!)

added wiggle animation to indicator. When you copy something indicator will wiggle

added font customization for search and title,

added window position settings. You can now put Pano at the top, bottom, left, right.

You can checkout the Pano on GitHub

Miscellaneous

Sam Thursfield announces

We are one step closer to making openQA testing infrastructure available to all GNOME apps, using GNOME OS as a base. Catch up on the latest developments in this status update.

Events

Kristi Progri announces

GNOME Asia is right around the corner and we all ready to kick off another succesful edition. The Local team is organizing the day trip excursion and we are finishing up last minute preparations before everything starts. If you would be interested to know more here’s the website: https://events.gnome.org/event/170/

This week we resumed the DEI meetings. If you would be interested to join please check the discourse for more information or join the engagement team for more details. We are looking for volunteers to help us with meeting notes and other logistic tasks such as adding information on gitlab and create new tickets. The next meeting would be on Dec 11th and the meeting link is available here : https://meet.gnome.org/dee-9kq-sfm-nof You can find the meeting notes and more about the structure of the meeting here: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/diversity-and-inclusion-meeting-announcement/17936

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#121 Public Interest Infrastructure

Fri, 10 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 03 to November 10.

Sovereign Tech Fund

Sonny announces

We are very happy to share that Sovereign Tech Fund is investing €1M into GNOME.

It will fund the following projects until the end of 2024:

Improve the current state of accessibility

Design and prototype a new accessibility stack

Encrypt user home directories individually

Modernize secrets storage

Increase the range and quality of hardware support

Invest in Quality Assurance and Developer Experience

Expand and broaden freedesktop APIs

Consolidate and improve platform components

Among other things, expect contributions to libsecret, oo7, Seahorse, systemd, Linux, Atspi, Orca, WebKitGTK, Shell, Mutter, Flatpak, AccountService, Settings, gdm, initial setup, Gtk, GLib, Online Accounts and language bindings.

The team, known as “GNOME STF” started on the 2nd of October and already made exciting and impactful changes. We look forward sharing more information and our work with everyone.

See the official announcement on the GNOME website https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/11/09/gnome-recognized-as-public-interest-infrastructure/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Impression ↗

Create bootable drives.

Khaleel Al-Adhami reports

Impression v3 was released! With this major version, we bring a new feature: Internet Download! Just choose your favorite distro and your device, then let it do the magic! Thanks to Brage Fuglseth for the wonderful design! You can get it from Flathub

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 says

I’ve updated the gtk-rs book to:

use async dialog API of libadwaita 1.3

replace the Leaflet with NavigationSplitView of libadwaita 1.4

Third Party Projects

ranfdev says

I’m announcing Notify, a native client for ntfy.sh. Notify will help you get notifications from your DIY projects. Have you built a smart doorbell🚪? Send a POST request to ntfy.sh, and get a notification on your desktop or smartphone every time someone is at your door! Add buttons to your notifications to execute an action as soon as you are notified. There are already hundreds of projects integrating with ntfy.sh: monitoring solutions 👀, download managers, backup managers, fediverse clients… Start receiving notifications from them! Or just wire up your microcontroller to send you a notification everytime your tomato plant is thirsty 🍅. Download Notify from flathub

Felipe Kinoshita reports

Kana is now available on Flathub!

It lets you quickly practice Hiragana and Katakana recognition, all characters also include audio files so you can learn what they sound like as well!

And thanks to Brage Fuglseth for the awesome icon!

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick announces

Tagger is now at V2023.11.2! This week Tagger saw many fixes and improvements making your tagging experience better :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to specify ""/"" in a Tag to File Name format string to move files to a new directory when renaming files

Tagger now has the ability to fix corrupted files right from within the app

Tagger will now display files with corrupted album art as corrupted files

Fixed an issue where specifying the directory separator in Tag to File Name when Limit Filename Characters was enabled caused new directories to not be made

Fixed an issue where some custom properties for vorbis and wav files could not be removed

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Fractal 5.rc1 is out!

Fractal 5.rc1 is the first release candidate since the rewrite of Fractal to take advantage of GTK 4 and the Matrix Rust SDK, an effort that started in March 2021.

The most notable changes since Fractal 5.beta2, that was released 2 months ago, are:

An awesome new look thanks to libadwaita 1.4

Read receipts tracking has been largely improved thanks to some upstream work in the Matrix Rust SDK

The same upstream work allows to have much better tracking of the activity in the rooms list

The full lists of read receipts and reactions on messages can be perused in popovers

Destructive actions like removing a message or leaving a room now ask for confirmation

The most noticeable performance issues and memory leaks were fixed to make Fractal run as smoothly as ever

This list is far from complete and hides more enhancements, including bug fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

As the version implies, if we don’t find any major bug in the next 2 weeks, our next release should be the long-awaited Fractal 5 stable version!

In the meantime, if you want to fix bugs, implement new features, or any other kind of contribution, you can get inspired by taking a look at our issues tracker on GitLab. Any help is greatly appreciated!

Footage ↗

Polish your videos.

Khaleel Al-Adhami announces

Footage has received a refresh with v1.3.0. This version brings multiple fixes for a variety of bugs and random crashes. It also updates its runtime to GNOME 45! Get it from Flathub.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#120 Updated Documentation

Fri, 03 Nov 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 27 to November 03.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

GLib has seen recent improvements for support on Hurd and musl, and is in the middle of an exciting port from gtk-doc to gi-docgen!

Evolution Data Server

Corentin Noël announces

This week the Evolution Data Server library gained a new homepage for its documentation using GitLab for an always up-to-date version and GI-Docgen to align with the documentation of other libraries in the ecosystem.

VTE / Terminal

hergertme announces

The venerable GNOME Terminal is working towards moving to GTK 4! You can find an initial implementation has landed in the git repository. A number of things need to be worked out for GNOME 46 and you can help make that happen! See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-terminal/-/wikis/Gtk4Warts for some outstanding issues.

Additionally, VTE will now time it’s rendering work based on the GdkFrameClock. This removes a longstanding issue where rendering would be capped around 40 frames-per-second.

Third Party Projects

Casper Meijn says

This week I released version 0.5.0 of Read It Later. This is a client for Wallabag, which allows you to save web articles and read them later. The significant changes are the upgrade to GNOME 45, a crash fix, better support for links in articles, and new translations. Download on Flathub.

paddis 🌻🐢 says

I released the first version of Jellybean, an app that allows you to manage inventories of various items, this week! You can download it from Flathub here.

kaii reports

Overskride v0.5.2 was released!

this release brings a lot of new features:

Audio profile support! now you can choose what profile to use with supported devices

Battery polling, so you can see the battery of the connected device

Auto accept files from trusted devices

…and a lot more fixes and quality of life improvements!

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick says

Tagger V2023.11.0 is here!

This release simply fixes an issue where Tagger crashed when loading album art data for some files.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Hot of the press is Phosh 0.33.0. The release is a bit smaller than usual as we spent some timer modernizing phoc to work well with wlroots git but there’s still some user visible improvements:

a consistent toggle for password visibility in modal dialogs

a new lockscreen plugin to spawn apps. Most useful when you forgot to launch your music player and don’t want to unlock just for that

better troubleshooting information

improved support for Indic languages

Check the full details here

Hebbot ↗

Hebbot is the bot behind TWIG that manages all the news.

Felix says

This week there were some technical difficulties, because TWIG-Bot (Hebbot) crashed during the creation of the issue (which is the reason for the delay).

This was caused by a rare bug involving Unicode text splitting. Thanks to the help of Sophie and Zander Brown, the problem was quickly identified and eliminated. I deployed a new updated version of the bot which fixes the crash.

Happy ending, the weekend is saved, I can publish TWIG! 🥳

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

gregorni announces

This week, the Blueprint formatter was merged! 🎉 You no longer have to worry about redundant whitespaces, forgotten indentations or random newlines anymore when editing your .blp files! This will make writing UI templates for GTK apps a lot more pleasant for developers.

The formatter is also part of the Blueprint LSP, meaning it should be integrated into development tools like GNOME Builder, VS Code and Workbench pretty soon.

I’d like to thank James Westman and Sonny for guiding me through the process of writing the formatter, they helped me a lot.

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) reports

After pitching a Welcome to GNOME website in March of this year, the pages are now ready for review.

Welcome to GNOME not only gives a lot of information about how to get started in GNOME but also generates a page for each Core, Circle, and Development app, providing the correct links and instructions for the respective app. That includes docs for the right programming language and GTK version, instructions on installing nightly builds if available, instructions on setting up GitLab or GitHub respectively, and much more customized information.

You can use the project’s issue tracker for feedback or create pull requests with content additions or corrections. If the content seems stable enough the pages will be submitted to our translation system within the next weeks, allowing for translation before the release.

Shell Extensions

somepaulo announces

A new version of the Weather or Not extension has been released, introducing a control to change the position of the indicator in the panel. You can now choose to place the indicator in either the left or right panel boxes or in one of four different positions in the central box. This is implemented in the main, GS45+ branch of the extension only.

Miscellaneous

barthalion says

flatpak-builder-lint is now capable of checking build directories and ostree repositories, regardless of the build tool used to produce an app. There also are new checks that ensure screenshots are properly mirrored and AppStream passes appstream-glib’s validation. We have also started publishing a Docker image to make it easier to integrate it with external CI systems. See its README for details!

We are putting the finishing touches to the updates moderation in Flathub. We have been historically very lenient past the initial review, trusting no one will try to sneak through with potentially shoddy AppStream changes. New builds changing certain user-facing fields will be marked for review and withheld until manually approved (or not!).

The server-side validation and the moderation dashboard are the backbone of the upcoming direct uploads feature, that will allow verified developers to publish their apps directly, without poking me or being forced to use either GitHub or flatpak-builder. There is no launch date for that yet, but we are getting there!

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Thanks to the stellar work of Arjan Molenaar, the pygobject bindings have been dramatically improving over the past month. Now Python developers can finally use instances of fundamental types, which was one of the big blockers for people implementing custom widgets with GTK4.

Starting with the GNOME 46 run time, you’ll be able to do advanced custom drawing using render nodes, as well as accessing low level windowing system event objects, in your Python applications.

GNOME Foundation

Sam Thursfield reports

Applications have now closed for the December Outreachy project, “Implement end-to-end tests for GNOME OS using openQA”. We received a number of very promising contributions to the openqa-tests and applications for the internship. Thanks to everyone who took the time to get involved. The accepted interns will be announced on Nov. 20, 2023 at 4pm UTC.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#119 Stylish Websites

Fri, 27 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 20 to October 27.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

The XDG Desktop Portal project has a stylish new website, thanks to Jakub Steiner!

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

lwildberg reports

Recently port of the Vala Reference Manual was merged and is now accessible online here. This was a longstanding effort to move away from a wiki-based solution. If you want to contribute to it now, you need to create a merge request in the Vala repository. Also it looks just so much more beautiful, doesn’t it? ;)

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

After more than 10 years, GLib is now generating the introspection data for its API instead of making it the responsibility of gobject-introspection. This is a requested step towards changing the documentation generator for the GLib API references from gtk-doc to gi-docgen. Work is ongoing to move libgirepository into GLib, as part of the overall goal of simplifying the introspection build. For more information, you can check my blog.

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) announces

In our ongoing efforts to organize the GNOME pages a bit better, we have created a Websites Team. The Websites Team is currently a loose association of people maintaining websites within the GNOME project. In this context, a bunch of website repositories have already been moved to the new GitLab team. You can also find us in #pages:gnome.org.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Marco Köpcke (Capypara) added Python support to Workbench 🎉

Are you learning Python or Gtk? Porting Library entries to Python is a great way to learn and contribute. Help welcome, see our guide.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

I’ve extended the chapter “The Main Event Loop” of the gtk-rs book to include more information on how to deal with async code. It shows how to:

embed blocking calls in an async context,

run async functions from external crates, and

integrate with tokio.

Thanks goes to Fina, Sabrina and Bilal Elmoussaoui for reviewing the changes.

Third Party Projects

d-k-bo says

Televido has been released and is available on Flathub!

It lets you livestream, search and play media from German-language public television services. Based on APIs provided by the MediathekView project, the content is delivered directly from the respective television services and may not be accessible outside of Germany.

Hunter Wittenborn reports

Celeste, a GTK file synchronization program that can connect to a plethora of cloud providers, has seen quite a few updates since last featured in This Week in GNOME.

Some notable changes include the addition of Proton Drive support, and new app icons that greatly help in showing what Celeste is.

Celeste is available on Flathub and the Snap Store if you’d like to give it a try.

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick says

Tagger V2023.10.0 is here! We’ve been hard at work this month bringing you a release packed with features and fixes :)

First, this release introduces a brand-new Windows version of the app built on WindowsAppSDK and WinUI 3! For all those unfortunately stuck using Windows at times, they can now use this great app on their system with a 1:1 feature match with the GNOME version!

In terms of features, this release introduces full support for playlists with relative paths, new tag properties, and a new information dialog for album art. Tagger will also watch a music folder library for changes on disk and prompt the user to reload the folder within the app. Furthermore, we fixed many issues and tweaked the design of some aspects of the app in which you can read all about below!

A special thanks to @kissthermite for bringing most of the changes in this release to our attention :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Tagger is now available for Windows using Windows App SDK and WinUI 3

Added the option to use relative paths when creating a playlist. This means that Tagger also now supports opening playlists with relative paths

Added the Disc Number, Disc Total, and Publishing Date fields to additional properties

Added information dialog for album art

Added an option in Preferences to limit file name characters to those only supported by Windows

Tagger will now watch a music folder library for changes on disk and prompt the user to reload if necessary

Tagger will now display front album art within a music file row itself if available

Tagger will now remember previously used format strings for file name to tag and tag to file name conversions

Fixed an issue where downloaded lyrics would sometimes contain html encoded characters

Fixed an issue where file names containing the < character caused the music file row to not display

Fixed an issue where the duration displayed for multiple selected files was wrong

Improved create playlist dialog ux

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Customize your login screen.

Mazhar Hussain announces

GDM Settings version 4 was released.

It brings a new UI style, GNOME 45 support, and more. Full release notes are available in GitHub releases.

Version 4 also brings the rename from “Login Manager Settings” to “GDM Settings”. Internally, GDM Settings has always been known as gdm-settings. So, the rename should makes things clearer and more consistent.

GDM Settings now supports GitHub Sponsors as well.

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

This week the Foundation has been preparing for a few upcoming events! Now that our new Executive Director has started, we’re hosting a Meet and Greet to give everyone a chance to get to know Holly and ask questions about her plans for the Foundation. This event is open to everyone, you can register and submit your questions for Holly here. Please note that all question submissions are due by Nov 7th.

We’ve also signed up for a booth at SCaLE x21. The 2024 conference will take place on March 14-17 and the CfP is still open. The deadline for submitting talks is Nov 1, 2023, so make sure to send yours in soon!

In addition to these two events, GNOME Asia 2023 is just over a month away! The full schedule of presentations is available on the event website and registration is open for both in-person and remote attendees. Please let us know you’re attending by registering.

Reminder: We’re still looking for sponsors for GNOME Asia 2023! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s summit reach out to mwu@gnome.org for more information.

Volunteer Opportunity: We’re looking for people to help manage the Foundation’s social media channels. If you’re interested in getting involved reach out to chenriksen@gnome.org for more information.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#118 Performant Terminals

Fri, 20 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 13 to October 20.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

hergertme says

VTE, the library providing a terminal emulator to GTK-based applications, received a number of performance improvements and new drawing abstractions.

VTE encrypts the scrollback buffer and uses zlib to reduce how much data needs to be encrypted. Now LZ4 is used instead of zlib to significantly speed up that process.

Performance improvements to how character and attribute arrays are managed has sped up support for bidirectional text. Additionally, many small string operations have been optimized to use faster code-paths in GLib. Many memory allocations have been completely eliminated.

Many small improvements have combined to improve the compilers ability to inline important code paths. Some code in VTE is C and some is C++ so removing various C wrappers around C++ code was completed. The PTY and UTF-8 parsers were tweaked slightly to allow skipping large chunks of sequential plain text without feeding through either parser.

A new drawing abstraction has been added which allows for GTK 3 support to continue using Cairo while GTK 4 now uses native render nodes with GtkSnapshot. Text is now rendered similarly to the work we did in GtkTextView which renders glyphs from a texture atlas on the GPU while also supporting color fonts and emoji without having to change shader programs.

Stylized line drawing is another important feature provided by terminal emulators. VTE now takes advantage of a recently added fast-path in GTK’s OpenGL renderer which can render alpha-channel texture masks with a color render node. This works very similarly to how text is rendered internally by GTK and speeds things up by avoiding additional offscreen framebuffers.

Now that VTE uses native render nodes, GTK can automatically calculate damage regions when submitting a frame to the compositor.

I still expect more work to be done around frame scheduling so that we can remove the ~40fps cap that predates reliable access to vblank information.

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield reports

The Tracker Extract metadata extraction tool has seen its SECCOMP sandbox improved in recent weeks. Thanks to Carlos Garnacho for spending significant effort tightening the list of system calls that parsing libraries are allowed to use, and to the various contributors who tested and reviewed changes across various architecture + OS combinations.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

ashpd ↗

Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

Support of the dynamic launcher portal in ASHPD Demo was added to the 0.4.1 release

Third Party Projects

kaii announces

overskride, the bluetooth app just got its first major release!

overskride is a simple, to the point app designed to make it easier than ever to interact with bluetooth devices. the main features are:

Send/Receive files

Bluetooth authentication agent

Multiple adapter support

…and many more

Emmanuele Bassi announces

After a year, there’s a new release of xdg-desktop-portal-gtk, the GTK portal implementation! Version 1.15.0 brings various changes:

Meson replaces Autotools as the build system

portal implementations that depend on GNOME private interfaces, like background, screenshot/screencast, and remote desktop, have been dropped to remove dependencies

the calendar settings from gsettings-desktop-schemas are now included in the Settings portal implementation The versioning policy has also been changed, and odd minor version numbers are not special any more. For more information, you can read the 1.15.0 release page.

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb announces

A quick development update for GNOME Crossword Editor. I added better selections for crossword grids, and used it to add a feature I’ve wanted for a long time: clue fragment highlighting.

The idea motivating this is that cryptic clues often break the answer into parts that are solved separately. In the video example, we give a hint to the word GIANTS being in the answer through the phrase “SATING DESTRUCTIVE”. In this instance, it’s a “destructive” (aka anagrammed) version of “sating”.

For the initial implementation of this feature, I’m just showing anagrams of the selected region, but this is a fertile area for other approaches. We are planning on also including headless/tailless words (eg, CAR ⇒ CART, CARD, SCAR, …) or call out word reversals (BRAG ⇒ GARB). I’d also love to add a dictionary with definitions and synonyms. I can also imagine adding common wordplay indicators (F, FF ⇒ LOUD, etc).

This work is based on the GSoC Project by Pratham Gupta to add an anagram lookup table to the word list.

Shell Extensions

glerro announces

Debian Linux Updates Indicator is updated for Gnome Shell45. Updates indicator for Debian Linux based distributions.

Check for updates and shows also the following packages status (as in Synaptic):

Available updates.

New packages in repository.

Local/Obsolete packages.

Residual config files.

Autoremovable packages.

Auto Activities ↗

Show activities overview when there are no windows, or hide it when there are new windows.

In this new version, Auto Activities v19 has been ported to ESM, making it compatible with GNOME Shell 45. In addition to minor changes, it now makes use of new Libadwaita widgets such as AdwSpinRow.

Check it out on extensions.gnome.org

Events

Caroline Henriksen reports

Registration is now open for #GNOMEAsia2023! This year’s summit takes place on Dec 1-3 in person in Kathmandu, Nepal, and online. Learn more and register today: https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/10/20/gnomeasia-2023-registration-open/

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

The GNOME Foundation has had a lot going on this week. The big news is we announced our new Executive Director, Holly Million. While she has only been on the job for a little over a week, her experience with running nonprofits has already made itself apparent. We are very lucky to have her on board!

We are inviting the community to come meet her on November 14th at 18:00 UTC for a meet-and-greet session. Please register at https://events.gnome.org/e/HollyMillion to come hear from Holly and her thoughts and plans for the Foundation. If you have questions for Holly, please submit them for this session before November 7th! Details are in the link above.

My work this week has been a lot of virtual paperwork as well as working on the books. I did take advantage of an unplanned power outage yesterday to go through some of the nonvirtual paperwork on my desk. In addition, work on the Code of Conduct committee is ongoing as we met this week to go through outstanding issues and discussed possible areas of improvement.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#117 Queued Fixes

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 06 to October 13.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

gnome-software has branched for 46, and Milan Crha has started landing various nice UI fixes which had been queued up after 45

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Video Trimmer ↗

Trim videos quickly.

I have released Video Trimmer 0.8.2, a minor update to refresh the visuals for GNOME 45.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo announces

I released Cartridges 2.6 with a much requested new feature:

You can now search your game library from your desktop!

To enable the feature, toggle “Cartridges” on from the Search page in the Settings app.

You can get the app from Flathub.

PS: If you want to support my work, I now accept donations through GitHub Sponsors! 💜

Third Party Projects

Philipp says

Migrating Meld

This is a little status update on my current progress of the meld migration to Gtk4 / libadwaita:

MainWindow uses Adw.ApplicationWindow

NewDiff page and both the FileDiff and DirDiff page are also migrated (mostly)

The Preferences dialog uses Adw.PreferencesDialog

Most of the signals have been migrated to event controllers

Most methods have been migrated to new signature (i.e. do_snapshot, do_size_allocate, etc.)

There are also things that are a bit more difficult, which I might not be able to solve alone:

Dialog execution is now async (save file, etc.) and has to be rewritten

Gdk.WindowAttr is gone (is it even needed anymore?)

Gtk.RecentChooser is gone, is there a replacement?

MeldSourceMap do_snapshot_layer not being called, although the new syntax is being used

DiffGrid do_size_allocate not being called, although the new syntax is being used (which currently prevents the colored overlay being drawn in HandleWindow)

Help is welcome!

Diego Povliuk announces

Dosage, an app to track your medications, it’s now available on Flathub. It packs a lot of features like inventory tracking, history, notifications and frequency modes.

Wildcard ↗

Test your regular expressions.

Felipe Kinoshita says

Wildcard 0.3.0 is out and available on Flathub, this update brings a new references panel to quickly test common regex patterns.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel says

Gir.Core 0.5.0-preview.2 got released. It is the next step to the upcoming 0.5.0 release and features some Api cleanups, bugfixes and added some more async APIs. See the release notes for further details.

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week a couple of nice accessibility improvements landed in Fretboard:

Support for both left-handed and right-handed guitar types

Independence from text direction for the chord diagram, fixing the mirroring issue it had with right-to-left languages

Turkish, Spanish, Norwegian, Portugese and Brazillian Portugese translations, making Fretboard available in a total of 9 languages

You can get Fretboard on Flathub.

Shell Extensions

somepaulo says

The Weather Or Not extension (https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5660/weather-or-not/) has been updated to fix a long-standing bug for Gnome 42-44 users where the indicator would appear twice. A new version has also been published, ingesting backend changes from upstream (Weather O’Clock extension) and refactoring code to work with Gnome Shell 45. For the next release, an options backend is in the works to allow changing the weather indicator placement on the panel.

GNOME Foundation

Sonny says

The board of directors has created the Internship Committee. It is responsible for promoting, organizing, and conducting internship programs such as Outreachy and Google Summer of Code.

https://wiki.gnome.org/InternshipCommittee https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/internship

Project proposals should now be submitted to https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/internship/project-ideas/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#116 Fragmented Files

Fri, 06 Oct 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 29 to October 06.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix reports

I’m happy to announce that Fragments now supports the most requested feature, namely selective downloading of files within a torrent!

The development for this took a lot of time, but I’m very pleased with the result. I put a lot of emphasis on scalability, so it doesn’t matter if a torrent has 5 files - or 5,000. To make it easier to find individual files within torrents, there is a search feature with the option to adjust the sorting according to your needs.

I would like to thank Maximiliano 🥑, who reviewed the huge MR, Tobias Bernard, who helped with the design - and the many people who helped with testing and gave valuable feedback!

I have some other exciting features planned for the next big release - stay tuned!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench 45.1 is available on Flathub

Highlights are

Reduce download size by relying on runtime extensions

Add an “Extensions” window to explain how to install them

New Library entry “CSS Gradients”

The documentation viewer “Manuals” gained keyboard shortcuts

Visual / design refresh

Paper Clip ↗

Edit PDF document metadata.

Diego Iván M.E reports

I’m glad to announce that Paper Clip v3.5 is out!

This is a relatively small release of Paper Clip, but brings some enhancements:

Updated and new translations.

The app now uses the new Libadwaita widgets, so it follows the look-and-feel of GNOME 45.

Paper Clip v3.5 supports multiple windows. Now if you try to open multiple files from the file explorer, it will open all of them in different windows instead of opening just one.

Get the latest version from Flathub.

Third Party Projects

angeloverlain announces

I’ve released Decibels, an app that lets you play audio files. It has a modern and adaptive interface, with a waveform, simple playback controls, and the ability to control the speed at which the audio is played.

Install Decibels from Flathub and give it a spin!

Heliguy announces

Introducing Warehouse, an app that manages installed Flatpaks, their user data, and Flatpak remotes. Warehouse 1.1.1 was recently released on Flathub!

Some notable features include:

Uninstalling Flatpaks in a batch

Displaying Flatpaks by what remote they are from

Finding unused user data and trashing it, or installing apps that match it

Displaying detailed information about apps and runtimes

Deleting current remotes and adding new remotes

https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.flattool.Warehouse https://github.com/flattool/warehouse

دانیال بهزادی reports

Carburetor 4.1.3 release pushing libadwaita 1.4 and GTK 4.12 for preferences with AdwSpinRow, AdwMessageDialog and GtkFileDialog. Carburetor is a libadwaita app for connecting to the TOR on GNOME mobile phones and desktops.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

I have published a first release of Snowglobe! A virtualization viewer built on top libmks and so uses the QEMU over DBus backend.

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp says

Tag it!

Turtle 0.6 has been released and it now supports tags. Tags will be shown in the log dialog and can also be created directly in the log or via the Nautilus context menu. There is also new references dialog, which let’s you inspect references (including tags).

It is now possible to directly compare modified files with the index version of it from the Nautilus context menu.

Additionally colors for the graph and branch/tag labels have been optimized for light theme and many little bugs have been fixed.

Smile ↗

An emoji picker with custom tags.

The companion extension to Smile, which automatically pastes selected emoji, now supports GNOME 45. Install the app from Flathub and the extension from EGO and beam! 😁

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Version 0.32.0 of Phosh is out with

a bunch of bug fixes especially around odly placed or rendered popups on mobile

a way for applications to suppress haptic/led feedback when they put out notifications

a way to reorder the lock screen plugins

support for more devices with notches

support for the tablet mode switch as found on some convertibles

Flowtime ↗

Spend your time wisely.

Diego Iván M.E says

Flowtime v5.0 is out now!

This update brings significant cosmetic and functional changes, as well as small bugfixes:

The app has been updated to the GNOME 45 runtime, so it now can use the new fancy Libadwaita widgets.

The old “Picture in Picture” mode has been replaced by the “Distraction Free Mode”. It is virtually the same, but instead of forcing you to a small window size, it will hide all the window clutter so you can focus on the timer.

Thanks to the replacement of the Picture in Picture mode, the window now shows the top/bottom view switchers depending on its width.

The old Statistics view has been replaced by graphs! It provides a nicer way to see how you spend your time.

Exporting the statistics to CSV now properly formats the work and break time.

Get it from Flathub

Shell Extensions

glerro announces

Just released on ego Debian Linux Updates Indicator for Gnome Shell 40-44. In a few days i release a new version for Gnome Shell 45.

Updates indicator for Debian Linux based distributions.

Check for updates and shows also the following packages status (as in Synaptic):

Available updates.

New packages in repository.

Local/Obsolete packages.

Residual config files.

Autoremovable packages.

Focus changer ↗

Change focus between windows in all directions using your keyboard.

The extension “Focus changer” has been made compatible with GNOME 45! In addition, it’s preferences window has been ported to libadwaita and received support for translations.

Miscellaneous

Sam Thursfield reports

GNOME is once again participating in Outreachy. The application period has begun and potential interns are active in the #gnome-os:gnome.org channel, learning about openQA and our project to extend the GNOME OS end-to-end tests.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#115 Modern Monitoring

Fri, 29 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 22 to September 29.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

martymichal announces

The long awaited port of GNOME System Monitor to GTK 4 has finally arrived! The porting effort focused on keeping the UI as close to the original but still minor enhancements can be seen. The port comes early in the new development cycle which gives us the opportunity to find possible bugs and make use of the new stylish widgetry in GTK 4 and libadwaita.

See the original merge request.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Webfont Kit Generator ↗

Create @font-face kits easily.

Rafael Mardojai CM reports

Webfont Kit Generator 1.1.0 has been released and is available on Flathub.

It features some design improvements. It has been updated to the GNOME 45 style and the font options are now a utility panel instead of a separate view.

The application is in maintenance mode, but this release brings some small additions. Its Google Fonts importer now allows the use of v1 CSS API urls, meaning that if you have an old url, you can import it without going back to Google Fonts. Base64 support has also been added, so you can now embed the fonts in the generated CSS file.

As always, this update also includes minor bug fixes.

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina reports

Warp 0.6 has been released. It features a redesigned code view and an update to the latest GNOME 45 style and widgets. Now your file transfers will look even better!

Test social media cards locally.

Share Preview 0.4.0 is out and available on Flathub, it adds two new services to the preview, Discourse, the self-hosted forum/discussion platform, and LinkedIn.

It also adds the ability to open multiple instances of the application, along with some minor cosmetic improvements.

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus says

I’ve released Eyedropper version 1.0.0. This is the biggest release for Eyedropper yet, here are some of the major features, including those from the last beta release

Visual feedback when entering a color format

Support for entering all formats

Ability to search for colors in the activity overview

Choice of file format when exporting palettes

Export palettes for LibreOffice

Updated design

Show only unique colors (thanks @gregorni)

Fixed bugs (and probably added new ones)

Ear Tag ↗

Edit audio file tags.

knuxify says

Ear Tag 0.5.0 has been released! This release introduces three main improvements:

The cover art button has been expanded to allow for changing both the front and back covers. It also now has an option to remove cover art from the file.

The “Identify Selected Files” dialog has been re-worked, and now pulls data from MusicBrainz based on present tags, not just AcoustID fingerprints. It also attempts to find the correct release for a track instead of selecting the first best one.

The UI now uses the new libadwaita 1.4 widgets, and thus adapts to the new application style.

You can get the latest version on Flathub.

Commit ↗

An editor that helps you write better Git and Mercurial commit messages.

Sonny reports

Commit 4.1 is available on Flathub. This release brings spell check back thanks to libspelling.

Chess Clock ↗

Time games of over-the-board chess.

Clara Hobbs (she/they) says

Chess Clock version 0.6.0 was released, bringing adaptivity refinements and alert sounds.

Thanks to Mariko Ueno, we now have alert sounds when a player’s timer runs low. These can be muted if desired via the menu.

The window adapts better to portrait aspect ratios and large screen sizes, enabling improved tablet support.

By the time of publishing, the release should be available over on Flathub.

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu announces

Some weeks ago I resumed the ongoing port to GTK4 of Apostrophe. While doing so I took a little detour and implemented a full fledged toolbar. It allows to format text and input common markdown elements. It is context aware, so for example clicking the “checklist button” will toggle a checklist item if the cursor is in one! Next week I’ll be improving the security of the app and sanding any rough edges there are still left

Third Party Projects

xjuan announces

Cambalache 0.16.0 released!

New release targeting GNOME SDK 45 with all the new goodies in Gtk and Adwaita 1.4

Read more at https://blogs.gnome.org/xjuan/2023/09/28/cambalache-0-16-0-released/

dabrain34 reports

GstPipelineStudio version 0.3.4 is out ! Draw your own pipeline for GStreamer

This is an important bug fix release for first adopters, here is the release notes and the binaries:

https://dabrain34.pages.freedesktop.org/GstPipelineStudio/

An update is also available on flathub https://flathub.org/apps/org.freedesktop.dabrain34.GstPipelineStudio

Rafael Mardojai CM reports

My little application Diccionario de la Lengua, which is used to look up words in the Spanish dictionary, has received a small cosmetic update to follow the new GNOME 45 look and feel. It also now has a permanent history sidebar if the window is wide enough.

Get it from Flathub.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

For the people interested in high quality 2D rendering, I am proud to announce the first stable release of the Cairo 2D rendering library after 5 years of development. With the work of 77 committers, the 1.18 stable release introduces new API and features such as:

support for COLR fonts

support for the DWrite backend on Windows

performance improvements on macOS

dithering options for image surfaces

a whole new build system, using Meson, for increased portability and speed on top of many, many build, documentation, and bug fixes. You can get the new release on the Cairo website.

Upscaler 1.2.0 is available on Flathub!

We’ve put a lot of effort to improve stability and compliance with the GNOME interface guidelines. We’ve also made the following changes/additions:

New icon

Add drag & drop support

New keyboard shortcuts

Add labels for assistive technologies

Improve support for high contrast

Port to newer widgets

Ellipsize text when file names are too long

Add WebP support

Transpose image (useful for photos taken by smartphones)

New translations

Add Vulkan checker

0xMRTT [envs.net] says

This week Bavarder 1.0 was released! It’s featuring a completely new UI with a multi-chat mode which works on desktop and mobile thanks to the new Libadwaita widgets. It’s now possible to use local models, export conversations, change bot and user name, markdown support and more! Thanks to everyone who helped for making it possible!

Check out the website for more and a full changelog!

Ticket Booth ↗

Keep track of your favorite shows.

Alessandro Iepure says

Say hello to Ticket Booth! Never again lose track of your favorite movies and TV shows. It leverages the power of TMDB’s API to serve you the latest information in a beautiful interface. It also features a fully offline mode if you prefer to handcraft your library without relying on a third-party service. Check it out on Flathub.

Snoop ↗

Snoop through your files.

Philipp says

Snoop initially released!

Snoop is a gui tool to search through your files. It also offers a Nautilus extension to directly start it from a folder and search in it.

It is available as a flatpak on flathub.

If you want to use the Nautilus extension with the flatpak, you have to manually get it from the repo and install it in a Nautilus extension folder, see the readme.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2023.9.1 is here! This release includes many features and bug fixes that make the subtitle experience a lot better in Parabolic :)

Here’s the changelog:

Added an option to disable embedding subtitles in a file and instead download them in a separate file

Added the ability to specify ""all"" in the subtitle languages list to download all available languages

Fixed an issue where empty subtitles were sometimes embedded

Fixed an issue where arte.tv links were not validating thanks to a yt-dlp update

If embedding subtitles fails, Parabolic will automatically save them to separate files instead

Improved Parabolic’s display of progress in taskbar (dock)

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Customize your login screen.

I released GDM Settings v4.beta0. This release brings

New UI style

GNOME 45 support

Background image adjustment option

Support for high contrast mode in GDM

Application Window is dragable from anywhere now

New graphical error message (replaces an unhelpful error printed on the terminal)

Since this is a beta release,

Expect bugs and if you do encounter any bug, please report it.

It is not yet available on the regular (stable) Flathub repo. You can install it from Flathub beta repo.

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

I am happy to announce the release of Flatseal 2.1.0. This new release comes with refined visuals, improved performance, support for a new permission, quality of life additions, and fixes.

Read all the details here.

Shell Extensions

glerro announces

Transmission Daemon Indicator NG is updated for Gnome Shell 45

Mateus R. Costa announces

Default Workspace has been updated to work with GNOME 45. This gnome-shell extension allows you to choose a specific workspace to automatically switch to as soon as you login. This is particularly useful if you have a workflow where you use fixed workspaces and don’t use the first workspace as the main one.

Thanks to Aryan Kaushik, extensions.gnome.org now supports liberapay and opencollective in donations key.

Events

Tobias Bernard reports

To celebrate the release of GNOME 45 we had a hackfest and release party last week!

Some hightlights:

Lots of productive discussions for how we can get GNOME OS (and image-based OSes more generally) to the next level

We discussed in detail how we could do local-first sync in GNOME, and made a tentative plan for first prototypes

Adrian and Jonas resurrected the transparent panel branch

Julian looked into fixing default avatars

Various discussions about improving developer experience

Lots of work on apps, including Evince, Railway, and Dino

There was cake! 🎂

More details in this blog post: https://blogs.gnome.org/tbernard/2023/09/26/gnome-45-release-party-hackfest

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#114 Forty-five!

Fri, 22 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 15 to September 22.

This week we released GNOME 45!

This new major release of GNOME is full of exciting changes, such as a new activity indicator, a brand new image viewer and camera app, faster search, new styled sidebars, additional privacy indicators, and so much more! See the GNOME 45 release notes for more information.

Readers who have been following this site for a few weeks will already know some of the new features. If you want to follow the development of GNOME 46 (Spring 2024), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Dallas Strouse (she/her) 🧑‍🏫 says

Calendar has completely rethought its scrolling behavior; in version 44 and prior, the scrolling lacked overall smoothness and was too sensitive to scrolling, and was especially annoying to use on touchpads. Calendar 45 now features smooth scrolling that scrolls between weeks, rather than whole months, which also helped to improve performance! You can view the details here, courtesy of Georges.

For the past three months, Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton) has been working on more Calendar bugfixes to improve accessibility and otherwise improve the user experience. Calendar has also become more keyboard navigable, with some assistance from Lukáš Tyrychtr to ensure usability, and many more fixes are planned for the future. If you’d like to see the work that Hari has worked on for Calendar so far, you can do so here.

Calendar has also been updated to use the dazzling new adaptive widgets, thanks to Christopher Davis (BrainBlasted).

If you’d like to help contribute to Calendar and make the experience better for yourself and others, see if you can help nab any Accessibility issues, and ask about how you can help in the #gnome-calendar:gnome.org channel. Jeff Fortin has also created a tracking issue which you can read here.

In other news, Calendar’s number of open issues has been slimmed all the way down to 283, from 570 back in February!

Oh, hey, Georges, you still haven’t given Skel that candy you offered :P

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

Forge Sparks 0.2.0 is now available on Flathub.

This release includes several user interface improvements thanks to the GNOME Circle review.

The initial view has been improved for a better experience, and account management has been moved to a separate window for easier interaction. It has also been updated to match the style of GNOME 45.

A few bugs have also been fixed, making it a bit more robust.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

Workbench 45 is out and available on Flathub 🎉

This is a massive release with many new features such as Rust support, 50 new Library demos (Map, Spelling, Camera, …), multi-windows, offline documentation viewer etc. See the release announcement https://github.com/sonnyp/Workbench/releases/tag/v45.0

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

NewFlash 3.0 was just released. There is so much new stuff in this release that I wrote a blog post about it: https://blogs.gnome.org/jangernert/2023/09/22/newsflash-3-0/

Identity ↗

Compare images and videos.

A new version of Identity is out, ready to go with visual tweaks to match the GNOME 45 design. Major improvements include pixelated, rather than blurry, zoomed-in media display; memory leak fixes, and improved format support, like AV1, WebP, semitransparent, and 16-bit images and videos.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo announces

Cartridges 2.4 is out, updated with a sidebar to filter sources and better adaptivity thanks to the newest Libadwaita!

Check it out on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

baarkerlounger reports

This week I released Jogger - a fitness tracker for Gnome Mobile. With it you can:

Track workouts such as running, cycling, rowing and more using Geoclue based location

Get time or distance based voice announcements during your workouts (local or higher quality network based)

Manually enter past workouts

View workout details such as route, pace, calories burned etc

Import workouts from Fitotrack (Android) for users switching to mobile Linux.

Thanks to kramo for the icon design and to everyone who has translated Jogger so far. If you would like to contribute with design suggestions, code, translations, bug reports or ideas you can do so on Codeberg

You can get Jogger on Flathub.

Note. that if you’re installing on a Librem 5 you’ll need to update to a newer version of xdg_desktop_portal than is available in Pure OS Byzantium to get an accurate location fix. See this issue for more details.

dabrain34 announces

GstPipelineStudio version 0.3.3 is finally out on flathub, MacOS and Windows.

You can have a quick overview of the project on its website: https://dabrain34.pages.freedesktop.org/GstPipelineStudio/

The main features are:

Windows and MacOS installer

Open a pipeline with its command line description

Multiple graphview tabs allowing to play with multiple pipeline at once.

Capsfilter support on the link

gstreamer-1.0 wrap support

Bugs fixing

schmiddi says

Railway (previously DieBahn) version 2.0.0 was released! Railway allows you to plan your travel by public transport like train or bus, and furthermore allows you to keep up-to-date on the latest information during your journey. Railway supports numerous providers, for example from Germany, Austria, Luxembourg but also some providers from America. Version 2.0.0 is a massive overhaul of the UI, for which I have to thank Tobias Bernard for the mockups and feedback and also camelCaseNick for helping with the implementation. Railway is available on Flathub.

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp announces

Turtle is finally available on flathub!

I also released Turtle 0.5 recently, which adds more settings (filter remotes in log, commit default behaviour) and plugins for Thunar, Nemo and Caja.

Turtle 0.5.1 adds some minor flatpak tweaks.

If you want to use the Nautilus plugin combined with flatpak, you have to install it manually. Please follow the instructions in the readme.

Letterpress ↗

Create beautiful ASCII art

gregorni reports

This week, I’ve released version 2.0 of Letterpress! We’ve simplified the versioning scheme (as you might have already noticed) and changed the app ID to be more consistent with the app name. The app icon has been revised (props to kramo), and the interface itself is now even uses a matching accent color! We’ve also updated to the latest libadwaita widgets, which allow for a nice and clean looking flat header bar!

A Tips dialog has been added that explains what kind of pictures are suitable for ASCII art.

The conversion to ASCII art has been improved, meaning the output will no longer have inverted colors in light mode! Pictures taken on a phone in portrait mode will also no longer appear rotated by 90°.

The output view itself now centers the ASCII output by default, and you can change the font size to zoom in and out of the view! For changing output width and zoom level, there are now also keyboard shortcuts.

The app has also been translated into Ukranian (by @volkov).

You can get the new release from Flathub. If you already have the app installed, just update, no need to worry about the new app ID.

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Brage Fuglseth announces

This week I released Fretboard 3.0, with the following improvements:

Refined visuals taking advantage of the new capabilities of GNOME 45

Keyboard shortcuts for common actions

Italian, Russian, and Dutch translations, making Fretboard available in a total of 4 different languages

If you would like to come with suggestions, report bugs, translate the app, or contribute otherwise, feel free to reach out! The app is now translatable through Weblate, which I hope will make it more straightforward to contribute.

You can get Fretboard on Flathub.

Cavalier ↗

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick says

Cavalier V2023.9.0 is here! In this release a feature to set foreground image was added to Cavalier! You can also now set transparency on both background and foreground images. Combine beautiful pictures with gradients to give Cavalier unique look that fits your mood!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added ability to set foreground image for Box modes

Transparency can now be set both for background and foreground image

Cavalier switched back to using PulseAudio by default. You can still switch audio backend to whatever is supported by CAVA using CAVALIER_INPUT_METHOD environment variable

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen announces

This week GNOME 45 was released! Along with assisting with the release announcements, sharing the news on social channels, and updating the website, one of my jobs as Foundation staff is coordinating the GNOME 45 release video. Big thanks to Freehive for their work producing this video!

Reminder: We’re still looking for sponsors for GNOME.Asia 2023! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s summit reach out to mwu@gnome.org for more information.

Volunteer Opportunity: We’re looking for people to help manage the Foundation’s social media channels. If you’re interested in getting involved reach out to chenriksen@gnome.org for more information.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#113 Numerous Updates

Fri, 15 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 08 to September 15.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) reports

I just released libadwaita 1.4 and wrote an overview of the changes: https://blogs.gnome.org/alicem/2023/09/15/libadwaita-1-4/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth reports

Errands has been accepted into GNOME Circle. This app lets you keep track of your tasks with a carefully selected collection of features, like subtasks, custom colors and a history of previously cleared tasks. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

dlippok announces

Since the last announcement on TWIG, the Photometric Viewer now has the ability to convert between IESNA and EULUMDAT file formats. Additionally, you can export photometric data in CSV and JSON formats, as well as light distribution curves in PNG or SVG formats. Furthermore, the software now allows you to calculate the annual power consumption of the luminaire and compare its light color temperature to that of common light sources. In addition to English, the application is also available in German and Polish.

Newest version is now available on Flathub and Snap Store.

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick reports

Tagger V2023.9.1 is here!

This release includes many new features and improvements to Tagger’s music file system. The Music Folder has been replaced with the Music Library allowing users to not only open folders, but to open playlist files as well and manage the files referenced in the playlist all from within the app. We also added support for creating a playlist file from a folder and fixed some issues with synchronized lyrics.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to open, manage, and create playlists within Tagger. As a result, the “Music Folder” has now become the “Music Library” that can be opened from a folder or a supported playlist file

Synchronized lyric timestamps will now be shown in the mm:ss.xx format as per the LRC specification. When creating a new lryic, both hh:mm:ss and mm:ss.xx can be specified and Tagger will convert them appropriately

Tagger will display headers in the list of music files when sorting to provide a more organized view of files

Fixes an issue where lrc files were not importing correctly

Tagger’s main window size will be remembered and restored on application restart

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2023.9.0 was released this week! This release includes some new feature to make Parabolic even more powerful and secure!

First, the Keyring is now backed by the system credential manager, meaning that users no longer need to provide a password to secure their Keyring as it would be handled by system secrets. Of course, we offer a guide inside the app’s help on moving old password-secured keyrings to the new secret-secured ones.

Besides keyrings, we improved Parabolic’s support for subtitles by downloading the correctly supported format for a file type and supporting two letter language with region codes. We also introduced a new preference for choosing to remove identifying media source information from embedded metadata.

Here’s the changelog:

Added support for two letter language with region codes

Added a preference for removing media source data from embedded metadata (previously it was automatically removed)

Parabolic will now use the system’s credential manager (i.e. DBus Secret Service) for securing the Keyring. Please read the Keyring page in Help for information on migrating the old password-secured Keyring to the new secret-secured Keyring

Parabolic will no longer ask for a subtitle format but instead use the format supported by the file type

Fixed an issue where translated metadata was embedded instead of original media metadata

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

GNOME Network Displays ↗

Stream the desktop to Wi-Fi Display capable devices

GNOME Network Displays can now embed your cursor in its video stream. No more guess work trying to figure out where your mouse pointer is!

PS: the glitchy vertical bars are my TV’s fault. It’s a an old TV!

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick reports

Denaro V2023.9.2 was released! This release includes many bug fixes for the new Currency Conversion tool we introduced in the last release. A huge thanks to @JoseBritto and @UrtsiSantsi who have contributed to finding these issues and creating fixes ❤️

Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where the currency conversion service would provide the wrong conversion rate

Fixed an issue where small converted currency amounts would show as 0

Fixed incorrect display of amounts for locales that use Cape Verdean escudo as currency

Improved UX in Currency Converter dialog

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Cavalier ↗

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick says

Cavalier got V2023.9.0-beta1 this week! Combine beautiful pictures with gradients to give Cavalier unique look that fits your mood!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added ability to set foreground image for Box modes

Transparency can now be set both for background and foreground image

Cavalier switched back to using PulseAudio by default. You can still switch audio backend to whatever is supported by CAVA using CAVALIER_INPUT_METHOD environment variable

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Shell Extensions

We’ve updated the EGO Review Guidelines and GNOME Shell 45 extensions no longer should import Gtk and Gdk to the shell process.

Weather O’Clock ↗

Display the current weather inside the pill next to the clock.

Weather O’Clock version 9 was released with support for GNOME Shell 45 using the new symbolic weather icons. Check it out on EGO.

Just Perfection ↗

A tweak tool to customize the GNOME Shell and to disable UI elements.

Just Perfection announces

Just Perfection Extension now supports GNOME Shell 45. In this version, we have a new animation option (almost none) that can disable GNOME Shell animation without disabling apps animation. App menu feature has been removed since there isn’t any app menu indicator in GNOME Shell 45. Activities button icon feature also got removed since GNOME Shell 45 uses workspace indicators in the activities button. This version is named after German painter Albrecht Durer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgIm2ggn67I

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

It’s nearing the end of September, which for the GNOME Foundation, means we are nearing the end of our Fiscal Year. It’s sometimes a surprise to folks that fiscal years aren’t always aligned with the calendar year, but it’s common for corporations and non-profits. This always leads to a flurry of activity, between getting travel reimbursements and expenses pushed through so they are reflected this year’s books, working on the books to make sure there’s nothing outstanding, and looking at creating the budget for next year. There’s a lot to do, so please be patient if you are expecting something from me!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#112 New Circle Apps

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 01 to September 08.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Brage Fuglseth reports

This week Forge Sparks by Rafael Mardojai was accepted into GNOME Circle. Forge Sparks lets you receive Git forges notifications on your desktop. Congratulations!

The second app to join GNOME Circle this week was Impression by Khaleel Al-Adhami. Impression lets you create bootable drives by flashing disk images to them. Congratulations!

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

It took a bit too long but a new release of the GTK Rust bindings is officially out. Details can be found at https://gtk-rs.org/blog/2023/08/28/new-release.html

Third Party Projects

xjuan announces

Cambalache 0.14.0 Released!

I am pleased to announce a new Cambalache version. Cambalache is a new RAD tool for Gtk 4 and 3 with a clear MVC design and data model first philosophy.

Release Notes:

Add GMenu support

Add UI requirements edit support

Add Swedish translation. Anders Jonsson

Updated Italian translation. Lorenzo Capalbo

Show deprecated and not available warnings for Objects, properties and signals

Output minimum required library version instead of latest one

Fix output for templates with inline object properties

Various optimizations and bug fixes

Bump test coverage to 66%

Read more about it in this blog post

Where to get it:

Flathub

Gitlab

Felicitas Pojtinger says

I just released Multiplex, an app to watch torrents together. It provides an experience similar to Apple’s SharePlay and Amazon’s Prime Video Watch Party, except for any torrent instead of a specific streaming service. Thanks to WebRTC, it doesn’t require a central server to synchronize playback positions, and allows the use of a central HTTP to BitTorrent gateway if a viewer can’t use the BitTorrent protocol on their own device. It’s written in Go with Adwaita and available on Flathub.

fabrialberio announces

This week I’ve released a new version of PinApp, an app that lets you create and edit application shortcuts in an elegant way, without having to bother with .desktop files.

This update brings new libadwaita 1.4 widgets, support for Snap apps as well as translations to german and spanish.

PinApp is available on Flathub.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel says

Gir.Core 0.5.0-preview.1 got released.

It features much improved support for opaque boxed records. More details can be found in the release notes.

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick reports

Tagger V2023.9.0 is here! This release includes many new features and improvements to Tagger’s lyrics system, file handling, and user experience.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added a new web service to download lyrics for a song

Added support for opening a folder with Tagger from the file manager

Added a “Select All Files” button next to the search bar

Redesigned the Lyrics dialog in which only unsynchronized or synchronized lyrics can be used for a file and not both

Fixed an issue where some album art for some OPUS files were not read

Fixed an issue where Tagger would crash on Tag to Filename if the tag contained an invalid file name character

Fixed an issue where Tagger would marked files as unsaved even if there were no changes

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Anton Lazarev ported libcall-ui (a library with common user interface parts for call handling) to GTK4 and libadwaita. Applications using GTK3/libhandy can still do so using the 0.1.x branch.

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.9.1 is here! This release includes new features for dealing with accounts with different currencies as well as some bug fixes :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Added a currency conversion tool into Denaro, accesable from the main menu. This tool is also integrated into the Transfer dialog when currency conversion is required

Fixed an issue where dates in the IncomeExpenseOverTime graph would overlap

Fixed an issue where accessing account settings would sometimes crash

Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb reports

Crosswords 0.3.11 has been released this is the first version to feature a standalone Crossword Editor. Read all the details here. Highlights this cycle:

Initial Crossword Editor release available for download on flathub! This release uses libpanel from GNOME Builder to achieve a similar look and feel.

Support for authoring Barred-style crossword puzzles in the editor.

The Crosswords player now supports acrostic puzzles. This was the result of a successful GSOC project! Numerous critical bug fixes and improvements.

The core crossword parsing library has a new home at https://libipuz.org.

Shell Extensions

glerro reports

I have updated my Gnome Shell Extension for Gnome 45: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2296/looking-glass-button/ and https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5416/wifi-qrcode/

sereneblue announces

I’ve released updates for extensions Colosseum and krypto to support GNOME 45. Colosseum now supports showing scores for 16 sports leagues and 5 tournaments.

Miscellaneous

Brage Fuglseth announces

I’ve created a Matrix room for chatting about GNOME in the Scandinavian languages: Norwegian, Swedish and Danish. These languages are spoken by more than 20 million people combined worldwide, and are similar enough that speakers of one language can understand the other two. If you speak one of the languages, natively or not, and would like to be a part of a thriving Scandinavian GNOME subcommunity, don’t hestitate to join #scandinavia:gnome.org and introduce yourself! You don’t need to be a regular contributor; the room is open to anyone interested in GNOME 🇳🇴🇸🇪🇩🇰

Sophie (she/her) reports

URLs for pages on Apps for GNOME are now considerably shorter. For example, the Maps app is now available under apps.gnome.org/Maps.

The old URLs, that contain the complete app ID, will keep working. The app URLs are generally guaranteed to be a safe place to link to. Even if an app gets removed, the page will be redirected to an external page decided on by the app maintainer.

Events

Kristi Progri says

September has been a busy month so far. I had a chance to present at Open Source Conference Albania (https://oscal.openlabs.cc/) and talk about GNOME and how people can contribute. We were also present with a booth and many people where interested to know more. I will have the same presentations in Debconf as well, where I am planning to get more in touch with locals and get new contributors.

Talking about conferences, please keep in mind that GNOME ASIA call for papers is still open (https://events.gnome.org/event/170/abstracts/#submit-abstract) until September 10th. Don’t miss your chance to join us in Nepal.

Deepesha Burse reports

Hello everyone!

Hope you all are doing well. GNOME Asia is happening in Kathmandu, Nepal between 1st to 3rd of December. We are glad to announce that the deadline for submitting CfPs has been extended up to 10th September. This is your chance to submit a proposal and speak at the conference!

You can submit your CfPs at: https://events.gnome.org/event/170/abstracts/ and find more info at: https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/08/08/gnomeasia-2023-cfp/.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#111 Number One

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 25 to September 01.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny reports

Akshay Warrier made a beautiful offline documentation viewer. It will ship with Workbench 45 and probably turn into a standalone app in the future.

So far it supports gi-docgen docs, searching for pages and back/forward navigation.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo says

This week, I released Cartridges 2.3!

New import source: desktop entries!

You can now choose executables directly via a file picker.

Short covers added manually will now be padded with a blurred background instead of stretched.

Check it out on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

A new minor release of libmks is out. Mostly containing small fixes that should make the rendering perfectly smooth. The next step is to get clipboard sharing and USB redirection working. The library is also available on https://download.gnome.org/sources/libmks/0.1/ if people wish to start testing/packaging it.

gountal announces

I released the version 0.1.0 of Package Transporter.

This application is meant to facilitate migration from an installation to another. Currently, the application can only backup Flatpak applications, their settings and data.

This is only a preview release as you cannot restore a backup of your apps yet.

Check it out on Flathub

Portfolio ↗

A minimalist file manager for those who want to use Linux mobile devices.

I am happy to announce the release of Portfolio 1.0.0! This new release is the first step in the modernization process to GTK 4 and Libadwaita. It’s also a continuation to my efforts of bringing a minimalist file manager to the mobile Linux community, with a few important bug fixes.

https://blogs.gnome.org/tchx84/2023/08/29/portfolio-1-0-0/

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

This week I released Fretboard 2.0. This major release of Fretboard brings a bunch of exciting improvements:

View different ways to play the same chord, to find the one that suits your situation the best

Bookmark chords to save them for a later practice session or gig

An additional fret in the chord diagram, to help you practice those really tricky positionings

Hover over positions in the chord diagram to see their respective note names

Smarter and more precise chord detection

If you would like to come with suggestions, report bugs, translate the app, or contribute otherwise, feel free to reach out!

You can get Fretboard from Flathub.

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi says

Flare 0.10.0 got released. There were tons of features, UI improvements and fixes compared to the last TWIG (with also 4 minor releases), so I will just list for the most notable ones. For all the changes, consult the changelog.

One can now receive notifications when someone reacts to a message (if one wants that to happen).

Added support for libspelling.

Fixed some major performance issues.

Deleting messages of a channel locally.

Added blurhash support, such that even unloaded images and videos look great.

Tons of UI improvements.

Many fixes.

There were some organizational changes made to my Linux mobile related apps in general:

Updated descriptions and a new common namespace. You can now find all my projects for Linux mobile in this GitLab group.

We now also have an Mastodon Account. We will post any updates to the apps right here.

Daikhan ↗

Play Videos/Music with style.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Daikhan received

A welcome page

Support for more codecs.

New translations

Czech

French

Russian

Turkish (previously translated; included in the flatpak now)

and

It disables fullscreen when no media is open.

It remembers fullscreen state of the player and restores it when opening files.

Miscellaneous

Cassidy James says

I’ve been editing down the day-long GUADEC 2023 streams into individual talks. To help share how I approached this using some excellent apps designed for GNOME, I provided instructions and a couple of videos on the GitLab issue. Hopefully this can help people in the future for GUADEC and other conferences. Huge thanks to HappiePlant NL from YouTube for providing comprehensive timestamps for each GUADEC 2023 talk! This type of work is often too invisible in the community, and yet is an excellent way to contribute. The next step is to get the videos actually uploaded to the channel with proper titles and descriptions—look forward to that soon.

GNOME Foundation

mwu says

The Foundation team is ramping up for GNOME ASIA. The call for papers is available at: https://events.gnome.org/event/170/abstracts/ and we are excited for your submission. Be on the look out for registration, hotel info and more! And, as always, we are on the look out for sponsors! Please reach out to us if you or your company would like to participate.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#110 Nailing Down Perfomance Issues

Fri, 25 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 18 to August 25.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Thanks to René de Hesselle from the Inkscape community, GTK has a new macOS CI runner

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

Just Perfection announces

GNOME Shell 45 port guide is out. Since GNOME Shell 45 moved to ESM, we want all developers to port their extensions before 45.0 release (September 20th) so they can report to us about the elements needed to be exported (in case they are not exported already).

We also offer our help to all developers on GNOME Discourse and GNOME Extensions Matrix channel: GNOME Matrix Channel IRC Bridge: irc://irc.gimpnet.org/shell-extensions

GNOME Development Tools

Sysprof ↗

A profiling tool that helps in finding the functions in which a program uses most of its time.

hergertme says

Sysprof gained the ability to show you what processes were scheduled per-CPU. You can use this to more effectively nail down performance issues on the desktop.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Clara Hobbs (she/they) announces

Thanks to the new AdwBreakpoint API in libadwaita 1.4, Chess Clock just merged improved support for larger screen sizes. The clock text is larger when the window is big enough to support it, and portrait mode is enabled whenever the window has a portrait aspect ratio (rather than requiring it to be as narrow as a portrait phone screen). These updates should make the app nicer to use on tablets and laptops.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny reports

Rust support landed in Workbench 🛠️ ❤️ 🦀 Thanks to Julian 🍃 ! We will work on formatter and language server soon.

We are approaching 100 Library demos. Porting them is a great opportunity to learn or work with Rust, specially if you are coming from JavaScript or Vala. Checkout our guide and don’t hesitate to come by #workbench:gnome.org

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

A new release of libmks is out! Adding support for touch events, improving the rendering which would avoid frame drops/incorrect regions updates. Details at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/libmks/-/releases/0.1.1. I also wrote a blog post recently about my adventures to get damage area propagated from the guest to the host which you can read at https://belmoussaoui.com/blog/16-damage-areas-across-the-virtio-space/

Nokse announces

This week, I’ve released ASCII Draw, an app that lets you draw diagrams, flowcharts, or anything else using nothing but characters. It has many lines styles to choose from.

There are multiple tools available:

Straight Lines and Arrows to connect points on your graphs

Rectangle to construct outlines effortlessly

Freehand Lines to draws connected lines following your mouse movement

Text to easily preview and write text on your canvas

Eraser, Picker, Filled Rectangle and Freehand Brush

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2023.8.3 is here!

This release includes some new feature to make Parabolic even more configurable. Read about them below :)

Here’s the changelog:

Added a new advanced download option to split chapters

Added a new preference to enable SponsorBlock for YouTube downloads

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.8.1 is here!

This release includes some new features and fixes that you can read about below :)

Here’s the changelog:

Added a password strength indicator when creating an account password

Added an Amount Display Style option to custom currency settings

Fixed an issue where selecting the current month on an empty account in the calendar would cause a crash

Fixed an issue where adding receipts to a new transaction would cause a crash

Improved UI/UX

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) announces

GNOME 45 is reaching its next step in release preparation. After three weeks of UI freeze, on Saturday, Aug 26, GNOME 45 will also enter string freeze. After 23:59 UTC that day, all string changes in Core components will require approval from the i18n team.

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen announces

With GUADEC 2023 completed Foundation staff have been busy wrapping up final conference tasks while moving forward with planning GNOME.Asia 2023, LAS 2024, and GUADEC 2024. Some of these tasks include collecting feedback from our post-event surveys, sorting through conference photos, and providing updates to our event sponsors. We’re currently working on finding the best solution for sharing the conference photos with everyone and will provide more updates on that soon! We’re also looking for community feedback on how we structure GUADEC 2024 talk and BoF days. Let us know if you would prefer to attend GUADEC talks on weekdays or over the weekend by answering our poll here.

Outside of events, we’ve been wrapping up the 2021-2022 Annual Report which is now available on the Foundation website, and getting started on a new video for the upcoming GNOME 45 release.

Reminder: The GNOME.Asia 2023 Call for Participation is open! If you would like to submit a talk to this year’s summit please read our news post for more details. All applications are due by September 1, 2023.

Volunteer Opportunity: We’re live-streaming the GUADEC talks, but are looking for a volunteer to edit the final footage into individual talk videos. If that sounds like a project you’re interested in let us know by emailing chenriksen@gnome.org.

feborges reports

The GNOME Foundation is looking for Mentors and projects for the Outreachy December-March internships. If you are interested in mentoring, please visit https://discourse.gnome.org/t/deadline-sept-20-2023-call-for-mentors-for-outreachy-december-23-march-24-cohort/16748 for more info.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#109 Managing Repositories

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 11 to August 18.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

macOS CI has been re-enabled for GLib, thanks to some welcome help and support from René de Hesselle

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Alan reports

File Shredder v2.0.0 was finally released, the last version being released in October of last year.

The preferences dialog has been removed.

File Shredder now uses custom code that is included directly in the source.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo reports

This week, I released Cartridges 2.2!

RetroArch support has been added, huge thanks to Rilic

Added the option to automatically clean up uninstalled games on import

Added the ability to undo an import, just to be safe :)

Check it out on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

Turtle ↗

Manage git repositories in Nautilus.

Philipp says

Turtle 0.4 released!

Turtle is a tool to manage git repositories within Nautilus by providing emblems and context menus. For more complex operations it provides specific dialogs, i.e. commit, sync, log, settings, etc.

Version 0.4 marks a huge leap forward in its development: Almost all git operations can now be performed by Turtle in a convenient and graphical way.

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

Daudix UFO says

Gradience 0.8.0-beta1 is finally available for download from Flathub Beta! it took a bit longer than we expected, but everything should be good now.

To install it, add flathub-beta remote and install Gradience from it:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta com.github.GradienceTeam.Gradience
To run the beta you might need to use this command:
flatpak run --branch=beta com.github.GradienceTeam.Gradience
See previous TWIG update for more info about 0.8.0-beta1

Customize your login screen.

Mazhar Hussain announces

GDM Settings v3.3 was released with fixes for the following two bugs.

Changing background color didn’t work on GNOME 44

Background image was broken on widescreen/dual monitor setups with GNOME 44

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille announces

Fractal 5.beta2 is out!

Fractal 5.beta2 is the second beta release 🎉 since the rewrite of Fractal to take advantage of GTK 4 and the Matrix Rust SDK, an effort that started in March 2021.

The most visible changes since Fractal 5.beta1 are:

Editing text messages ✏️

Logging in with homeservers that don’t support auto-discovery 🧐

A refactor of the login flow should avoid crashes when going back at any step 🔙

Sometimes two day dividers 📅 would appear next to each other without messages between them, this is now fixed

Of course, there are a also a lot of less visible changes, notably a lot of refactoring, 🐛 fixes and translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

As the version implies, this is still considered beta stage and might trigger crashes or other bugs 😔 but overall should be pretty stable 👍. It is available to install via Flathub Beta 📦, see the instructions in our README.

A list of blocking issues for the release of version 5 can be found in the Fractal 5 milestone on GitLab. All contributions are welcome!

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.8.0 is here! This release comes after months of hard work and includes many new features, including graphs!, and many fixes that make Denaro an even better money manager! Read about all the changes below :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Added graph visuals to the Account view as well as in exported PDFs

Added tags that can be used with transactions for finer management and filtering

Thanks @fsobolev

Added the option to select the entire current month as the date range filter

Thanks @CoffeeIsLife87 !

Added reminders for upcoming transactions

Improved the transaction description suggestion algorithm with fuzzy search

Fixed an issue where the help button in the import toast was not working

Fixed an issue where Denaro would crash if an account had incorrect formatted metadata

Fixed an issue where docs were not available when running Denaro via snap

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Daikhan ↗

Play Videos/Music with style.

Mazhar Hussain announces

TWIG-Bot

Daikhan received translation support and has already been translated into Turkish thanks to Sabri Ünal. Translations are done through Hosted Weblate.

Dropping multiple files into the player window works as expected now. Previously, only the last file would play.

The app shows a dialog explaining the situation if the user tries to open an unsupported file type e.g. a document or a supported file type (video or audio) with unsupported codec.

The flatpak received support for more codecs but it won’t/can’t be released until the Flathub build bot is fixed.

GNOME Foundation

Sonny reports

The following GNOME Circle requirement has been removed “No existing non-profit fiscal sponsor”. It came from an ambiguity in our software policy that is now solved. GNOME Circle developers are welcome to do fundraising how they see fit. Thanks to Sophie (she/her) for raising this issue with the board.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#108 Sandboxed Images

Fri, 11 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 04 to August 11.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Image Viewer (Loupe) ↗

Browse through images and inspect their metadata.

Chris 🌱️ announces

Loupe has been officially added as part of the GNOME core app set as the new default image viewer.

We have landed the two last significant changes for GNOME 45. The image loading via glycin is now fully sandboxed, including SVGs. And the print dialog got updated to a new design by Allan Day.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Early GTK 4.12 release following GUADEC; lots of fixes and long awaited features:

list views gained support for sections, using a new GtkSectionModel interface; various models in GTK implement this interface

also in list views: you can now programmatically scroll GtkListView, GtkGridView, and GtkColumnView using a fine-grained API

finally, focusing on list views is more accurate and reliable

tons of fixes for the accessibility support, with better name and description computation following the ARIA specification; improved handling of composite button widgets; and a whole accessibility overlay in the GTK inspector, showing missing names and descriptions in your UI

the Vulkan renderer has seen major improvements; Vulkan support is still marked as experimental, but it’s definitely less of a science project

multiple fixes in the GL renderer when it comes to mipmaps and texture filtering

Wayland, Windows, and macOS improvements and bug fixes

there are a few new deprecations, mainly related to GdkPixbuf The GTK team is already hard at work on the next GTK 4.14 development cycle, so stay tuned!

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now has an experimental vector layer, using the new vector map support in libshumate. Currently it is using the OSM Liberty style. Longer-term the plan is to develop GNOME style style sheets supporting light and dark variant, using icons for the markers based on the GNOME Icon Library. At this time this showcases horizontally aligned labels (regardless of map rotation) and sharp rendering, also at fractional zoom levels. Some things that are not yet implemented includes being able to directly click on labels and markers, and localized names.

GNOME Contacts ↗

Keep and organize your contacts information.

nielsdg reports

GNOME Contacts 45.beta is out, now powered by the GtkListView/GtkSectionModel APIs. This decreased memory usage of Contacts locally with about 20% and helps save some precious CPU cycles! It should also enable some nice-to-have behaviors like being able to select multiple contacts at once with shift-click.

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

GJS released a new version for GNOME 45 beta. There are several bug fixes and documentation improvements. Highlights of the release are performance improvements by Marco Trevisan, and the upgrade of the JS engine to SpiderMonkey 115 thanks to Xi Ruoyao. New things that you will be able to use in your JS code in GNOME 45 are the new findLast(), findLastIndex(), with(), toReversed(), toSorted(), and toSpliced() array methods, and the ability to create an array from an async iterable with Array.fromAsync().

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas reports

NewsFlash got a new application id on flathub. It moved from com.gitlab.newsflash to io.gitlab.news_flash.NewsFlash. The flatpak CLI and Gnome software should ask you if you want to migrate to the new id. This was done to be able to verify the app on flathub and in preparation for a big feature update. So stay tuned.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan says

Gaphor development is continuing at full pace. This week Dan Yeaw released Gaphor 2.20.0. Support for SysML modeling has been improved with new elements and the ability to assign types to model elements.

ashpd ↗

Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

finally updated ashpd demo to follow the new libadwaita designs along with a new ashpd release

Third Party Projects

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick reports

Tagger V2023.8.2 is here! This release is packed with new features and fixes that make Tagger a lot more powerful to use. Read about them below :)

Changelog:

Added support for managing a file’s lyrics

Tagger will now provide suggestions while typing a genre

Fixed an issue where downloading MusicBrainz metadata would fail even if metadata was available

Fixed an issue where Web Services were disabled even though network connection was available

Fixed an issue where back album art was not saved correctly

An Info button will appear when MusicBrainz lookup fails and will provide more information about why the process failed

Improved tag panel design

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh and phoc have been released a couple of days ago. Besides not downscaling screenshots any longer phosh switched to newer versions of libgnome-volume-control and gmobile. The later was updated to support more notches (those of the Fairphone 4 and Poco F1) which were added to the 0.0.2 release of gmobile (also tagged last week).

Phoc got updated to newer wlroots allowing us to add support for newer xdg-shell versions but most importantly it fixes a long standing issues with GTK4 popups and on screen keyboard interaction.

The screenshot shows phoc reneding the rounded corners and the bounding box of a notch while phosh uses the same information to move the clock out of the center.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2023.8.1 is here! This release is packed with new features, improvements, and bug fixes. Read about them below :)

Changelog:

Added the option to prevent suspend while using Parabolic

Added the ability to skip the password dialog when unlocking Keyring

Added the ability to reset the Keyring when locked

Improved bitrate used for audio-only downloads with the best quality

Parabolic will now prefer videos with the h264 codec when downloading in the mp4 format. If space is a concern, users are recommended to download in the webm format which uses the vp9/vp8/av1 codecs

If overwriting files is off and a download’s file name exists, a numbered suffix will be attached to the end of the file name to prevent error

Fixed an issue where downloads with specific timeframes would download incorrectly

Fixed an issue where opus downloads would sometimes fail

Fixed an issue where Parabolic would be unusable on systems without NetworkManager installed

Fixed an issue where Parabolic would say no active internet connection even though there was a connection established

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.8.0-beta2 is here!!

This is the release that finally introduces graphs into the Account view as well as exported PDFs! Check it out now :)

Here’s the full V2023.8.0 changelog so far:

Added graph visuals to the Account view as well as in exported PDFs

Added the option to select the entire current month as the date range filter

Improved the transaction description suggestion algorithm with fuzzy search

Fixed an issue where the help button in the import toast was not working

Fixed an issue where Denaro would crash if an account had incorrect formatted metadata

Fixed an issue where docs were not available when running Denaro via snap

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Daikhan ↗

Play Videos/Music with style.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Last week, I announced Daikhan media player without mentioning any features of the app. Well, one of its features is that it remembers what selections the user has made (e.g. selected audio/subtitle languages, etc.) for each opened file and when the user opens any of those files again, it restores those selections.

This week, the “Remember Selections” feature received superpowers. Now, the player can recognize files by their content. So, it can restore selections made by the user even if files have been renamed, moved to a new location or both.

Additionally,

Hardware acceleration support was added to the flatpak

Screenshots were updated

Access to files is only granted when you open them. Previously, the app had full access to the filesystem.

NOTE: The app is still in early access. So, expect some bugs and beware that big changes (even backward-incompatible ones) might occur in the app’s interface and behavior.

Cavalier ↗

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick announces

Cavalier V2023.8.1 is here! Tired of existing 6 drawing modes? Well, now there are 11, because every mode except Splitter got Circle variant! We also fixed the issue that caused incorrect drawing with display scaling enabled, and added a cute easter egg 👀

Here’s the full changelog:

All drawing modes except Splitter now have Circle variants

Added an easter egg (run the program with —help to find how to activate it)

Fixed an issue where the app wasn’t drawing correctly with >100% display scaling

Added welcome screen that is shown on start until any sound gets detected

Added Cairo backend that can be used in case of problems with OpenGL. To activate, run the program with environment variable CAVALIER_RENDERER=cairo

CAVA was updated to 0.9.0

Pipewire is now used as default input method, you can still change back to Pulse Audio using environment variable CAVALIER_INPUT_METHOD=pulse

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Miscellaneous

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I released a new version of all the core design tooling apps, with some very small subtle changes & updates of the rust bindings

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna says

August is traditionally a slow month for the Foundation, as staff tends to take a small break after another successful GUADEC. Somehow, this week was chock full of meetings jammed in between folks who just got back from holidays and those about to leave for the same. Of particular note were:

the first regular Board meeting of the new term — we covered a lot of topics and I am looking forward to working with this new group for the next year

code of conduct committee meeting — amongst other things, we are working on our processes and transparency reports

executive director search committee — interviews are ongoing and we met to touch base and make sure there aren’t any hiccups

In addition, I have been catching up on the bills that accumulated on my virtual desk during GUADEC, doing various HR tasks (including digging up paperwork to give references), finishing the filing of our 2022 tax forms, and making sure the staff get the support they need. I see travel committee requests starting to come in… that will be on my todo list next week!

Do you have a talk about GNOME you want to give in a new location? The CFP for GNOME Asia is open! More information available here — https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/08/08/gnomeasia-2023-cfp/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#107 Reduced Overheads

Fri, 04 Aug 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 28 to August 04.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

hergertme says

Lots of GNOME Shell search providers are reducing runtime and startup overhead thanks to Sysprof Nightly. See my various blog posts about how we find and triage such issues. https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/07/28/how-to-use-sysprof-again/ https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/08/02/writing-fast-search/ and https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/08/04/more-sysprofing/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

Workbench gained the ability to save and load on-disk projects. In addition, we’ve made it easier to contribute to the library of demos and examples, checkout the contributing guide.

Third Party Projects

mibi88 reports

I just finished rewriting entirely my Markdown editor, MibiMdEditor, and released the first beta version of it (since I’ve rewritten it), but it is not just a random Markdown editor, it works by adding scripts that will be called to generate the HTML code, so you can use it to write MarkDown, BBcode, Asciidoc, just by coding a simple script! I’ll make a Flatpak soon! Stay tuned!

Philip Withnall reports

Evolution main just gained support for Autocrypt, a trust-on-first-use protocol for easily enabling encrypted e-mail

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick reports

Tagger is now at V2023.8.1!

This release and the previous V2023.8.0 are packed with many bug fixes and some new features as well. Read about them below :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Added support for the TrackTotal and BeatsPerMinute tag property

Added more sorting options

Improved the advanced search algorithm, supporting accented characters better

The apply button will now be shown only when a file has unsaved changes

Web Services will now get enabled and disabled depending on the system’s internet connection

Empty Year, Track, and BPM fields will show an empty string instead of 0

Fixed an issue where clearing a tag did not clear all fields

Fixed an issue where single album art from other programs was not read by Tagger

Fixed an issue where docs were not available when running Tagger via snap

Fixed an issue where advanced search may sometimes crash

Fixed an issue where submitting to AcoustID would crash

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2023.8.0 is here!

In this release we’ve added select and deselect all buttons to a download’s playlist page and added a proxy url setting in Preferences. We’ve also added a network connection monitor to Parabolic. On the side of bugs, we fixed an issue where docs were not available when running via snap and an issue where History wasn’t saved correctly in json.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added buttons to select or deselect all items in a playlist

Added a proxy setting in Preferences

Parabolic will now check for an active network connection

Fixed an issue where docs were not available when running Parabolic via snap

Fixed an issue where History wasn’t saved correctly in json

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Daikhan ↗

Play Videos/Music with style.

I have been working on a new media player named Daikhan (previously Envision Media Player) for some time. I have now released an early access version as a flatpak on Flathub.

Unfortunately, the flatpak does not yet support hardware accelerated playback. The player itself however does support it if GStreamer is set up properly.

Due to the early access nature of the app, there may be some other issues and there will be significant changes occurring in the future.

Cavalier ↗

Visualize audio with CAVA.

Nick says

Cavalier V2023.8.0 is here!

This release is packed with new features! We added a new drawing mode and the ability to set a background image in the window. We’ve also added a CLI to Cavalier in which you can change its settings right from the terminal!

Here’s the full changelog:

Cavalier can now be controlled from command line. Run the app with —help option to see full list of available options.

Reverse mirror option is now available with full mirror.

It’s now possible to set frames per second to 144 or other custom value.

Added anti-aliasing, so rounded items now look less pixelated.

Added ability to set background image.

New drawing mode - Splitter.

Bars limit was increased to 100.

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Shell Extensions

Swapnil Devesh reports

I released Solaar Extension for GNOME https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/6162/solaar-extension/ , this allows Solaar to support features on Wayland desktops which were previously unsupported, namely the process and mouse process conditions, which allow specific actions to happen on events from Logi keyboards and mice based on which application is currently in focus or currently has the mouse over it respectively. These should start working automatically on Wayland desktops with this extension installed with the next update of Solaar, or you can try the building the latest code from Solaar’s repository or from git or nightly releases if available for your distro.

Miscellaneous

Jordan Petridis announces

I wrote a blogpost about the magic of systemd-sysext and how it can be used to develop system components https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2023/08/04/developing-gnome-os-systemd-sysext/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#106 GUADEC 2023

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 21 to July 28.

GUADEC 2023

Michael Downey reports

During this year’s Annual General Meeting on Friday, the annual Community Appreciation Award (a.k.a. Pants of Thanks) was awarded to someone who cares deeply about GNOME, helps out app developers (almost every single day), plays the guitar (but just one song), holds controversial opinions (some even turn out to be right), and who is a climate advocate and activist … Tobias Bernard! A standing ovation was offered along with a flattering pair of red and blue plaid pajama pants. Congratulations, Tobias!

mwu reports

Greatings from Riga, Latvia! GUADEC 2023 is in full swing. We’ve had great turnout and support and wonderful presentations. Its fantastic to see so many GNOME users in one place. Special thanks to Kristi Progri, Caroline Henriksen and all the speakers, volunteers and sponsors for their amazing work and sponsorship.

For those of you who are not here in person or want to review the presentations, you can see the tracks here: https://www.youtube.com/@GNOMEDesktop

Excited the AGM is coming up and we will have some exciting announcements coming soon – stay tuned!

Thank you to our sponsors – Endless, Ubuntu, ARM, Igalia, openSUSE, Redhat, centricular, Codethink, and Woodlyn Travel for helping to make all of this possible!!!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo reports

Cartridges 2.1 is out, with support for Amazon Games in Heroic.

Third Party Projects

Fyodor Sobolev reports

It’s been half a year since the previous stable release of Cavalier, an audio visualizer based on CAVA — but now it’s revived! 🕺 Completely rewritten in C#, it joined Nickvision apps family, and got some new features, including new drawing mode, mirror setting and ability to change drawing direction. Download from Flathub or Snap Store.

Jan-Willem reports

During the past year, I have been working on Java-GI, a tool to generate Java language bindings for GNOME, GStreamer and other GObject-Introspection-based libraries, based on the new “Panama” preview API of OpenJDK 20 (JEP-434) for interconnecting the JVM and native code. The goal of Java-GI is to generate a pleasant API in which Java developers feel right at home: camel-case method names, automatic cleanup of resources, and Javadoc-style formatting and cross-references.

The latest Java-GI release 0.6.1 publishes Java bindings for Gtk4, LibAdwaita, GStreamer, GtkSourceview and WebkitGtk, and custom-developed bindings for Cairo. It is also possible to define your own GObject-derived classes in Java, and to create Gtk composite template classes. Visit the Java-GI website, or check out the examples for more information.

Until now, I’ve mostly been working on Java-GI on my own. I’d very much appreciate if interested Java developers would try it out, send feedback on #java-gi:matrix.org or github, and become involved in further development.

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick announces

Tagger V2023.7.1 is here! This release comes after a month of hard work, adding many new features, design enchantments, and overall improvements to the experience of the app.

There are just too many changes to describe here, so please read the full changelog below :)

A huge thanks to all contributors, translators, feature requesters, and testers ❤️

Here’s the full changelog:

Replaced taglib backend for tag metadata with atldotnet. This change added support for a lot more file types

Added support for the following tag properties: Composer, Description, Publisher

Added support for custom, user-defined properties

Added support for custom, user-defined format strings for conversion

Added help documentation with yelp-tools, accessible from the Help menu action

Added more file sorting options

Improved album art design and added support for managing back cover art and exporting album art

Improved advanced search algorithm to use fuzzy searching

Fixed an issue where corrupted music files would crash the app. Tagger will now display a dialog to warn the user of corrupted files

Improved UI

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2023.7.3 is here!

In this release we improved the design of the Keyring dialog making it cleaner and more user friendly. We also added a History dialog that allows users to manage previously downloaded videos!

Behind the scenes, we upgraded to gir.core V0.4.0 which brings many improvements to using GTK and asynchronous programming in C#. As a result of this update, our code is a lot cleaner and easier to read.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#105 Legendary Saturday Edition

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 15 to July 22.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie (she/her) announces

Loupe is now GNOME’s Core app for viewing images. It’s not yet available in GNOME OS due to a dependency issue. But everyone can help with testing by trying out the nightly builds.

This week we have landed a new design for indicating that an image is dragged over the window. Thanks to FineFindus for implementing the groundwork for this. Chris 🌱️ has tackled the task to equip Loupe with a set of help pages.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Diego Iván announces

Paper Clip v3.2 is here! With a bunch of small bug fixes and improvements:

Fixed a bug in which the File Dialog would show all files instead of only PDF documents.

The app has improved its cache usage.

Document thumbnails are now scaled down using Gtk.Snapshot.append_scaled_texture, creating nicer-looking images. This can be specially noticed with PDF documents with transparent background.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny reports

Multi windows/sessions support landed in Workbench. You’ll be able to consult Library demos while working on your prototype. This is also a requirement for future on-disk folder projects support in Workbench. Followin up Bilal Elmoussaoui footsteps, here is a totally unnecessary screenshot of all Library demos open.

Third Party Projects

Paulo announces

Black Box 0.14 is out. This update brings many exciting features, UI improvements, and bug fixes.

New Adwaita and Adwaita Dark color schemes

Updated look for tabs

Customizable working directory for new tabs

Confirmation dialog when closing tabs/windows with commands running

Desktop notifications when a command completes in the background

Context-aware header bar: the header bar turns red or purple when running sudo or ssh

Tabs can be renamed via the new tab right-click menu or a keyboard shortcut

Quickly switch between system/light/dark with the new style switcher in the main menu

You can check out the full release notes here.

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick says

Tagger V2023.7.1-beta3 is here!

Compared to beta 2, this release features a brand new backend for reading and writing tag metadata (TagLib# -> ATL.NET). With this change, Tagger now supports a wide-range of file types and can even manage corrupted files that previous TagLib-based Tagger could not. We also added support for custom, user-defined properties that can be added to any file’s tag and we greatly improved our documentation pages available through the Help menu item.

Because the new backend is such a big change, we urge all willing users to give this beta a shot and make sure everything still works correctly :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Replaced taglib backend for tag metadata with atldotnet. This change added support for a lot more file types

Added support for the following tag properties: Composer, Description, Publisher

Added support for custom, user-defined properties

Added help documentation with yelp-tools, accessible from the Help menu action

Added more file sorting options

Improved album art design and added support for managing back cover art and exporting album art

Fixed an issue where corrupted music files would crash the app. Tagger will now display a dialog to warn the user of corrupted files

Improved UI

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2023.7.3-beta1 is here! In this release we improved the design of the Keyring dialog making it cleaner and more user friendly.

Behind the scenes, we upgraded to gir.core V0.4.0 which brings many improvements to using GTK and asynchronous programming in C#. As a result of this update, our code is a lot cleaner and easier to read.

However, because this is such a big change, we urge all willing users to give this beta a shot and make sure everything still works correctly :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Improved Keyring Dialog design

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel reports

Gir.Core 0.4.0 was released. Most prominent features in this release include:

Addition of GtkSourceView to the supported libraries

Update to the latest versions of Gtk, LibAdwaita, WebKit

Support for Span<T> to avoid memory duplication while doing native interop

Improved exception handling for callbacks

Automatic dispatching of code into the MainLoop if async code is written

All details can be found in the release notes.

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman announces

Blueprint 0.10.0 is out! The biggest change is that the bind-property keyword is gone, since it was a bit confusing when to use it instead of bind. Also in this release are some improvements to the on-hover documentation. https://gitlab.gnome.org/jwestman/blueprint-compiler/-/releases/v0.10.0

GNOME Foundation

barthalion announces

Update from the infrastructure team:

GNOME Gitlab has gained two brand-new CI runners, donated by Canonical. Both are hosted at Hetzner, sporting an Intel Core i5-13500, 64GB of RAM, and 2 NVMe disks configured as RAID1 for faster disk reads.

The deployment of the new CI runners was a good opportunity to revisit our deployment automation. All runners were upgraded to the latest distribution releases, and also reworked to use podman instead of Docker, which now runs fully unprivileged for a reduced attack surface.

We have also improved the tool used to clean up the old Docker images to act more aggressively. As a result, there should be fewer issues caused by limited or no disk space.

Outside of CI/CD changes, we’re working on a replacement for Discourse e-mail integration we’re using instead of the late Mailman. Currently, it can be a little wonky as it applies Discourse permissions if the sender already has an account, causing issues with the delivery to the Board and Code of Conduct team. The new solution will be deployed shortly after GUADEC.

Speaking of GUADEC, I will be talking about short- and long-term plans for the infrastructure on Wednesday at 9:40 AM CEST. Drop by if you want to know where we’re at!

Do you know someone doing outstanding work for GNOME? Find out how to nominate them for the 2023 Pants of Thanks Award!

Learn more and find out how to submit a nomination here.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#104 Full Text Search

Fri, 14 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 07 to July 14.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield announces

The Tracker search engine has a new full text search algorithm arriving in GNOME 45, thanks to Carlos Garnacho. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker/-/merge_requests/611 for more details.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Call for volunteers: if you are experienced in maintaining a GitLab CI runner on macOS, and you want to contribute to building and testing GLib and GTK on that platform, please join the GNOME Infrastructure team channel to help maintaining the macOS GitLab CI runner provided by the GNOME Foundation. If nobody volunteers, the CI runner will be retired in September. More details are available on Discourse.

GNOME Development Tools

hergertme reports

In an attempt to ease porting of applications to GTK 4, I’ve released libspelling which provides inline spellchecking for GTK 4. It is extracted from the spellcheck engine I wrote for GNOME Text Editor and Builder. You can grab a copy from https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/libspelling

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

jcwasmx86 reports

Workbench now supports GTKCssLanguageServer, a language server providing code intelligence for the GTK CSS flavor. This moves the CSS code intelligence out-of-process and allows reusing the functionality in other editors. It’s planned to include it in GNOME Builder later, when it is a bit more mature. Currently, the language server only provides diagnostics in Workbench, but documentation on hover and auto-completion will follow as soon as it adds support for those features.

Webfont Kit Generator ↗

Create @font-face kits easily.

Webfont Kit Generator has received a small UI refresh with the new widgets from libadwaita. It now has a utility panel for the output options, allowing you to set everything in one view.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo reports

Thanks to Libadwaita 1.4, Cartridges has gained a new sidebar allowing you to filter games by source. It will also adapt to smaller screen sizes better thanks to AdwBreakpoint.

These features will land alongside GNOME 45 in the fall.

Third Party Projects

Tagger ↗

Tag your music.

Nick says

Tagger is now at V2023.7.1-beta2 ! V2023.7.1 is shaping up to be a huge release with new features, more customization options, better performance, many bug fixes, and an improved user interface.

Here’s the full changelog so far:

Added support for the following tag properties: BPM, Composer, Description, Publisher, ISRC

Added help documentation with yelp-tools, accessible from the Help menu action

Added more file sorting options

Improved album art design and added support for managing back cover art and exporting album art

Fixed an issue where corrupted music files would crash the app. Tagger will now display a dialog to warn the user of corrupted files

Improved UI

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick says

Parabolic V2023.7.2 is here!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to select a download’s audio language if more than one are available

Added the option to allow for only Windows-supported characters in filenames

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

IPlan ↗

Your plan for improving personal life and workflow

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.9.0 is now out! What’s changed:

Search button and Primary menu moved to the sidebar

Navigation in the calendar by scroll

Calendar Navigation buttons removed

Now task changes apply to other parts of UI too. (instead of resetting them)

Clickable URL Links in the task description

Ctrl + w shortcut for closing window

Code refactoring, Bug fixes, and UI improvements

You can get it from Flathub

GNOME Network Displays ↗

Stream the desktop to Wi-Fi Display capable devices

Pedro Sader Azevedo announces

Discovery of Chromecast and MICE devices was backported to the work-in-progress headless build of GNOME Network Displays.

Flare ↗

An unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi announces

Flare 0.9.0 was released, which included a lot of overall UI improvements, but also some new functionality. I will just list the most important improvements, a list of all improvements can be seen in the changelog:

Flare now supports receiving and playing voice messages.

The UI of the messages got drastically improved. The message bubbles now also support theming with GNOME accent colors.

The dropdown menu on messages got improved. Furthermore, the drop-down menu is now opened by right-click or (when using touch) holding the message instead of just a normal click.

Updated to GTK 4.10 including updating from deprecated widgets to their new counterperts.

Flare now supports receiving mentions (implemented in 0.8.2).

I want to thank @Marc0x for doing most of the work on this release and bringing the UI of Flare to a new level.

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen reports

This week you can find the Foundation at FOSSY, a community-oriented conference hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy! If you’re attending in Portland, make sure to stop by the GNOME booth to grab some stickers or pick up a t-shirt.

We’ve also been hard at work coordinating all the final details for GUADEC 2023! The conference starts in 12 days and that means we’ve got banners, signage, name badges, lanyards, t-shirts, and more to prepare. If you’re attending remotely or in person remember to register ahead. This helps us know how many people to expect and lets us have time to print your name on your badge.

We’re still looking for GUADEC 2023 sponsors! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s conference, take a look at our sponsorship brochure and reach out to mwu@gnome.org for more information.

Volunteer Opportunity: We’re live-streaming the GUADEC talks, but are looking for a volunteer to edit the final footage into individual talk videos. If that sounds like a project you’re interested in let us know by emailing chenriksen@gnome.org.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#103 Flowing Information

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 30 to July 07.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan says

This week Dan Yeaw released Gaphor 2.19.1. The simple modeling tool has received a lot of small improvements and bug fixes. Parts of the UI have been updated to use new GTK 4 elements. Information Flow for Associations has been added, and Object Flows can now connect to Join/Fork Nodes. Get your copy from Gaphor’s download page or directly from Flathub.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo announces

After months of work, Cartridges 2.0 is finally here.

Two new import sources have been added: Legendary and Flatpak.

Alongside several UX improvements, the import backed has been completely rewritten, huge thanks to Geoffrey Coulaud. This allows for faster imports, much better error handling and makes adding new sources much easier, so a lot more are coming soon!

Check it out on Flathub!

Third Party Projects

Swapnil Devesh reports

This week I released Luminance, an app that lets you change brightness of displays including external ones that support DDC/CI (almost all non ancient displays support it). The app is intentionally really simple, and integrates very well with GNOME desktop. It also has a CLI interface for adjusting brightness from scripts or keyboard shortcuts, its available to install for Arch based distros in AUR and deb and rpm packages are available on GitHub releases. Would be looking at porting to GTK4 next, would have loved to make it available as a Flatpak but don’t think that would be possible due to the app needing permissions to access i2c and backlight devices.

Vlad Krupinski says

After two weeks of development I’ve released List 44.6.7. The main feature of this release is implementation of Drag and Drop. Now you can easily move tasks around! Moving sub-tasks between tasks now works too.

This update also includes:

Added smooth fade effect on top of the tasks list

Tasks list now scrolls when new task added

Added button to scroll to the top

Minor UI changes and improvements

Gianni Rosato announces

Aviator 0.4.1 is released today with the following changes:

The custom SVT-AV1 fork used in Aviator has been updated, promising up to a 40% speed improvement for the slower, higher quality presets

A new “Crop” option for switching between cropping & scaling resolution has been added

The internal SVT-AV1 parameters have been tweaked for a 0.3-0.8% improvement in perceptual quality

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.29.0 is out. This release adds improved audio device selection and notifications for ongoing calls. When phosh has information about a device’s notches it can avoid placing UI elements there and you can enable suspend from the system menu. Notifications can now take more screen space on the lockscreen and we made a bunch of robustness fixes to the emergency info preferences plugin.

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Fyodor Sobolev reports

Parabolic V2023.7.1 is here! In this release we fixed 2 bugs and added 1 new feature:

Fixed an issue where CPU usage was high during download due to excessive logging

When downloading a playlist with enabled metadata embedding, a media’s position will be written to the tag’s track property

Fixed an issue where Validate button was sensitive during validation, causing error if the button was pressed multiple times

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

IPlan ↗

Your plan for improving personal life and workflow

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.8.0 is now out! What’s changed:

Move up and down option for tasks rows

Fade effect for moving between projects

Improve date format

Popovers aligned and calendar navigation buttons width reduced, to fit in the phone form factor

Code refactoring, Bug fixes, and UI improvements

You can get it from Flathub

Fretboard ↗

Look up guitar chords

Brage reports

This week I released Fretboard, an app that lets you find guitar chords by typing their names or plotting them on an interactive guitar neck. No matter if you are a beginner or an advanced guitarist, you can use Fretboard to practice, learn, and master your favorite songs!

I’d appreciate your help with improving the chord data. Please report any weird chord recommendations in the issue tracker, and I’ll have a look at it.

Install Fretboard from Flathub and give it a spin!

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna says

This was a short week because of the holiday, but there still was a lot going on. With GUADEC coming soon at the end of the month, the staff is working towards making sure everything happens as smoothly as possible. If you haven’t signed up for the Latvia social trip yet, there are still some spots open: https://events.gnome.org/event/101/page/164-northern-latvia-trip. I am very much looking forward to that!

I spent a lot of this week catching up on lots of minutiae. There has been an emphasis on taxes and books this past month, as we have been onboarding our bookkeeper and working towards filing our taxes. I also renewed our mailbox, went over our foundation insurance policies, did state-mandated training, etc. In between that, I had meetings on the Executive Director search, travel issues, and finances, along with individual meetings with staff.

I am also getting ready to attend FOSSY next week where I will be giving a talk on creating crosswords with free software. GNOME will also be running a booth there, so please drop on by and say hi if you are going to be in Portland!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#102 Contextual Back Buttons

Fri, 30 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 23 to June 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) says

AdwNavigationView back buttons now support a context menu allowing to pop multiple pages at once. This works with nested navigation views and even with structures like AdwNavigationSplitView containing navigation views in both content and sidebar. Additionally, back button tooltips are now more reliable - they previously didn’t work in this situation and required the app to manually sync the sidebar page’s title with its navigation view’s visible page. Now it’s automatic like in other cases

Third Party Projects

Alain reports

Hi, Planify 4.1 is out!

Planify has a new icon thanks to Tobias Bernard.

Quick Add is available, quickly add tasks from anywhere on your desktop with a simple keyboard shortcut, set it from Preferences → Quick Add

Preferences page redesigned.

The preferences to run in the background and run at startup are available.

The error that did not allow to see the calendar events was solved.

Added the preference to create tutorial project.

Bug fixes and performance improvement.

https://github.com/alainm23/planify/releases/tag/4.1 Available on Flathub

Felipe Kinoshita says

This week I release Wildcard 0.2.0, it brings a more streamlined layout and a nice dialog for quickly switching expression flags on/off, check it out! :D

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick reports

Tagger is currently at V2023.7.0-beta2 !

After months of no updates, we are proud to bring Tagger back and better than ever. Tagger has received the C# treatment and has been completely rewritten from the ground up with a more stable and performant backend. To signify this great release, we even have a new icon thanks to @daudix-UFO ! Besides being written in C#, we also added some new features and fixed pre-existing bugs that you can read about below. Tagger is also now available to translate on Weblate !

We urge everyone who uses Tagger / wants to use Tagger to help us test the beta releases so we can iron out any issues before our stable release this Sunday. We hope you enjoy this release as much as we enjoyed making it :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Tagger has been completely rewritten in C#! With this new language comes better performance and more stable features. To signify this great change, we also updated the app icon!

Added a separate option in Preferences for overwriting album art with MusicBrainz metadata independently of the overwriting tag data setting

Added an option in Preferences for controlling how music files are sorted

Track values will now be padded into double digits

Fixed an issue where some file types were not loading album art correctly

Fixed an issue where applying unapplied changes would sometimes not work

Improved UI/UX

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick announces

Parabolic V2023.6.3 is here!

If you haven’t noticed, Tube Converter has been renamed to Parabolic! We think this is a much better name for the downloader and thank all that have worked with us to come up with a new name :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Tube Converter has been renamed. Introducing, Parabolic!

Fixed a large memory leak caused by not disposing logs correctly

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

IPlan ↗

Your plan for improving personal life and workflow

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.7.0 is now out! What’s changed:

Chart of Time spent in last 7 days

Record delete button moved to record row

Improve usability for the phone form factor

Option to disable run in background

Improve duration format

Code refactoring, Bug fixes, and UI improvements You can get it from Flathub.

GNOME Network Displays ↗

Stream the desktop to Wi-Fi Display capable devices

GNOME Network Displays gained a DBus interface, that exposes the list of screencasting devices (also known as “sinks”) discovered in your network. This is part of the ongoing effort to allow GNOME Network Displays to function as a screencasting backend for other projects (e.g. GNOME Shell, GNOME Settings, xdg-portal, etc).

GNOME Foundation

Kristi Progri announces

GUADEC 2023 is coming and the team is working hard to make this experience as pleasant as possible. On July 31st we are orgaizing a day trip outside of Riga. If you are interested to join please register here: https://events.gnome.org/event/101/page/164-northern-latvia-trip. We have extended the deadline for everyone who couldn’t make it on time.

On another note, GNOME ASIA is taking place in Katmandhu, Nepal from 1st-3rd of December. We are starting to put together the plans and conference timeline, if you would be interested to join the organising team please send us an email at: asia@gnome.org

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#101 Libadwaita Happenings

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 16 to June 23.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Text Editor ↗

Text Editor is a simple text editor that focus on session management.

hergertme reports

Text Editor is now using the libadwaita’s AdwToolbarView. See https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2023/06/15/rethinking-adaptivity/ for more information about the new widget and how it can improve adaptability to different form factors.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

the “Edit Calendar” page in GNOME Calendar was recently ported to libadwaita widgets! We also added mnemonics to improve keyboard accessibility, as well as tooltips.

Chris 🌱️ announces

GNOME Calendar now uses the new AdwNavigationSplitView widget and AdwBreakpoint for adaptivity. This means it now fits properly on mobile portrait mode - something that wasn’t possible with the old libadwaita widgets. We also now use AdwMessageDialog instead of GtkMessageDialog.

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Alice (she/they) reports

Epiphany is using new libadwaita widgets now, as well as AdwTabOverview

Disks

kailueke reports

GNOME Disks is in need of contributors for the GTK4 port and the UI refresh planned in gnome-disk-utility#274 (these mockups have been around for a while). The GTK4 port and the UI refresh could be done separate but it maybe saves work if it’s done at once (there could be an easy way to use GTK4 without rewriting the partition view, not sure).

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny says

Workbench 44.2 is out. There are 30 new demos and examples in this release which brings the total amount of Library entries above 50. Each entry is carefully crafted to feature good coding practices, be easy to reason about and respect GNOME HIG and patterns.

Thanks to all contributors, specially Outreachy and GSoC students José Hunter, Akshay Warrier, Sriyansh Shivam and Andy Holmes for co-mentoring.

Here is the list of new entries

Popover

Screenshot

Header Bar

Font Dialog

Preferences Window

Web View

Boxed Lists

Drag and Drop

Tab View

Drawing Area

Advanced Buttons

About Window

Animation

TextView

Styling with CSS

Spin Button

Banner

Carousel

Color Picker

Email

Progress Bar

Wallpaper

Drop Down

Video

Revealer

Account

Stack

Status Page

Frame

Account

Happy coding!

Third Party Projects

Vlad Krupinski reports

List - simple to-do application version 44.6.4 is out!

This week updates are:

Added some nice animations

New setting for data backup

Added Turkish translation

Updated symbolic icon

UI improvements and bug fixes

Available on Flathub

Mazhar Hussain announces

GDM Settings v3.2 was released with the fix for not being able to change background image/color on GNOME 44 and updated translations.

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick announces

Tube Converter V2023.6.2 is here! This release features brand new documentation provided by the Help menu item and includes some bug fixes when working with credentials and validating URLs. Here’s the full changelog:

Added a “Help” item in the main menu to display yelp docs about Tube Converter

Recently completed downloads will be shown first in the completed group instead of being appended last

Tube Converter will now automatically select the xdg-download folder as the save folder if no previous folder is available

Fixed a performance issue with displaying logs when the logs were large in size

Fixed an issue where the app would crash if the authentication credentials were invalid

Fixed an issue where some supported URLs could not be validated

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Julian says

It is my pleasure to announce that the recently released PineTab2 from PINE64 already runs Phosh, so you can use and develop your favourite GNOME applications on it!

Here’s how to run it, using Mobian: https://wiki.debian.org/InstallingDebianOn/PINE64/PineTab2

Thank you to everyone who helped me make this possible!

IPlan ↗

Your plan for improving personal life and workflow

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.6.0 is now out!

Changes this week contains:

New design for drag and drop

New Project create window

Close windows with escape key

Drop task on each other

Scroll while dragging task

Rename tasks list to section

Czech translation updated thanks to Amerey.eu

Code refactoring, Bug fixes, and UI improvements

you can get it from Flathub.

GNOME Network Displays ↗

Stream the desktop to Wi-Fi Display capable devices

GNOME Network Displays can now be compiled as headless daemon! All it does for the time being is printing available sinks to the terminal, but that’s the foundation that will later enable shell and settings integrations.

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick reports

Denaro V2023.6.1 is here! This release features some minor bug fixes and UX tweaks.

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to select a file to import existing data from in the new account setup dialog

Improved custom currency preferences design

Fixed an issue where the Help docs were not installed on an English system

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Shell Extensions

Marcin Jahn says

I’ve developed a new Gnome Shell extension - Peek Top Bar On Fullscreen. It enables macOS-like capability of revealing Gnome top panel while full screen content is on. Just hover mouse cursor to the top of your primary screen to check the time, or to switch some quick settings toggles, without leaving full screen mode.

GUADEC 2023

mwu reports

We are getting ready for GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Latvia and we hope to see you there! Registration is open for both in person and virtual attendance. Please register early so that we can get an in person and virtual headcount. Why do we ask this? Its helpful to know how popular sessions are, where people are attending from and if there is interest in our events. To register please go to https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/05/04/guadec-2023-registration-is-open/. We are very grateful for our current sponsors: RedHat, ARM, Codethink, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Centricular, and Endless who have all stepped up in supporting GUADEC 2024. We still need to raise more money and if you or your company are interested, please email sponsors@guadec.org. Look fwd to seeing you in Latvia!

Caroline Henriksen announces

GUADEC 2023 is only 1 month away! We’ve planned two social event options for our final conference day. If you’re attending in person in Riga and would like to join us for a day trip in Northern Latvia or a walking tour of Old Riga, make sure to register by June 26: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/join-us-for-guadec-2023-social-events/15764

Asmit Malakannawar says

Are you attending #GUADEC2023 in Riga? We’ve organized two awesome social events for our final conference day, July 31! Reserve your spot on either option by registering before June 26.

And don’t forget to register as an in-person attendee: GUADEC 2023 (26-31 July 2023): Registration · GNOME Events (Indico)

Northern Latvia Day Trip Our first option is the Northern Latvia Day Trip!

This 8hr tour includes transport to a number of historic spots including Gauja National Park, Bīriņi Manor, and the seaside resort of Saulkrasti.

Learn more and register here: GUADEC 2023 (26-31 July 2023): Northern Latvia Trip · GNOME Events (Indico)

Old Riga Walking Tour Our second option is an Old Riga Walking Tour!

This 2hr tour walks us through the winding streets and cobblestone alleys of historic Old Riga.

Learn more and register here: GUADEC 2023 (26-31 July 2023): Old Riga Walking Tour · GNOME Events (Indico)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#100 One Hundred

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

One hundred weeks ago, on Friday 16 July 2021, “This Week in GNOME” was launched - the first post was “#1 Scrolling in the Dark”.

Since then TWIG has grown into a vibrant community, and has become a weekly ritual for many people—both for developers who share their work, and for curious readers who want to follow the development of GNOME.

TWIG is not the result of a few individuals, but of a large, diverse, dedicated, motivated, fantastic group of contributors who are all behind the GNOME project!

The picture above shows the various projects people have been working on over the last few years. Since the beginning, over a thousand news submissions have been made to the Matrix room #thisweek:gnome.org. A big thank you to each and every contributor ❤️! Can you recognise your own project in the picture?

In line with the anniversary, we have also set a new record. Never before have there been so many submissions as this week. Let’s celebrate this success together! And now, as usual, to the happenings across the GNOME Project in the week from 09 June to 16 June!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof reports

Files was an early adopter of the new AdwOverlaySplitView and AdwToolbarView widgets, featuring updated visual style, courtesy of Chris 🌱️ .

Work on improving file searching experience continues on full steam. When searching from grid, it no longer changes to a list. The goal was to show the location of recursive results, but now the grid view has grown the ability to display the path itself. This avoids the abrupt change of view from grid to list.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) says

Now that all the replacements are in, the old adaptive widgets in libadwaita have been deprecated:

AdwLeaflet

AdwFlap

AdwSqueezer

AdwViewSwitcherTitle

I’ve published a blog post detailing the rationale and the replacements: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2023/06/15/rethinking-adaptivity/

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

The Default Apps panel in Settings got a new look, using libadwaita’s list widgets.

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

lwildberg reports

Since a week the new nightly version of the Vala Sdk is published and everyone can use it! Its hosted on the GNOME nightly flatpak remote. Its the same as if you use the stable Sdk, except the id is org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.vala-nightly. Currently there is a 22.08 branch, which works with the latest gnome and freedesktop runtime. The nightly Sdk includes the git version of the Vala compiler and the Vala language server updated every day. So if you want to try out new features or need a recent bug fix, use the nightly Sdk! You can read more also on discourse. Great thank you to Jordan Petridis for setting everything up!

GNOME Development Tools

Chris 🌱️ reports

If you’re interested in using Typescript for GNOME apps, you can now use the new Typescript SDK Extension. I’ve also published a Typescript Template you can use as a starting point for your apps.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus announces

Due to the large number of changes since the last release, I’ve released a beta for the next version of Eyedropper. Highlights of this release include

Visual feedback when entering a colour format

Support for input of all formats

Allow searching for colours in the activity overview

Choice of file format when exporting palettes

Visual fixes

Visit the GitHub release for the full changelog or download the beta from Flathub and share your feedback.

Metronome ↗

Practice music with a regular tempo.

FineFindus reports

Metronome 1.3.0 has been released! This version fixes a bug with off-beat ticks and allows to change the BPM while playing. We’ve also added tooltips to several buttons. It is available on Flathub.

Ear Tag ↗

Edit audio file tags.

knuxify says

Ear Tag 0.4.0 (and its subsequent bugfix release, 0.4.1) have been released! This new version brings three new features:

Renaming files using a specific pattern

Identifying files using AcoustID

The option to set a full release date (YYYY-MM-DD) instead of just the year

You can get the latest version from Flathub.

Third Party Projects

Daniel Wood reports

This week Design, the 2D CAD appication gets support for:

Line Types (Dotted, Dashed, Center etc…)

Exporting to alternative DXF versions

Thank you to the GNOME Design community for their support.

Design 44-alpha4 is available from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

Diego Iván says

This week, I also worked on a new release of Flowtime. Flowtime is a productivity app for the time management method with the same name, especially useful for the tasks you love, as other methods like Pomodoro may interrupt you when you are at your most concentrated. Flowtime lets you work all the time you want, to then take a break that lasts a fifth of the time you worked. It has various useful features, which include:

Statistics: Keep track of the time you’ve worked, the time you’ve taken a break and which is you most productive day of the week.

Small View: Reduce the clutter in the Flowtime window by activating a mode that shows just the timer.

Run in the background: Close the window to reduce distractions while your timer is still running, check your progress in GNOME Shell’s background apps panel.

Customizable factor to compute break time: If a fifth of the time you’ve worked does not fit your work flow, you can change it from a half of the time up to a tenth.

You can download it from Flathub!

Iman Salmani reports

IPlan 1.5.0 is now out!

Changes this week contains:

The task row shows the description, subtasks, due date, and reminder

New design for task rows

Add task button below tasks list

One week per calendar page

Today and No Date buttons on top of the date picker

Click on a searched task will open the task window

Auto start (if the user lets the app run in the background) and checking for reminders in the startup

Czech, French and Brazilian Portuguese Translations Added or updated thanks to Amerey.eu, Irénée Thirion, and Fúlvio Leo

Code refactoring, Bug fixes, and UI improvements

you can get it from Flathub.

Khaleel Al-Adhami reports

Introducing Footage; a tool to rotate, flip, crop, trim, mute, and export your video to a format of your choice! It’s available on Flathub

Khaleel Al-Adhami says

New Impression release: 2.0. We decided to drop the major versions to simplify versioning. This release includes visual enhancements, automatic updates of the available drives list, explicit drive selection before flashing, and more translations, making Impression available in a total of 8 languages. Huge thanks to Brage for helping out so much with the app! It’s now available on Flathub

Aleks Rutins announces

Today, I implemented shared buckets in Kaste. Check it out at https://gitlab.gnome.org/aleksrutins/kaste!

0xMRTT reports

Bavarder 0.2.4 has been released with a few improvements

Faster baichat

Better internal structure wich is more modular

Improved translations

Better UI

dlippok says

This week I released version 1.0.0 of Photometric Viewer, a utility software for viewing EULUMDAT and IESNA photometric files. Photometric files are used in the lighting industry, CAD and 3D graphics for describing properties and light distributions of lamps and luminaires. The software is available on Snapcraft and Flathub.

Project page: https://flathub.org/apps/io.github.dlippok.photometric-viewer

mrvladus reports

This week I’ve released List 44.6. It’s a simple To Do application for your daily tasks. You can add tasks and sub-tasks, edit them, move around and mark as completed. That is pretty much it! This version includes:

History of deleted tasks

Button to undo deletion

UI and Accessibility improvements It is available on Flathub

xjuan reports

Cambalache 0.12.0 released! New features:

User Templates: use your templates anywhere in your project

Workspace CSS support: see your CSS changes live

GtkBuildable Custom Tags: support for styles, items, etc

Property Bindings: bind your property to any source property

XML Fragments: add any xml to any object or UI as a fallback

Preview mode: hide placeholders in workspace

WebKit support: new widget catalog available

External objects references support

Add support for GdkPixbuf, GListModel and GListStore types

You can read more about in here

Diego Iván reports

This week, and after a three month hiatus in development, I published the second major release of Paper Clip (formerly PDF Metadata Editor), with various improvements since it was last featured in TWIG, which include:

New icon! Thanks to Brage Fuglseth for the neat icon!

Fix many UI paper cuts to better fit the GNOME HIG. Thanks to Tobias Bernard for his recommendations!

The main view now has a thumbnail of the document instead of a symbolic icon

The details window has been removed and its contents have been moved to the bottom of the main view

Felipe Kinoshita reports

This week I released Wildcard, a simple development utility for testing/practicing regular expressions!

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick reports

Tube Converter V2023.6.1 is here! This release is packed with new features and fixes that make Tube Converter faster, more customizable, and easier to use.

Continued thanks to @fsobolev and @DaPigGuy who continuously work with me to implement and test all of these features. @soumyaDghosh for managing snap and all other contributors, feature requesters, bug testers, and translators who continue to make Tube Converter the best that it can be :) ❤️

Here’s the full changelog:

Added authentication options when adding a download if needed

Added a Keyring to store credentials that can be used when authenticating

Added the advanced download option to specify a specific timeframe of a media to download

Added the ability to embed chapters in a download

Added the ability to turn on automatically cropping audio thumbnails

Added the ability to specify a comma-separated list of language codes for subtitle downloading

Improved the speed of playlist validation

The “Number Titles” switch’s state will now be remembered and used again for future downloads

The previous “Video Resolution” will be remembered and pre-selected if available for future downloads

Comment, Description, Synopsis and Purl fields will no longer be embedded in metadata

If a download fails and was not stopped, Tube Converter will automatically retry it one more time

Fixed an issue where some websites were not validated

Fixed an issue where the incorrect file extension was sometimes shown for generic downloads

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Rnote ↗

Sketch and take handwritten notes.

flxzt reports

A new version “v0.7.0” for Rnote, a vector-based sketching and handwriting app is out! Notable new features: a focus mode that hides the toolbars for a better experience on devices with lower resolution, inertial touch-scrolling, a dedicated zoom-tool and a lot of other improvements

Paper Plane ↗

Chat over Telegram on a modern and elegant client.

marhkb reports

For the 100th issue of TWIG, we are pleased to announce that Telegrand has been renamed to Paper Plane. In addition, we have now started distributing releases on Flathub Beta.

Among the recent changes are:

The chat history now has a background image, which is animated when new messages arrive, thanks to yuraiz.

A bug was fixed that lead to an application crash if selecting non-existing chats from the contacts window, thank to alissonlauffer.

Avatars of deleted accounts now have a ghost icon set, thanks to karl0d.

The application will now be built with more aggressive compiler options, which should result in a smaller and maybe faster binary.

Translation updates

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data in a breeze!

Sjoerd Stendahl reports

This week we released version 1.6.0 of Graphs, which spots a number of bugfixes as well as some quality of life changes. Some highlights of this release include:

Full localization support, with full translations available in Dutch, Turkish (thanks to sabriunal) and Swedish

Action dialogs now follow the GNOME HIG

The behavior of the axes limits have been improved, with fewer unnecessary resets

The axis limits are now persistent when loading saved projects

Regular and advanced import have been merged to offer a single mode to add new data

Graphs now functions properly on high DPI displays with scaled resolutions

And many general bug fixes as well as refactors under the hood

Graphs is now officially available as Snap package as well (thanks soumyaDghosh).

The latest version of Graphs can be found on Flathub or on Snapcraft! While there is no time schedule, planned features for coming updates include the ability to add objects to the plots themselves, and functionality for data regression using arbitrary equations. If you want to contribute to Graphs or have any issues or feedback, please file a ticket at the Github page.

Thanks to everyone involved in making this release possible. Not the least to my co-developer cmkohnen.

And congratulations to the whole community with the 100th issue of TWIG! Just a few weeks ago we reached another milestone with a total of 1000 submissions. With our cumulative efforts, there’s no denying the data that the year of the Linux desktop will soon be upon us ;-)

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

Daudix UFO reports

Gradience Team is pleased to announce the first beta release of the upcoming 0.8.0 version after 4+ months (128 days). This release brings the long-awaited feature of GNOME Shell theming 🎉 along with several enhancements:

🔄 Added ability to use JSDelivr instead of GitHub for downloading presets

✨ Added mnemonics to view switchers

⌨️ Added keyboard shortcuts

🖼️ Small tweaks to the icon

🌐 Updated translations

🐛 Bug fixes

A list of blocking issues for the release of version 0.8.0 can be found in the Gradience milestone on GitHub. All contributions are welcome!

The beta version will soon be available on Flathub Beta for testing. Stay tuned!

Escambo ↗

Test and develop APIs

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

In celebration of TWIG’s 100th issue, Escambo releases version 0.1.2.

Since the last version Escambo has received some improvements such as:

Fix inability to select response code

Update to Blueprint to 0.8.1

Update Brazilian Portuguese translation

Add German and Turkish translation

Be able to create Header with empty value

Check for duplicate data keys

Add new way to add new Body Form Data

Add new flat design

Fixed some toast notifications and many more…

New contributors: Pablo Emídio S.S., FineFindus, 0xMRTT, Sabri Ünaal, gregorni.

New sponsors: baarkerlounger, Jorge O. Castro.

Escambo is undergoing a redesign process and great news is coming in the future.

Get it on Flathub

Dev Toolbox ↗

Development tools at your fingertips.

Aleie000 reports

Dev Toolbox v1.1 has landed on Flathub! This release upgrades the platform to GNOME 44 and introduces many new tools and improvements. Thank you for all the suggestions I received since the last release and for the translators’ work on Weblate.

Here’s a list of everything that has changed:

Upgraded to GNOME 44

Now follows the system theme

Timestamp: ISO8601/RFC3339 output format and timezone support

Ported UIs to blueprint

Improved icon

New tool: JS Formatter

New tool: Certificate Parser

New tool: CSR Generator

New tool: Random Generator

New tool: CRON generator

New tool: chmod calculator

New tool: QR-code generator

New tool: JSON validator

New tool: CSS Formatter

New translations: Czech (@Amereyeu), Spanish (Óscar Fernández Díaz on Weblate and @gallegonovato), Norwegian bokmål (@comradekingu) and Portuguese (@SantosSi)

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.6.0 is here! This release features many new feature, fixes, and design improvements giving Denaro a better look!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added a new account setup dialog to make it easier to configure new accounts

Added the ability to remove recent accounts from the list

Denaro will now suggest autocompletions for transaction descriptions

Moved deleting groups and transactions from their rows to their dialogs

Changed the default sorting order of new accounts to last to first by date

Amounts shown in the sidebar will now reflect that of the transactions shown in view

Fixed an issue importing CSV files

Fixed an issue causing Denaro to crash when working with a large number of transactions

Improved UI/UX

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Shell Extensions

Thanks to Yuri Konotopov, GNOME extensions website now allows users to delete their account from the account settings page. User account will be deleted in 7 days after the request.

kramo says

The One-Thing GNOME Extension now supports GNOME 44!

Weather O’Clock ↗

Display the current weather inside the pill next to the clock.

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

Weather O’Clock and Auto Activities extensions received links for donations.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#99 Overlaid Sidebars

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 02 to June 09.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) says

libadwaita now has AdwOverlaySplitView as an overlay sidebar counterpart to AdwNavigationSplitView and a future replacement of AdwFlap that works with breakpoints. It provides a cleaned up API and the same dynamic sizing, styling and automatic window button handling as AdwNavigationSplitView

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Pedro Sader Azevedo announces

As part of an ongoing GSoC internship to integrate screen casting into GNOME, we’re running a user survey to better understand the most common use-cases for this feature. Answer our poll on reddit and leave a comment if you have the time, it’ll be greatly appreciated!

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme announces

Now that GJS has merged support for running scripts within a given mozjs Realm, libpeas has gained support for loading plugins written in JavaScript. Christian’s blog post at https://blogs.gnome.org/chergert/2023/06/02/gjs-plugins-for-libpeas-2-0/ has more details on how to use this and how it will be integrated with GNOME Builder.

GNOME Development Tools

hergertme announces

An initial alpha release of libmks is available at https://gitlab.gnome.org/chergert/libmks/-/releases/0.1.0. Libmks provides a “Mouse, Keyboard, and Screen” implementation for QEMU utilizing the D-Bus display device. It supports importing DMA-BUF into GdkTexture with damages for more efficient rendering as part of a GTK 4-based application.

We expect a number of new features to land in the future ranging from touchpad integration, clipboard, and sound devices.

hergertme says

Libdex, an async/await/futures library for GLib based applications, gained support for performing async I/O on traditional file-descriptors in the public API. This was always available internally and utilizes io_uring on Linux. Additionally, a number of new GIO abstractions were provided for GDBusConnection and GSubprocess. Fixes were also added to improve GObject Introspection integration.

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme announces

Hot on the heels of libpeas-2 gaining support for JavaScript-based plugins powered by GJS, GNOME Builder has switched to JavaScript as it’s dynamic language for plugins. That means you can write third-party plugins for Builder in C, C++, Rust, Vala, JavaScript, or any other language which supports both GObject Introspection and compiling to a shared library (.so).

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie (busy) says

Loupe is now using glycin to decode images. Glycin is a new library that loads images via sandboxed processes. This will allow adding support for additional image formats via additional loaders, similar to GdkPixbuf. The sandboxed image loading will increase security and neatly separate image loading from the Loupe UI. There will be more details announced on this in the future. You can try the changes via GNOME Nightly.

There have also been a bunch of smaller fixes and tweaks by new contributors. If you are interested in contributing as well, we are trying to keep a list of “Newcomers” issues now.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Solanum ↗

Balance working time and break time.

Chris 🌱️ reports

Solanum 4.0.0 is out with the feature to restart your pomodoro sessions from the beginning and some fixes for long-standing bugs.

Third Party Projects

ByteSeb says

I made a simple Rock, Paper, Scissors Libadwaita application. It serves as a demo for my free Libadwaita App Development video tutorial. You can inspect the source code at: https://github.com/ByteSeb/Duel And watch the tutorial at: https://youtu.be/WtvObZHhdf0

Khaleel Al-Adhami announces

In under 24 hours, I made Impression; the simplest app you could imagine to create bootable devices with a clean interface. All while following safe flatpak permissions!

https://flathub.org/apps/io.gitlab.adhami3310.Impression

tfuxu reports

Halftone 0.3.0 is out! It comes with a slightly revised look to the dithering page, new controls for brightness and contrast, and a button for opening previews in external image viewers. You can check it out on Github or download directly from Flathub

Iman Salmani says

IPlan 1.4.0 is now out!

New features and updates

Backing up system

Calendar for Exploring tasks by date

Tasks can have date and reminders (Application will remain in background for handling reminders)

When a task doesn’t have record, Timer button will move to options

Record edit window

Now users able to edit record duration by changing start time

Bug fixes, and UI improvements

You can get it from flathub.

Furtherance ↗

Track your time without being tracked.

Ricky Kresslein reports

Furtherance v1.8.0 was released and includes lots of new features:

Today’s total time ticks up with the current timer (optional)

Added ‘This week’ and ‘Last week’ options to Reports

Exported CSVs have a total seconds column

Total time is displayed across from the date in the task list

The task input and history list expand with the window

Preferences is sorted into three sections

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.6.0-beta2 has been released this week! Version 2023.6.0 is shaping up to be a big release with many new features and fixes!

Here’s the current changelog:

Added a new account setup dialog to make it easier to configure new accounts

Added the ability to remove recent accounts from the list

Denaro will now suggest autocompletions for transaction descriptions

Moved deleting groups and transactions from their rows to their dialogs

Changed the default sorting order of new accounts to last to first by date

Amounts shown in the sidebar will now reflect that of the transactions shown in view

Fixed an issue importing CSV files

Improved UI/UX

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Shell Extensions

andyholmes announces

Shell Extensions now support donation URLs!

Thanks to work by Martin Zurowietz and Javad Rahmatzadeh, extension developers can now add donation links for several popular services, as well as custom URLs.

See the documentation at https://gjs.guide/extensions/overview/anatomy.html#donations for details on how to get set up.

GNOME Foundation

This week, the GNOME Foundation has been getting everything ready for GUADEC 2023! The conference is only a month and a half away and there are still lots of tasks to do. The Riga team has planned two fun social outing options for our last conference day and we’re currently working on getting all the details up on the website as well as opening registration for both. In other event news, we will also be attending FOSSY, hosted by the Software Freedom Conservancy, in July in Portland, OR (USA). If you’re in the area or planning to attend be sure to stop by our booth!

In addition to event planning, we’re working on finalizing all of the articles for last year’s annual report. Once all of the writing is complete I’ll be designing the report and preparing it for online and print publication in time for GUADEC. Something we can always use help with is collecting photos for annual reports. If you have any GNOME photos from 2021-2022 that you would like to share please take a look at our GitLab issue and consider submitting them.

Reminders: The GUADEC 2023 call for BoFs and Workshops is open for a few more days. If you would like to host a BoF in Riga make sure to submit your application by June 12.

We’re still looking for GUADEC 2023 sponsors! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s conference, you can find our brochure and learn more on guadec.org.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#98 Fast Searching

Fri, 02 Jun 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 26 to June 02.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof says

Files search is faster. A series of performance optimizations by Carlos Garnacho gave momentum to a testing and developing team effort. There are further optimizations ahead, but the difference can already be felt in the Nightly flatpak.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) announces

I just landed AdwNavigationSplitView - the other part of replacing AdwLeaflet. This widget displays sidebar and content side by side or inside an AdwNavigationView. Meanwhile, AdwHeaderBar automatically hides redundant window buttons when used inside a split view.

AdwNavigationSplitView also manages sidebar width as a percentage of the full width when possible, as well as finally allows to implement the style from the original mockups that was impossible with AdwLeaflet

Third Party Projects

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

I just released Forge Sparks, a simple git forges (Github, Gitea, Forgejo) notifier app.

You can get it on Flathub, and help translate it on Weblate.

gregorni reports

This week, I released Calligraphy, an app that turns your text into large ASCII banners. Spice up your online conversations and add that extra oomph to your messages!

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.3.0 is now out! Changes this week contain Code refactoring and UI improvements:

New widgets for selecting Date and Time

Changing duration of the new record by setting end time

Add Brazilian Portuguese Translation thanks to Fúlvio Leo You can get it on flathub.

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick announces

Tube Converter V2023.6.0 is here! We have been hard at work implementing many new features, configuration options, user interface improvements, and plenty of bug fixes for this update.

I’d like to especially thank @fsobolev (my right-hand man), @soumyaDghosh (our wonderful snap maintainer), @DaPigGuy (our continuous tester and feature implementer), and all of the other testers, contributors and especially translators who put in countless time to make Tube Converter be the best that it can be! We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for all of your support ❤️

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to upload a cookie file to use for media downloads that require a login

Added support for downloading media as M4A

Added more configurable options for aria2 downloader

Added options to configure when completed download notifications are shown

Added the ability to clear completed downloads

Added the ability to disallow conversions and simply download the appropriate video/audio format for the selected quality without converting to other formats

Overwrite Existing Files is now a global option in Preferences instead of an individual setting in the AddDownloadDialog

Tube Converter will check the clipboard for a valid media url and when AddDownloadDialog is opened

Fixed an issue that prevented downloading m3u8 streams

Fixed an issue that prevented downloading media to NTFS drives

Updated UI/UX

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.28.0 is out. This is a “small things matter” release: Several transitions have been smoothed out. Notifications can unblank the screen and you can set at which urgency this happens. <super>-key can open the overview. Pressing and holding down the volume button works now (no more tapping multiple times). The lockscreen works on smaller displays and libcall-ui was updated to 0.1.0 bringing in some visual improvements.

Miscellaneous

feborges says

GNOME will have an Outreachy intern working on “Make GNOME platform demos for Workbench”!

We are happy to announce that GNOME is sponsoring an Outreachy internship project for the May-August cohort where the intern will be working on “Make GNOME platform demos for Workbench”.

Jose Hunter will be working with mentor Sonny Piers.

Stay tuned to Planet GNOME for future updates on the progress of this project!

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna announces

This week has been a lot of churn of what used to be called paperwork. With the help with some expert bookkeepers we were able to get the info the accountant needed to file our taxes by their deadline. I am always grateful when we can get expert help; it saves me a lot of time trying to figure it out on my own and I can be more confident in the results.

Speaking of deadlines, today is also the deadline for Executive Director applicants. I’ve been collecting the applications and collating them for the search committee to go through. Will spend this weekend and early next week going through them before the next committee meeting.

The travel committee had a lot more requests this year for GUADEC than our budget to handle. Because GUADEC is such a priority for us and being able to send interns is so fundamental to getting them to integrate with our community, I liaised between the committee and the Board to request additional funding. Hoping to be able to process the rest of the travel sponsorships soon.

Speaking of GUADEC, the call for volunteers is still ongoing. If you are attending and have ever wondered what is necessary behind the scenes to get everything running smoothly, this is a great opportunity. Quick form is located here: https://events.gnome.org/event/101/surveys/14 — Make sure you also have registered for GUADEC first!

Deadline for GUADEC BoFs or Workshops: June 12 — If you want to run a BoF or Workshop at GUADEC this year but have not submitted a request yet, please do so by June 12. More details here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/05/25/guadec-2023-call-for-bofs/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#97 GNOME Latam 2023

Fri, 26 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 19 to May 26.

Today, Friday May 26th, and tomorrow, Saturday May 27th, come join us at GNOME Latam 2023! This is a two days event celebrating our Latin GNOME community with speakers from all over the Americas.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) announces

I merged AdwNavigationView. This is a widget that implements page-based navigation with an easier to use API than AdwLeaflet, and will eventually replace it

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

GNOME Calendar just received a small facelift on top of the new widgets provided by libadwaita. It now features a better delineated sidebar, and the views have a uniform look too.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Sonny reports

This week, Cartridges joined GNOME Circle. Cartridges is a simple game launcher for all of your games. Congratulations!

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo says

I just released Cartridges 1.5!

Extra Steam libraries are now detected and added automatically, executables are now passed directly to the shell, allowing for more complex arguments, and a lot of UX improvements have been made.

Oh yeah, and the app is now part of GNOME Circle!

Check it out on Flathub!

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Amberol 0.10.3 is now out! Not a lot of changes, but two nice bug fixes: the waveform for short songs is now appropriately sized; and the cover art with a portrait orientation does not get squished any more. Plus, as usual, lots of translation updates.

Third Party Projects

Iman Salmani reports

IPlan 1.2.0 is now out! Changes: Subtasks, Bug fixes, and UI improvements

Task Window which contains task info, subtasks, and records

Translation to Persian and Turkish languages. thanks to Sabri Ünal

New toast message for moving back task from the tasks done list

Users are now able to pick emojis for their projects in the edit window

Projects and Tasks now can have descriptions

0xMRTT reports

Imaginer 0.2.2 has been released with the ability to use stable diffusion running locally. It’s also now possible to customize the filename and some bugs has been fixed.

0xMRTT says

Bavarder 0.2.3 has been released with the ability to use a custom model which enable you to use either a model running on your computer or a custom API providing the model. The loading mechanism is now faster and some bugs has been fixed.

You can download Bavarder from Flathub or from either GitHub or Codeberg.

tfuxu says

I’ve released Halftone, a simple app for lossy image compression using quantization and dithering techniques. Give your images a pixel art-like style and reduce the file size in the process with Halftone. You can check it out on Github.

JumpLink reports

I am pleased to announce the release of ts-for-gir v3.0.0 🚀 ts-for-gir is a powerful tool for generating TypeScript type definitions for GJS and GObject Introspection-based libraries.

In this release, I have focused on introducing NPM packages 📦. These packages contain pre-generated TypeScript types that can be easily integrated into your GJS projects. By utilizing these types, you can benefit from TypeScript’s strong typing and improved code navigation, whether you are working with JavaScript or TypeScript.

The pre-generated NPM packages can be accessed directly on GitHub, or you can find them on NPM, such as the Gtk-4.0 package.

I encourage you to explore ts-for-gir / the NPM packages and provide your valuable feedback. Your input is greatly appreciated! 🤗️

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

I have added multi windows support to Contrast because why not. Along with other fixes in v0.0.8

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick says

Tube Converter V2023.5.0 is here! This week’s release features a brand new backend that makes Tube Converter much more stable! Besides the new backend, we added the ability to stop all downloads and retry all failed downloads, as well as clear all queued downloads. This release also introduces the feature to crop the thumbnail of a download as square (useful for downloading music) and the ability to choose specific resolutions for video downloads instead of the qualities Best, Good, Worst. Here’s the full changelog:

Added the per-download option to crop the thumbnail of a video as a square

Added the ability to stop all downloads

Added the ability to retry all failed downloads

Added the ability to clear queued download

When downloading a video, the quality options will be the specific resolutions of the video instead of Best, Good, Worst

Fixed an issue where some downloads could not be stopped and retried

Fixed an issue where some users would experience random crashing when downloading

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Pods ↗

A podman desktop application.

marhkb says

I have released version 1.2.0 of Pods with the following new features:

Usabilty and UX has been improved in many places.

Pruning of containers and pods is now possible.

Container terminals are now detachable and can be used in parallel.

Images can be pushed to a registry.

The CPU utilization now takes the number of cores into account.

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick says

Your favorite pizza man is back with another Denaro release! 🍕 Denaro V2023.5.0 is here! This week’s release features many fixes for bugs users were experiencing across the app. Denaro will also now show error messages if it attempts to access inaccessible files instead of crashing. Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where Denaro would crash on systems with unconfigured locales

Fixed an issue where PDF exporting failed for accounts with many receipts

Fixed an issue where a group’s filter was reactivated when a transaction was added to that group

Error messages will be shown if Denaro attempts to access inaccessible files instead of crashing

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Documentation

Sonny reports

libmanette dev documentation is back online and will be included in org.gnome.Sdk.Docs https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/libmanette/

libmanette offers painless access to game controllers, from any programming language and with little dependencies.

GNOME Foundation

Kristi Progri says

After we successfully wrapped up LinuxAppSummit with a great team, we are moving forward with GUADEC preparations.

The schedule is out now; you can check it at https://events.gnome.org/event/101/timetable/#20230726 We are pleased to inform you that the call for registrations is now open as well https://events.gnome.org/event/101/registrations/, get your ticket now and keep up with all the latest news and announcements we make.

You can still submit your Bof/workshop even if you missed the original deadline at: https://events.gnome.org/event/101/surveys/13

If you would like to volunteer and help us, consider signing up as a volunteer during the event time https://events.gnome.org/event/101/surveys/14

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#96 Polished Settings

Fri, 19 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 12 to May 19.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Allan Day announces

A collection of nice polish improvements landed in Settings this week:

An information popup was added to the Users panel, to explain the autologin setting.

The user name setting was changed to use AdwEntryRow instead of a custom UI solution.

In the Sharing panel, descriptions were added to each of the sharing features.

There were also some code cleanups, with the introduction of a new information button widget.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Allan Day reports

In Software, Milan Crha added the ability to delete app data when uninstalling Flatpaks. When other types of apps are uninstalled, a reminder is shown that app data is retained.

Document Scanner

Bartłomiej Maryńczak (Poly) reports

The latest batch of patches, pertaining to the transition from GTK3 to GTK4, has now been applied to Gnome Document Scanner. This development instills enough confidence in me to deem the porting process complete. This includes:

GTK4 & libadwaita port

Multithreaded image resize, that improves window resize performance ~10 fold

Introduction of a new design for page reordering, drivers installation, and authentication dialogs, which are expected to be more user-friendly and visually appealing.

User testing (aka. hunt for regressions) on a wide variety of scanners would be appreciated.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

Following up James Westman’s announcement, I have released Workbench 44.1

Update icon-development-kit; adds 143 new icons

Blueprint 0.8

VTE 0.72.1

Rome tools 12.1.1

As soon as Blueprint hits 1.0, it will lose its experimental status and become the default UI syntax in Workbench. Please help us by testing Blueprint 0.8 in your apps or in Workbench.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

Did you ever wonder how ants would build an espresso machine? Dan Yeaw extended the Gaphor documentation with a tutorial showcasing the modeling features of Gaphor. You can read it at https://docs.gaphor.org/en/latest/coffee_machine.html.

Third Party Projects

0xMRTT says

Bavarder 0.2.2 has been released with the ability to have multiple windows open at the same time, an improved UI (the provider selector has been moved to the menu), a new mechanism for warning users if a provider isn’t working because of a remote change (the ability to use local models will come soon) and now, Hugging Chat has been disabled and replaced with the model behind Hugging Chat, Open-Assistant SFT-1 12B Model.

You can download Bavarder from Flathub or from either Github or Codeberg.

0xMRTT says

Imaginer 0.2.1 has been released with support of custom provider, an improved UI, a faster loading mechanism for Preferences, and an improved mechanism for saving credentials.

You can download Imaginer from Flathub or from either Github or Codeberg.

Iman Salmani announces

IPlan 1.1 is out. this is a solution for managing your personal life and workflow (its a goal). you can download it from flathub.

Features:

Grouping tasks with project and list

Timer for tasks

Global search

Arranging projects, lists and tasks by drag and drop

changes in this version:

Lazy loading for project tasks and stat

Records window for create, edit and delete records

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh can now unblank the screen on incoming notifications based on category and urgency. That allows you to e.g. have it only unblank on critical notifications and/or only on instant messages.

We also improved the idle-inhibit support in phoc so that we can now show the same amount of information when an application uses that Wayland protocol rather than DBus to prevent the screen from locking (as e.g. mpv does).

Finally Alistair Francis made it possible to use the super-key to bring up the overview in docked mode which required changes in phosh and phoc.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Fractal 5.beta1 is out!

Fractal 5.beta1 is the first beta release since the rewrite of Fractal to take advantage of GTK 4 and the Matrix Rust SDK. It is the result of over two years of work.

New features since Fractal 5.alpha1:

Joining room by ID, by alias or with a Matrix URI

Creation of direct chats

Sending and displaying read receipts, read markers and typing notifications

Notifications on new messages

Highlight messages with mentions

Added media file history viewers in the room details, thanks to our GSoC intern Marco Melorio

Displaying the other user’s avatar as a room avatar for direct chats

Of course, there are a also a lot of less visible changes, fixes and translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.

As the version implies, this is still considered beta stage and might trigger crashes or other bugs but overall should be pretty stable. It is available to install via Flathub Beta, see the instructions in our README.

The GNOME 44 runtime used by the beta version Flatpak was shipped with a GTK version that has a regression which messes with room order in the sidebar: some rooms can appear twice and some rooms are missing. This is a known issue so there is no need to report it, there is nothing for us to do but wait until the fix is backported and shipped in an update of the GNOME runtime. In the meantime, the nightly version is unaffected by that.

A list of blocking issues for the release of version 5 can be found in the Fractal 5 milestone on GitLab. All contributions are welcome !

Escambo ↗

Test and develop APIs

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

Introducing Escambo, an HTTP-based API testing application for GNOME.

Some cool features are:

API Testing: The main objective of Escambo is to facilitate the testing of HTTP-based APIs. It provides an interface where users can specify API endpoints, parameters, headers, and other information relevant to executing various types of API requests.

Request Configuration: Escambo allows users to configure different types of HTTP requests such as GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc. Users can define request headers, authentication credentials, request bodies, and other request-specific parameters.

Authentication and security: The app can support authentication methods, API keys, or basic authentication.

Escambo is now available on Flathub Follow its development on Github or Codeberg.

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman announces

I’ve released Blueprint ~~0.8.0~~ 0.8.1, a big release that contains some syntax changes and a bunch of newly supported features. Even more exciting, this is a release candidate for Blueprint 1.0! Check out the full release notes on the Releases page.

Shell Extensions

Marcin Jahn says

I have created 3 Gnome Shell extensions:

Quick Settings Audio Devices Hider - allows you to hide selected devices from the Quick Settings audio devices panel

Dim Completed Calendar Events - styles calendar events in the top panel to make it clear which events are completed, ongoing, or upcoming.

Do Not Disturb While Screen Sharing Or Recording - automatically switches on the “Do Not Disturb” mode while screen sharing or screen recording

Thanks to the great documentation at gjs.guide and awesome folks at #extensions:gnome.org, developing your own extension is (almost) a breeze!

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

A new version of Weather O’Clock has just arrived. In this new version, the extension creates its own instance of WeatherClient from GWeather instead of recycling the existing one from dateMenu. This caused weather to be forced to update every time it was clicked on the clock.

Kudos to runverzagt who helped with this task.

Get it on GNOME Extensions

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#95 Overlaid Zoom

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 05 to May 12.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Maps now has moved the zoom control buttons back to use overlay buttons (they were moved to the headerbar to work around issues with Clutter and GTK overlays in earliear versions when using Clutter), additionally there is a button to indicate map rotation, with the ability to click it to reset to normal “north is up”. Useful on touch screens when using gestures to rotate. Additionally there’s now keyboard shortcuts to rotate, and reset rotation

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Metronome ↗

Practice music with a regular tempo.

Clara Hobbs (she/they) reports

Metronome 1.2.1 was released! This new release updates the Flatpak runtime to GNOME 44, finally bringing support for the dark style. It is now possible to toggle the metronome using the spacebar, regardless what GUI element is selected. We also landed some minor UI improvements, bringing the app more in line with the HIG.

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

Icon Library finally has the most requested feature: Displaying the license of the icons and a lot of new icons brought to you by the design team.

I have published a new release of Symbolic Preview featuring progressive icons rendering. The old release used to block the UI until all the icons were rendered.

gregorni announces

This week, I released version 1.3.0 of Letterpress (previously ASCII Images) on Flathub! The new release features a better warning dialog when the output is too big, the “Output Width” setting’s subtitle is now more adaptive, and the buttons for copying and saving the output have been swapped. As part of the rebrand, the welcome page now shows a nice illustration (shoutout to Brage, who also came up with the new name) instead of the app’s symbolic icon. Finally, Czech and Turkish translations have been added as well.

0xMRTT announces

Imaginer has been released! Imaginer is a new application for generating pictures with various AI.

You can download Imaginer from Flathub or from either Github or Codeberg

Bavarder 0.2.0 has been released with support for a formatted output (table/code) and a new website with documentation for explaining how to get a token.

Michael Terry announces

Multiplication Puzzle 12.0 released with some UI tweaks (uses an AdwBanner now for the victory screen) and it also changed appids, which flatpak should prompt you about when updating

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick says

Tube Converter received V2023.5.0-beta1 this week!

This update includes the ability to stop all downloads, retry all failed downloads, and clear all downloads that you may have in your queue (previously these actions had to happen on a per download basis).

Besides that, we completely rewrote the backend for managing downloads, which should now fix many of the crashing issues users were experiencing :)

Flare ↗

An unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi says

Flare 0.8.1 was release with many UI and UX improvements including some style changes to the message list to better differentiate own messages from messages sent by others. Furthermore, channels that don’t have messages yet are now hidden by default, one now has to explicitly show them using the new “compose”-button. The final noteworthy addition is a new button to scroll down in the list view.

Miscellaneous

There are improvements to the GNOME openQA tests:

The tests are now split into multiple testsuites. Now we can develop multiple sets of tests and run them independently (issue 26)

A commandline tool named pipeline_report.py was merged to make it easier to analyse test failures (MR 25)

The individual openQA test results are now shown in the Gitlab merge request UI (issue 32 - screenshot below)

Most importantly, we are about to run test #1000 at https://openqa.gnome.org/

Google Summer of Code

feborges reports

GNOME will be mentoring 9 new contributors in Google Summer of Code 2023!

GSoC is a program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. A number of long term GNOME developers are former GSoC interns, making the program a very valuable entry point for new members in our project.

The new contributors will soon get their blogs added to Planet GNOME, making it easy for the GNOME community to get to know them and the projects that they will be working on.

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/announcement-gnome-will-be-mentoring-9-new-contributors-in-google-summer-of-code-2023/15232

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#94 Configuring Columns

Fri, 05 May 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 28 to May 05.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof reports

There is a new interface for configuring the columns of Files list! After almost 20 years of the same column chooser, the deprecation of GtkTreeView encouraged Corey Berla to replace the column chooser with one containing modern widgets and design. This enhancement, with additional contributions by Peter Eisenmann, also allows for changing visible columns either globally or only for the current folder, without the old misleading interface duplication in the Preferences.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

While it hasn’t been a priority for this cycle, Loupe should already deliver a solid experience on mobile devices with this week’s update. Apart from the complete interface being now adaptive, typical features like one-finger swipe, double-tap to zoom in and out, pinch zoom, and panning are already supported.

This week’s update includes:

Adopt the properties view for smaller form factors using the latest libadwaita Breakpoint feature.

Hide the HeaderBar and mouse cursor in fullscreen after a moment.

Skip unsupported image formats when browsing images.

Many more minor tweaks and fixes.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

NewsFlash 2.3.0 was released today. The only visible change is the fancy new icon by Tobias Bernard. Under the hood WebKitGTK was upgraded to the latest version, which should fix a lot of problems. But the most work went into the new content grabber. It should be a lot faster than the javascript library used before. It is better documented and it is easier to provide custom extraction rules.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

The Rust bindings generator gir is now capable of embedding docs for virtual methods and class methods from the corresponding GIR files.

Third Party Projects

0xMRTT reports

I’ve released Bavarder, an app for chatting with AI. With Bavarder, you can ask a question to differents providers like Hugging Chat, BAI Chat, OpenAI GPT-3.5-turbo, etc. It has been designed to be minimalist for having access to a chatbot without a browser or an account.

Remember that AI can produce fake contents and should not be used in a fraudulous way.

You can download Bavarder from Flathub or from either Github or Codeberg

Flare ↗

An unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi reports

Flare 0.8.0 was released which brings big improvements to the message list. Instead of the previous “Load More”-button, content now gets dynamically loaded if needed leading to an improved experience using Flare with longer chats. Since the last update, message deletion has now also been implemented. And, as always, many bug fixes and minor features have also been developed to make sure Flare works as expected.

GNOME Foundation

This week, the GNOME Foundation has been wrapping up LAS 2023 tasks and focusing on GUADEC organization. We recently shared the full schedule of talks, which can be viewed on guadec.org, and hope to share more details about social events and keynote speakers soon. One fun event item I’ve been working on is the design for GUADEC 2023 t-shirts! We’ll share that on shop.gnome.org as soon as it’s ready.

Registration is now open for GUADEC 2023! Let us know you’re attending, either in-person in Riga, Latvia, or remotely by signing up online. More details and links can be found on GNOME Foundation News.

We’re still looking for GUADEC 2023 sponsors! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s conference, you can find our brochure and learn more on guadec.org.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#93 Snapshot

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 21 to April 28.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Maximiliano 🥑 says

Snapshot was recently accepted into the Incubator group and the first new preview release is out. Snapshot aims to be the next generation camera app for GNOME, supporting both desktop and mobile devices.

You can get Snapshot at Flathub.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/they) announces

after almost a year, breakpoints have finally landed in libadwaita. They allow to do arbitrary layout changes depending on the bin/window size and aspect ratio, with the tradeoff of losing automatic minimum size calculation. This finally allows to do things such as adding a bottom bar on narrow sizes without issues, and enable a lot of designs that are currently impractically hard to implement.

Breakpoints can also be used directly on AdwWindow and AdwApplicationWindow for convenience.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

GLib has just acquired an internal list of pending GTasks, for debugging what’s going on in your app using gdb. Use it by calling print g_task_print_alive_tasks() in gdb. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3404

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

This week, Telegraph joined GNOME Circle. With Telegraph, you can translate Morse code back and forth. Congratulations!

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

You thought I forgot about Amberol, but here we are, with a new release! And what a release is this, with lots and lots of fixes big and small:

you can now restore the playlist from your last session

background playback can be toggled

there’s a quick mute/unmute button

no duplicate songs in the playlist

the UI has been slightly tweaked to avoid confusing the volume scale with the song position

the readability of the drop overlay has been improved

the base run time and dependencies have been updated to GNOME 44

lots and lots of big and small fixes

Plus, Amberol is now verified on the new Flathub website, and we’re close to 100k downloads in a bit over a year of development!

Third Party Projects

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

To celebrate Flatseal reaching 800,000 downloads on Flathub 🤯, a new release is out! Flatseal 2.0 comes with improved visuals powered by GTK 4 and Libadwaita and, with that, a few quality of life improvements and bug fixes.

Kudos to natasria for the initial work on porting the user interface to GTK 4 and Libadwaita, and to A6GibKm for helping with the reviews and making a lot of further improvements to that work.

Download on Flathub!

Miscellaneous

Casper Meijn announces

A long-standing issue with the GNOME CI templates is fixed. Rust apps were built three times by the template. The old template executes a normal build. Then rebuilds all the dependencies in preparation for the tests. And will accidentally build again during the test execution. With the recent change, the CI job rewrites the Flatpak manifest to enable run-tests. Flatpak will take care of executing the test suite during the build.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/citemplates/-/issues/5

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna says

(Some of the hats I wear here at the Foundation include work on the Travel Committee, the Code of Conduct Committee, the Executive Committee, the Finance Committee, as well as the staff liaison to the Board of Directors. For the sake of clarity, I will avoid using the word “we” without specifying which group I am referring to.)

With another successful LAS conference completed, the Foundation staff spent this week recovering, traveling, or switching gears. With scheduling for GUADEC happening this week, the travel committee is also getting into gear to go through travel requests. I have also been invoicing the generous folks who have committed to sponsoring GUADEC this year.

The Code of Conduct Committee has been made aware that the sending of reports to discourse is not working for some people. The committee and staff are working on an alternative at blogs.gnome.org/coc/. Reports can already be sent via this webpage, but it does need a bit more work. It needs to allow anonymous reports and to link to the code of conduct. Only those on the Code of Conduct Committee and moderators on gitlab.gnome.org have access to these reports. If you wish to report on anyone on that list, you can still personally email a report to the other members of the committee.

I have had some meetings with some nonprofit bookkeepers in an effort to find help to lighten my load. I am looking forward to carving out more time to be able to catch up on some of my other tasks.

In other goings on this week, I have also corresponded with the 401K accountant to figure out some discrepancies for a tax filing, updated the employee handbook, paid some bills, filled out and uploaded some forms for compliance, and spent time at the bank. Just another regular week working for the Foundation.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#92 Image Printing

Fri, 21 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 14 to April 21.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ ✊ announces

We have landed all features planned to make Loupe a suitable image viewer for GNOME Core. As a next step, we will primarily focus on removing bugs and polishing what we have.

While basic image editing features are very frequently requested, it’s very unlikely it will make it into GNOME 45. Much work is needed on different levels, especially in the libraries that handle image formats. I want to work on that in the future, but this is nothing that should be done under time pressure. Please let me know if you are experienced with image formats and/or rust and want to help!

Since our last update, we have:

Landed image printing.

Added ICC color profile support for JPEG, PNG, HEIC, and AVIF.

Filled an upstream fix for ICC profiles in PNGs.

Made the overlay buttons hide after inactivity.

Let Loupe correctly advertise to the system what images it supports.

Made dragging the image also work with the middle mouse button.

Optimized SVG rendering, showing a complete image more quickly when zooming for huge SVGs.

Allow to drag and drop multiple images into Loupe to browse through those images.

And finally made our CI builds three times faster on average.

Thanks to everyone who helped with contributions, bug reports, and advice.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

Workbench 44 is out. Highlights are:

Use GNOME platform/SDK 44

Fully sandboxed and now considered Safe by GNOME Software

An improved previewer

18 new library entries

Thank you to all new contributors, specially GSoC and Outreachy applicants.

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Pika Backup 0.6.1 is now available with some distribution specific bug fixes. We have fixed that archives could not be mounted on distributions that don’t link fusermount to fusermount3, and removable drives can now be included in backups on all distributions again.

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

Authenticator 4.3.0 is out with one of the biggest code cleanup we have done since the port to GTK 4 & Rust. The end user shouldn’t notice that many changes though other then a finally very accurate TOTP implementation.

Fix compatibility with https://2fas.com/check-token/

backup: Add FreeOTP+ JSON format support

Allow importing from an image file containing a QR code

Add tests for all the supported backup formats

Third Party Projects

cwunder reports

Support for Chromecast on GNOME Network Displays finally landed and it’s scheduled to be released with GNOME 45.

More details about the Merge Request: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-network-displays/-/merge_requests/171.

Sonny announces

Dino, a modern chat and video call app is now available on Flathub.

Thanks to Aman9das, Link Mauve for the manifest and bl00mber for --socket=gpg-socket.

As a side note, thanks to its isolation, Flatpak is the first distribution of Dino to include fix for a CVE in one of it’s dependency.

Aleks Rūtiņš reports

This week, I released version 0.1 of Kaste, a stupidly simple abstraction for data storage in GNOME applications. Check it out!

Nick says

Nickvision apps (Denaro, Tube Converter, Tagger) have a new home, the NickvisionApps GitHub Organization. This organization helps us keep all of ours apps in one place and manage our team as a whole. New website soon to follow :)

Tube Converter ↗

Get video and audio from the web.

Nick announces

Tube Converter V2023.4.2 is here!

This release includes some new features that make the downloader even more customizable. First, we added a configurable speed limit that can be used to limit individual download speeds. Furthermore, we added support for using aria2 as the downloader backend if users choose.

We also fixed some issues, including an issue where not all logs were shown for a download.

Denaro ↗

Manage your personal finances.

Nick reports

Your favorite pizza man is here with a new release of Denaro! V2023.4.1

First off, a new Notes field was added to transactions to allow users to write whatever extra notes they may choose for a transaction. We also added support for choosing to export all account information or just the transactions shown in the current filtered and sorted view. Support for displaying native digits instead of just Latin ones when working with numeric amounts was also added.

Besides these new features, we also fixed many issues including an issue where custom separators would not parse correctly and an issue where CSV files were not exported in the correct format.

Denaro Docs, available from the Help action in the main menu, are also now available to be translated via Weblate!

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

This week we finally merged Thomas support for handling emergency calls into Phosh. Whenever gnome-calls reports available emergency numbers you can now either select them from an emergency contact list or dial them via the keypad (doesnt’ matter if your phone is locked or not). You currently have to opt in via a configuration option as we want to get more testing feedback before enabling it by default - it would be bad if that feature failed you in a real emergency. Apart from that we landed some visual tweaks related to notifications, system modal dialogues and screenshots.

Graphs ↗

Plot and manipulate data in a breeze!

Sjoerd Stendahl says

I am happy to announce that we have finally released Graphs 1.5! Graphs is a simple, yet powerful tool that allows you to plot and manipulate your data with ease. Data can be imported from column-files stored in most formats, or generated using an equation. You can easily manipulate or transform the data in various ways such as cutting, translations, multiplications, derivatives, fourier transforms and more. Some major highlights of this release include:

A major overhaul of the UI: Graphs now tries to follows the GNOME HIG, giving a nice and consistent experience in GNOME

A fully featured plot style editor: The style of your plot can now be saved in our now style editor where setting such as plot colours, ticks, the grid and even the default color cycle are all stored. A new plot style can easily be applied on an open project to quickly change your graph styling for a specific purpose

Saving projects: Projects can now be saved as a single file, which can be opened later for further use. Allowing you to continue where you left off.

Improved clipboard behaviour: Adding new data no longer resets the clipboard. And more actions are now included in the clipboard as well, so actions such as changing line colours, adding data, removing data and changing line names can all be undone/redone using the clipboard features.

Tons of bug fixes and changes under the hood. Most code has been updated since the previous release.

And many more changes, such as support for Panalytical .xrdml files, the ability to set the canvas limits from Plot Settings, the ability to reorder data by drag-and-drop within the side-panel, and a bunch of additional toast pop-ups to give the user feedback on specific occasions.

Thanks to everyone involved in helping out. Specifically @cmkohnen, who’s been co-developing Graphs with me, and I’d also want to thank Tobias Bernard for his useful feedback and help with the user interface! The latest release of Graphs can be found on Flathub.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo announces

I just released Cartridges 1.4!

This update brings:

Support for animated covers

A redesigned details view

The ability to search for games on various databases

Check it out on Flathub!

Documentation

lwildberg announces

This week dark mode support for valadoc.org was merged! Check it out and enjoy looking up the beautiful API references with even more comfort! This was a long standing effort by colinkiama and others and now its finally there!

GNOME Foundation

Kristi Progri reports

Linux App Summit (LAS) is just a few days away and we’re excited to welcome you to Brno on April 22-23. We’ve been working hard to make sure the conference runs smoothly, so if you’re around, please feel free to join us. There’s still time to register at https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/5/registrations/.

In addition to LAS, we’re also busy organizing our big upcoming event, GUADEC. We’ll be publishing the full schedule and opening registration soon, so stay tuned!

I’m also looking for someone to assist with leading the annual report project. If you’re interested in helping out, please reach out to me at kprogri@gnome.org. Your support would be greatly appreciated.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#91 Inverted Titles

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 07 to April 14.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alex (they/them) reports

libadwaita has 2 new types of boxed list rows now:

Spin rows contain an embedded GtkSpinButton

Property rows invert their title and subtitle style same way as Nautilus and Loupe properties have been doing

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Milan Crha has been re-triaging old GNOME Software issues, fixing problems in PackageKit, and smoothing off a lot of sharp edges ready for GNOME Software 44.1.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Hugo Olabera announces

This week I released version 2 of Wike, which brings a huge revamp to the user interface and also introduces some new features. These are the main changes:

Migration to GTK4 + Libadwaita.

The search input is now always visible. It also includes an indication of the selected language and a button that gives access to the search settings.

Type to search. Just start typing to find articles.

New side panel that provides access to the article table of contents, languages, bookmarks and history. It can be used in floating or pinned mode.

Bookmarks with multiple lists.

New view menu that allows you to change the theme, zoom, typography and more.

Content view now defaults to system font.

Responsive design. The user interface now adapts to small screens, like phones.

Improved status pages (new tab, article not found…).

Use of flag icons to help identify languages. This can be turned off.

New printing option. This also allows export articles using the “Print to PDF” option.

New app icon.

Updated translations. Thanks to all translators!

Video Trimmer ↗

Trim videos quickly.

Ivan Molodetskikh announces

I published Video Trimmer v0.8.1. This is a small release that adds keyboard shortcuts, fixes a crash with some videos and updates the platform to GNOME 44.

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

A new version of Pika Backup is out. Part of the more than 20 additions and changes in version 0.6 are:

Add status information to the list of background apps.

Automatically reconnect and retry backups in more situations than before.

Fix issues with not freeing up space when deleting older archives.

Correctly handle some rare situations like moved backup repositories.

Document that restoring from backup via Files does not preserve access rights.

One of our many goals for the next version is a dedicated restore feature. You can support the development with a donation on Open Collective or GitHub sponsors.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 says

The properties macro of gtk-rs-core has been published two months ago. Now that the rough edges have been polished, I’ve updated the gtk-rs book too. In the case of the book, this let me remove more than 300 lines. If you want to adapt your own app, you can also have a look at our examples. custom_editable, custom_layout_manager, custom_orientable, expressions, list_box_model, rotation_bin and squeezer_bin all take advantage of this macro. Thanks goes to ranfdev for doing most of the initial work and Bilal Elmoussaoui for getting it over the finish line.

Third Party Projects

gregorni says

This week, I released version 1.2.0 of ASCII Images on Flathub! In this release, French, Russian, Occitan and Italian translations were added, the app now remembers window size and state when closed, and the file manager can now open files with ASCII Images.

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter V2023.4.1 is here!

This week’s release includes many many fixes for various crashes across both the GNOME and WinUI platforms, the application should be a lot more stable now.

We also added the ability to open a download file directly, as well as the save directory :)

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

We’ve merged support for a menu that appears when long pressing the power button on your phone when using phosh. The emergency call support didn’t land yet, hence that button is dimmed. But the merge request for that is already pending and the gnome-calls side is in place too.

Customize your login screen.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Login Manager Settings has moved from my user profile to a dedicated GitHub organization. The new website is https://gdm-settings.github.io and the new repo is https://github.com/gdm-settings/gdm-settings.git. It also has a collective on OpenCollective now.

Login Manager Settings v3.0 was released. It adds

An “Always Show Accessibility Menu” option

Option to change cursor size

“What’s new” section in ‘About’ window

A one time donation request dialog

A ‘Donate’ option in app menu

Also, proper names of themes are presented instead of their directory names.

Bugs that were fixed include

One could choose a cursor theme as an icon theme.

The app failed to run on PureOS.

Login Manager Settings v3.1 was also released. Some translations were accidentally not included in v3.0. So, this is a very small point release, released only to include those translations.

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick announces

Your favorite pizza man is here, announcing Denaro V2023.4.0 🥳

This version includes many many new features and improvements for managing your accounts. First, there is a new Dashboard page that allows users to see information about all accounts at a quick glance. We also added the ability to assign colors to groups and customize decimal and group separators used per account. Many issues were also fixed, including issues importing information OFX and QIF files and random GTK crashes users were experiencing.

I’d like to thank @fsobolev , @DaPigGuy , and all of the translators and contributors who continue to make Denaro better every day ❤️

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#90 Enabling Feedback

Fri, 07 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 31 to April 07.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Loupe is now available as a preview on Flathub. One of the ideas behind the Incubation process is to enable feedback from the broader community before an app lands in GNOME Core and all features are set in stone. So don’t expect everything to work yet.

Since our last update, we have continued to get some of the more important features done:

Loupe now uses mipmaps in rendering, avoiding rendering artifacts.

We have merged HighDPI support.

I have added an algorithm that detects whether a zoom or a rotate gesture is intended. Quite a tricky task, but necessary for touch gestures to work correctly. However, more work on the rotate gestures is still necessary.

Loupe now uses an algorithm that detects if a transparent image will be too dark to be visible on the default background. In that case, Loupe will choose a lighter background (screenshot below).

And as usual, we have fixed a bunch of issues.

Thanks for everyone contributing feedback and issue reports. Special thanks go to Matthias Clasen and Benjamin Otte for keeping up with all my attempts to break GTK/GDK and Ivan Molodetskikh for the fruitful cooperation in our joint goal to get images on computer screens.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Dave Patrick reports

Introducing Mousai v0.7!

If you have been following Mousai on TWIG, nothing should come as a surprise. After almost two years of development, this version comes packed with exciting new features, including a new sleek and intuitive UI, fuzzy search on the history, recognition cancellation, and MPRIS support. You can now also easily copy the title and artist of any song from the UI, remove individual songs from your history, and seek through the player. And for those times when you don’t have an internet connection, we’ve got you covered. Plus, we’ve fixed a ton of bugs and improved stability across the board, along with a full Rust rewrite.

hugoposnic says

I spent the last two weeks improving Curtail. Mainly porting it to Gtk 4 and Libadwaita. I made three new versions to improve the app incrementally with the indispensable help of Maximiliano and Tobias. It was also the opportunity to add some new features and fixed some bugs.

Here is a small tour of the main changes:

SVG support

Port to GTK 4 and Libadwaita

More modern results page

No more UI freezes during compression

Configurable compression timeout

Dependencies updates (OptiPNG -> Oxipng)

The latest update has even been featured on “OMG! Linux”: Curtail Image Compressor Can Now Crush SVGs

Really happy with the current state of Curtail. Thanks for your great feedback!

Plum Nutty (she/they) reports

Chess Clock v0.5 was released! This new release brings a major overhaul to the time control selection screen, simplifying the available presets and emphasizing the manual time entry controls. There’s now only a single button to start the game, and the presets just set the time on the manual time entry.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

I’m happy to announce a new release of Gaphor.

Gaphor is now 100% GTK4 on all supported platforms: Linux (Flatpak + AppImage), Windows, and macOS

Gaphor now has a graphical merge conflict resolver

Diagrams can be added to diagrams

Enable middle-click mouse scrolling of diagrams

The language used in the model can be changed independent from your system language

And many, many bug fixed and UI improvements

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

Took a bit too long but finally did a new release of flatpak-vscode, it includes various improvements inspired by GNOME Builder as usual:

Mount fonts directories

Support running inside a container like toolbox

Expose session accessibility bus

Fix remote development support

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

A new release of flatpak-github-actions is out with various new configuration options. Details can be found at https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-github-actions/releases/tag/v6

nxyz announces

This week I released Resonance, an intuitive music player application written in Rust & Python with a clean user interface. Resonance lets you effortlessly manage and play your music collection.

Features:

UI updates to reflect currently playing track’s cover art colors

Playlist creation & modification

Control the player through MPRIS

Discord Rich Presence integration

Last.fm scrobbling

GH repo: https://github.com/nate-xyz/resonance

Flathub page: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/io.github.nate_xyz.Resonance

Fyodor Sobolev announces

This week Time Switch, a small app to run a task after a timer, got an update:

Added ability to create presets to allow saving and restoring settings

New shortcuts were added to make the app easier to use with keyboard

When running in the background, the app shows timer information in GNOME 44

The app will now remember window size and notification text

Small UI improvements

Download from Flathub

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter V2023.4.0 is here! This week’s release features the ability to run downloads in the background (taking advantage of GNOME 44’s new background apps API!) as well as many bugs fixed!

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to run downloads in the background (off by default)

Fixed an issue where extra escape characters were added in video titles

Improved the UX of adding a download

Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick reports

Denaro V2023.4.0-beta1 got released this week! We have been hard at work the past month and a half improving Denaro’s stability and adding many many new features to the application. This beta is a continuation of the V2023.3.0-beta series, but since we are in a new month, the beta number was reset.

This beta includes a fix for the random crashing many users were experiencing when working with transactions, finally! It also includes a new preference option to automatically backup account files as CSV files to a specific folder. We have a few more features left to polish up and are expecting a stable release next week :)

Here’s the full changelog:

Added the ability to customize the decimal and group separators used per account

Added the ability to password protect a PDF file

Added a preference option to automatically backup account files to a specific folder

Fixed an issue where OFX files with security could not be imported

Fixed an issue where QIF files could not be imported on non-English systems

Fixed an issue where editing a transaction with a receipt would crash the application

Updated to GNOME 44 platform and fixed many GTK crashes users were experiencing

The UI is now built using blueprint

Updated translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Crosswords ↗

A crossword puzzle game and creator.

jrb announces

GNOME Crosswords 0.3.8 has been released.

This release adds the following improvements:

“New Puzzle” greeter for the editor. • Fully adaptive sizing. Crosswords will shrink to fit available space • Fix end-of-game bugs where you could still edit the puzzle • Use tags instead of labels for puzzle-set metainfo • Enumeration rendering fixes • Miscelaneous bugfixes

This release marks a change in focus. For the next few months, we are going to work more on the Editor than the game. Stay tuned for more changes!

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo says

Last week I released Cartridges, a simple Libadwaita game launcher for all your games. This week it received a huge update:

You can now download cover art from SteamGridDB automatically!

It gained two new import sources: Lutris and itch.

There is better feedback for launching and hiding games.

Check it out on Flathub!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#89 Steady Framerates

Fri, 31 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 24 to March 31.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

Amongst the hundreds of changes included in Mutter 44, one of them stands out: Mutter is not affected by GPU-intensive apps and games anymore, and can keep steady framerates when they’re running. This fantastic improvement is in the spotlight in most recent article in the Mutter & GNOME Shell blog! Read more about it here.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Maksym Hazevych says

AdwPreferencesPage now has a description property that makes it easier to show a description for the whole preferences page.

Alex (they/them) reports

libadwaita now has AdwSwitchRow to make the common case of having a row with a single switch easier

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

ashpd ↗

Rust wrapper around freedesktop portals.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

We have finally released a new stable release of ASHPD. The release contains a lot of API improvements making it super easy to use portals from Rust.

Code example of taking a screenshot using the new builder API
use ashpd::desktop::screenshot::Screenshot;

async fn run() -> ashpd::Result<()> {
    let response = Screenshot::request()
        .interactive(true)
        .modal(true)
        .send()
        .await?
        .response()?;
    println!("URI: {}", response.uri());
    Ok(())
}
For more details: https://github.com/bilelmoussaoui/ashpd/releases/tag/0.4.0

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

A new release of ASHPD demo is out on Flathub! The demo comes with various nice features closing the gap of the supported portals

Camera: Multi camera support

Notifications: Support setting Default action/action target, allow adding buttons

Email: support adding attachments

Make use of libadwaita widgets

Fix application adaptiveness

Third Party Projects

gregorni announces

This week I released my app ASCII Images on Flathub. It uses jp2a to turn your PNG or JPEG images into beautiful, highly detailed ASCII art.

Felipe Kinoshita says

I just released Telegraph, it’s a silly little app for writing and decoding Morse code.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

After a year in development, I have finally released the first version of oo7. It is a Rust library that aims to provide a libsecret replacement, tight integration with the secrets portal and a way for apps to migrate their secrets from the host to the sandboxed keyring. Thanks to Sophie Herold, Maxmiliano & Daiki Ueno for their huge help shaping up the building blocks of the library!

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter V2023.3.1 is here! This week’s release features many bug fixes and the port to the GNOME 44 platform :) Here’s the full changelog:

Fixed an issue where the user could not download playlists with unavailable videos

Fixed an issue where some videos could not be downloaded when embedding metadata

Fixed an issue where videos with invalid filename characters could not be downloaded

UX/UI improvements (including moving Adw.MessageDialog dialogs to proper Adw.Window)

Flare ↗

An unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi announces

Flare 0.7.0 was released. The biggest update for this release is certainly the new and improved UI thanks to Jan-Michael Brummer. Besides that, Flare now also integrates with feedbackd, gained support for profile names and some new small features, fixes and changes. For all changes, see the changelog. Also note that updating to this release from 0.6.0 requires a relink of the device.

Cartridges ↗

Launch all your games

kramo says

This week I released Cartridges, a Libadwaita game launcher for all your games. The project was born out of a personal need for a launcher that let me quickly start any game from any platform with just one click. No need to manage yet another game library. It currently supports importing games from Steam, Heroic and Bottles with no login necessary and more sources on the way. Check it out on Flathub!

GNOME Foundation

This week, the GNOME Foundation has been busy organizing various events such as GUADEC 2023, LAS 2023 in collaboration with KDE, and looking for other open source and community events to participate in. As a graphic designer, much of my work for these events involves creating designs such as name badges, signs, banners, and social media content - all of which I’m currently working on! Look out for a new page on the LAS website soon. I’ll be adding graphics for people to use on their social media posts or in their presentations.

Right now in-person attendees of LAS can place an order for an event t-shirt. Orders are due today so if you’re attending in person and would like to purchase one, fill out the form here: https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/5/registrations/13/. If you’re attending remotely we have shirts and a few additional items available online: https://shop.spreadshirt.com/linux-app-summit/all

Open Calls for Participation: We’ve extended the GUADEC 2023 call for participation, all proposals are now due by April 4th. If you have a talk, workshop, panel, or BoF you’d like to host make sure to get your submissions in soon! https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/02/24/guadec-2023-cfp/

We’re also looking for GUADEC 2023 sponsors! If you or your company would like to sponsor this year’s conference, you can find our brochure and learn more here: https://events.gnome.org/event/101/page/167-sponsors

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#88 Forty-four!

Fri, 24 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 17 to March 24.

This week we released GNOME 44!

This new major version of GNOME is full of exciting changes, such as major improvements to the Settings app, a better quick settings menu, a streamlined Software app - and of course much more. More information can be found in the GNOME 44 release notes.

Readers who have been following this site for a few weeks will already know some of the new features. If you want to follow the development of GNOME 45 (Fall 2023), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Jamie announces

AdwAboutWindow has a new_from_appdata constructor now, allowing creation of AdwAboutWindow from valid AppStream metadata

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Loupe now supports showing animated GIFs, PNGs, and WebPs. The HEIC image format (x265 codec) can now be separated into an extension that is automatically loaded if available. This is primarily due to pending software patents that might apply in some countries. Last but not least, the image format detection has been unified. Loupe will now, in many situations, be able to load images with the wrong extension and show the actual image format in the properties.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Test social media cards locally.

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

Share Preview 0.3.0 has been released in time for GNOME 44 and is available from Flathub.

It includes the following changes:

New scraping logger feature

Remember last selected social platform

Design improvements

Updated to use latest libadwaita features

Many small bug fixes

Updated translations

Identity ↗

Compare images and videos.

I released Identity v0.5. In this version I implemented the long-awaited side-by-side comparison mode! Images and videos can be arranged in a row or a column, and their position and zoom remain fully synchronized.

I also reworked mouse gestures for zooming, panning, and drag-and-drop, taking heavy inspiration from Loupe. They make Identity much more pleasant to use.

Dialect ↗

Translate between languages.

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

This week we merged some new things on Dialect. The preferences window has been redesigned a bit. Now you can choose from multiple text-to-speech providers, currently Google and Lingva. We also added new translation providers for Bing and Yandex.

Commit ↗

An editor that helps you write better Git and Mercurial commit messages.

Sonny says

Commit message editor 4.0 is out

GNOME 44

Ask for confirmation before dismissing changes

Show the name of the repository in the title bar

Prevent shortcut from saving empty commit (by axtloss)

Improve tooltips (by Felipe Kinoshita)

Design improvements

Miscellaneous

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

After a few months, I finally got the time to do a release of the various design tools! The releases mostly contain bug fixes, translations updates & code cleanups for:

Contrast

App IconPreview

Icon Library

Additionally Symbolic Preview now supports exporting the css classes used by symbolic icons.

Third Party Projects

swanux reports

This week I released version 0.4.2 of my simple mediaplayer HBud. As the version number indicates, it hasn’t reached its final form yet, but with this version many problems have been ironed out. HBud is not intended to compete with any of the “big ones” (this being a one-man show, wouldn’t even be possible), the goal is to provide a simple and convenient alternative for those with similar preferences to me. Check it out on Flathub.

Geopard ↗

A Gemini client.

ranfdev says

Geopard has finally received a new release! Take a look at the changes:

Updated to latest libadwaita and GTK to improve performance and compatibility, including the use of the new Adw.TabOverview widget for improved tab management on small screens.

Added support for opening files and gemini mime types from the command line.

Added tab history menu on right click over arrows for easier navigation.

Fixed issue with links without whitespace not working properly.

Moved scrollbar to the edge of the window for a cleaner UI.

Added tooltips for items in header bar to provide more information to users.

Added more information to the About window to give users a better idea of the project’s.

Various fixes and refactorings.

Download it from flathub

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Login Manager Settings v3.beta.0 was released.

Changes compared to the previous alpha release are:

The flatpak runtime has been updated to version 44.

Fixed a bug where the app could not launch on PureOS.

A few code improvements were made.

Cawbird ↗

A native Twitter client for your Linux desktop.

CodedOre reports

After an overhaul of the system responsible for managing timelines, Cawbird 2.0 can now show and mark pinned posts on a users detail page.

Documentation

Allan Day reports

With Libadwaita 1.3 officially released, GNOME’s Human Interface Guidelines were updated to include guidance on the new banner widget. This replaces the guidance on info bars, which have been deprecated.

Shell Extensions

Auto Activities ↗

Show activities overview when there are no windows, or hide it when there are new windows.

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

In this new version, Auto Activities receives significant improvements, some of which are:

Add preference to ignore last workspace

Hide New Window option is enabled by default.

Revamp preferences window

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna reports

Work at the Foundation is humming along. For me, this week was a paperwork week. This involved:

Filing some paperwork with the state of California to keep us in good standing

Checking on the status of staff health insurance policy

Updating payroll

Working with our 401k accountants on some tax forms

Updating the employee handbook

Reimbursing some travel expenses

Forwarding some paperwork to the bank

Updating the accounting books

Invoicing some corporate sponsors

etc.

These are the types of things required to do on a regular basis to keep our foundation running.

In addition, some of the staff got together this week to start compiling a document on all the programming we currently do to address diversity. We hope of getting a better idea of where we currently stand and what we can do to improve.

Reminder: Get your talks for GUADEC submitted now! The deadline is March 27. More details at https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/02/24/guadec-2023-cfp/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#87 Editable Shortcuts

Fri, 17 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 10 to March 17.

GNOME Development Tools

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme says

Just in time for GNOME 44, Builder has gained support for editable shortcuts. You can individually override a number of shortcuts from the Preferences dialog. Popover menus and the Keyboard Shortcuts window will reflect changes made by the user.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alex (they/them) says

libadwaita 1.3 is out: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2023/03/17/libadwaita-1-3/

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

This week, Clairvoyant joined GNOME Circle. Clairvoyant gives you psychic answers to your questions. For free. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

Casper Meijn reports

This week I released version 0.3.0 of Read It Later. This is a client for Wallabag, which allows you to save web articles and read them later. The significant changes are the upgrade to GTK 4, some fixed bugs, and new translations. Download on Flathub.

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick announces

Tube Converter V2023.3.0 is here! Introducing the all-new Tube Converter completely rewritten in C#. First off I must thank @fsobolev and @DaPigGuy because this release would not be possible without them ❤️ Besides being rewritten in C#, this release includes many new features compared to the previous C++ version: Users can now download playlists, there is a new queue system to more easily manage downloads, plus a redesigned interface with support for smaller screens. We can’t wait for all of you to try this release 🥳

Portfolio ↗

A minimalist file manager for those who want to use Linux mobile devices.

After a long hiatus, a new release of Portfolio is out 📱🤓. This new release comes with important bug fixes, small-detail additions and a few visual improvements. Download on Flathub.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

As predicted 3 weeks ago, Fractal 4.4.2 has been released and is available on Flathub.

As a reminder, there are no new features, but it makes Fractal compatible with newer versions of our dependencies. Which means our Flatpak has been rebased on top of the GNOME 43 runtime just in time for the release of GNOME 44! Big thanks to everyone who tested the beta version and feel free to uninstall it.

In another news, let’s talk a bit about Fractal 5…

We have finally implemented one of the most annoying missing features: sending read receipts and updating the fully-read marker. What is doubly great about this, is that we are now only one feature away from being regression-free compared to our stable release (and a merge request is opened for the last one)!

This means that a beta release is around the corner, but we also have serious performance issues to resolve first. We hope that switching to the new store backend currently developped in the Matrix Rust SDK will fix some of it, but we still need to investigate properly how we can improve the situation.

That’s all for this week, don’t hesitate to come say hi in #fractal:gnome.org. If you would like to help us, take a look at our newcomers issues (and don’t forget to read our CONTRIBUTING.md first).

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.3.0-beta2 is here! This release features more customization for an account’s custom currency, the ability to add a password to an exported PDF file, and many fixes when importing QIF and OFX files :) Here’s the full changelog across betas:

Added the ability to customize the decimal and group separators used per account

Added the ability to password protect a PDF file

Fixed an issue where OFX files with security could not be imported

Fixed an issue where QIF files could not be imported on non-English systems

Fixed an issue where editing a transaction with a receipt would crash the application

The UI is now built using blueprint

Shell Extensions

sereneblue announces

Colosseum and krypto extensions have received support for GNOME Shell 44.

GNOME Foundation

Kristi Progri announces

I am Kristi Progri, the Program Manager at the GNOME Foundation, where I am in charge of conferences, events and ensuring that everything is run efficiently in our community.

The Linux App Summit is approaching and we have just finished organising the conference schedule, sending emails to all speakers, opening the call for volunteers and gathering the supplies we will need to make the conference run smoothly, and made sure we have enough people present to support us. Talking and communicating with sponsors is another aspect of my duties. If you or your business is interested in sponsoring the Linux App Summit monetarily, please contact us by email at kprogri@gnome.org.

After Linux App Summit the other conference that we have is GUADEC. GUADEC is the GNOME community’s largest conference and this year is happening in Riga, Latvia from 26th-31st of July. The call for papers is open until March 27th, so here’s your chance to submit your proposals.

Here are the tasks we have been working on as a team:

Reviewing the papers submission page

Updating the website with the latest information about the city, attractions and transportation

Constantly talking with the venue people making sure we have the rooms we want to rent for the event

Forming the papers team, etc.

In addition to these activities, I am working on the Annual Report, for which I would appreciate some help. These are the tasks that we need help with:

Contacting and sending reminders to everyone who is writing the articles;

Collecting all these materials and creating a document;

Update the Gitlab issues with the latest update on annual report progress

If you are interested in volunteering to help me with that, please ping me either in matrix @kristiprogri:gnome.org or by email.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#86 New Decoding

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from March 03 to March 10.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

The new image decoding code has finally landed in Loupe. This change will be the basis for many features to come, like supporting color profiles, animated images, and potentially sandboxed decoding. Already landed has the support for viewing SVGs. Thanks to GTK 4 and tiled rendering, you can view large SVGs without the UI seeing any performance penalties. However, a few known rendering bugs still have to be fixed.

The GDK-PixBuf support has, for now, been removed from Loupe. Loupe already supports many image formats directly, making it unclear if support for GDK-PixBuf plugins is required. Please let us know if an image format vital to you is missing from the list of supported formats.

Apart from this, we have:

Fixed some memory leaks,

redone the scroll-wheel logic to support high-resolution scroll wheels,

made rotation and pan gestures work correctly on touch screens, and

merged many more bug fixes, tweaks, code improvements, and documentation.

Finally, a small optical change: Drag and drop now features a newly designed thumbnail that provides more contrast to the content behind it.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny announces

In just 2 weeks, Workbench gained 11 new GNOME Platform demos and examples. More on the way. A huge thanks to all the contributors! Library examples and demos have 3 functions

Showcase the capabilities of the platform

Teach how to use the APIs, patterns, and widgets

Provide functional snippets ready to use

The plan for now is to focus on a wide set of UI / JavaScript entries. In the long run, we want to support more languages into Workbench and port the examples.

I have written a guide on how to get started contributing to Workbench https://github.com/sonnyp/Workbench/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md For the time being I will be focusing on stability, mentoring and preparing Workbench 44

Tobias Bernard Shared their experience using Workbench as a design / prototype tool https://mastodon.social/@tbernard/109972593064382462

James Westman and I discussed reducing the scope of Blueprint 1.0 in order to drop its experimental status and make it the default syntax in Workbench

I’d like to give kudos and thanks to GSoC and Outreachy early applicants for their contributions ✨

Test social media cards locally.

Rafael Mardojai CM reports

Share Preview has a new “logs” feature. The app will now give better hints about errors, missing metadata, and limits set by social platforms like image size.

This new feature has added a lot of new strings. Everyone is welcome to contribute or update translations for their language on Weblate.

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Sophie 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ ✊ announces

After the release of Pika Backup 0.5, Fina has taken care of many outstanding smaller and more significant issues. Pika Backup now also uses the new background status for apps that will be available with GNOME Shell 44. That way, you can always check what Pika Backup is doing in the background.

Some of the other changes that happened:

Fix compact is not run after pruning

Fix potential crash after deleting archives

Fix spurious ‘Pika Backup crashed’ messages

Change secret service error messages to include specific instructions how to resolve the issue

Change to explain checkpoint creation when aborting backups

Change to restart backup after SSH connection timeout

Change reconnection to be abortable and count down seconds remaining

Add ability to answer questions from borg process

Third Party Projects

Alessandro Iepure announces

I released Dev Toolbox! If you are tired of using random websites for conversions or simple checks during your coding, give it a try. Simple to use with local processing. Includes encoders and decoders, formatters for various languages, image converters, text and hash generators, and much more. Available on Flathub: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/me.iepure.devtoolbox

Can Lehmann announces

This week we released owlkettle 2.2.0, a declarative GUI framework based on GTK. Owlkettle is a library for the Nim programming language. One major focus for this release was improving the documentation. There are 15 new examples as well as a new document explaining how owlkettle works internally. We also improved the support for libadwaita by adding bindings for the EntryRow, ComboRow, ExpanderRow, WindowSurface, Flap and SplitButton widgets. Other improvements include support for multithreading and sending notifications. You can find a short tutorial for getting started with owlkettle here.

nautilus-code received support for translations and has already been translated in Hungarian and Italian.

nxyz reports

This week I released Chromatic, a simple tuner app written in Rust. Chromatic detects the frequency of audio input, converts it to the correct musical note and octave, and displays the cents error. Cents are displayed on an analog gauge to make tuning more visually intuitive. Requires PulseAudio or PipeWire.

GH repo: https://github.com/nate-xyz/chromatic Flathub page: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/io.github.nate\_xyz.Chromatic

Telegrand ↗

A Telegram client optimized for the GNOME desktop.

Marco Melorio announces

It’s finally time for a new update about Telegrand development! This is a brief look at the new biggest changes from the last update:

Added support for file messages by yuraiz

Added support for GIF messages

Added support for more event-like messages by Alisson Lauffer

Added support for viewing message replies by karl0d

Added ability to edit and reply to messages

Added a Christmast easter egg animation by yuraiz (sorry, we’re late!)

Added markdown support for composing messages by karl0d

Added more information in the chat info window, like group description, usernames and phone number

Added a contacts window to view saved contacts

Improved the chat view for channels, by adding a mute/unmute button by karl0d

Improved the style of the chat view by yuraiz

Big performance improvements to chat view scrolling

Ground work for future support of chat folders and archived chats

Flare ↗

An unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi reports

Flare 0.7.0-beta.1 was released. It does not provide any big new features, but updates many dependencies which lead to pretty big changes in the codebase. To check everything is working as expected, this beta was released for anyone to try out if they want. Note that due to changes in the storage, a relink will be required at the first start of the application.

Furthermore, Flare has gained experimental support for integrating with feedbackd to provide vibration or audio feedback on message receive.

Blurble ↗

Word guessing game

Vojtěch Perník reports

After a longer time I started working on Blurble again and the app has moved a few steps closer to version 1.0.0:

Keyboard navigation has been improved. The currently active cell is highlighted and it is possible to navigate the UI using the Tab key.

The buttons on the keyboard are now also colored. For better playability are now keyboard buttons also colored based on if and where the character is in the word.

The app has been redesigned. A welcome page, help and nicer game result information have been added.

You can get the latest version from Flathub.

Also, a big thanks to the GNOME design team, namely Tobias Bernard and Allan Day, for helping come up with better solutions.

Shell Extensions

oae reports

I have updated the Pano - Clipboard Manager with new features and fixes

Gnome Shell 44 support

Marking items as a favorite is now possible.

New Emoji type

Many customization options are added (Item styles, Pano height…).

Links can be now opened in the default browser

History can be filtered based on the item type

Content-aware notifications

Many navigation improvements

And many more changes.

You can read more on GitHub. {{< video src=“odSBdObmRFOUptXAqGsBnAVr.webm” >}}

Just Perfection announces

Extension download count is now available to the public on extensions.gnome.org.

Currently, Argos extension (not developed since 3.32) holding the records for more than 13.8M downloads following by Dash to Dock extension with 6.2M downloads.

GNOME Foundation

mwu reports

My name is Melissa Wu and I am a Project Coordinator with the GNOME Foundation. I’m in charge of special projects, fundraising and assist Caroline Henriksen with marketing and branding and Kristi Progri with events and conferences. I’m also the resident travel coordinator for hotels and other conference travel.

Right now I have two focuses – Raising sponsorships for GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Lativa (https://events.gnome.org/event/101/) and organizing our volunteers. I need help with both!! If you are interested, please feel free to reach out to me directly. This is a great time to learn something new or share your talents with us!

This week I am preparing for SCaLE where I will manning the booth for the next three days – fundraising, selling shirts, and sharing what’s new with GNOME. If you are in the area, come see us at the booth or stop by our GNOME Beers event on Sat (March 11) at 6pm at Craft by Smoke and Fire (30 W. Green Street. Pasadena, CA)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#85 Preferred Installations

Fri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 24 to March 03.

GNOME Development Tools

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme reports

Builder now allows you to choose a preferred Flatpak installation to use when installing new SDKs and SDK extensions. That Flatpak installation must include a remote providing the necessary FlatpakRef to be used.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Plum Nutty (she/they) says

Chess Clock added support for the Bronstein delay and simple delay timing methods. These methods prevent a player’s time from increasing by playing fast moves, as is possible with increment time control.

This week, Elastic joined GNOME Circle. Elastic allows you to design spring animations. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

nxyz reports

This week I released Conjure, a simple gtk4/libadwaita app that allows you to manipulate images with various transform & filter operations. Manipulation is done with the popular image processing library, ImageMagick with python bindings from Wand.

gh repo: https://github.com/nate-xyz/conjure Flathub page: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/io.github.nate_xyz.Conjure

angeloverlain announces

Hello everyone! This week, Sticky Notes was released. It’s a simple libadwaita app that allows you to quickly jote down ideas in notes. Notes contain text with some formatting (bold, italic, underline and strikethrough) and every note can be assigned one of 8 pastel colors to categorize notes. You can get it from Flathub

abb128 says

Since my last post, I’ve updated Live Captions with a few new features:

The window can now automatically be kept on top on X11, or on Wayland if you have the GNOME Extension or KWin script

Support for lower-end hardware (at potentially reduced accuracy)

New history window and history export

Download Live Captions from FlatHub if you’re interested in trying it out!

I’ve also been working on improving the april-asr library so hopefully more open-source apps can make use of live speech recognition. There are now C# and Python bindings available. I’m not calling them stable yet, but they should be usable. Open an issue if you have any problems or suggestions!

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick announces

Tube Converter V2023.3.0-beta1 is here! This is the first beta featuring the new C# rewrite. It continues to use yt-dlp and ffmpeg in its backend, however, the application now has a much more stable and cleaner architecture, allowing for faster downloads and fewer crashes. The C# rewrite also makes Tube Converter available for Windows! This work couldn’t have been possible without the help of @fsobolev and @DaPigGuy ❤️

Here’s the changelog:

Tube Converter has been rewritten in C#. With the C# rewrite, Tube Converter is now available on Windows!

Added download progress/speed indicators

Replaced the View Log button with an Open Save Folder button on successful download and a Retry Download button on error

Redesigned download rows to better fit small screens/mobile devices

Fixed UI freeze while downloads in progress

The beta is available on flathub-beta:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta org.nickvision.tubeconverter
flatpak run org.nickvision.tubeconverter//beta
For translators: Please update all translations on Weblate before Friday, March 3 2023, to be included in the stable release.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

This week we released phosh 0.25.0 featuring a new plugin to configure the emergency preferences as shown on the lock screen by Chris Talbot and a style refresh updating the settings menu by Sam Hewitt:

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.2.2 is here! This release includes many UI tweaks and improvements as we gear up for joining The Circle ;)

Here’s the full changelog:

New and improved icon (Thanks @bertob)!

Various UX improvements

Updated and added translations (Thanks to everyone on Weblate)!

Shell Extensions

The port guide for GNOME Shell 44 extensions is ready: https://gjs.guide/extensions/upgrading/gnome-shell-44.html If you need any help porting your extensions to GNOME Shell 44, please ask us on GNOME Matrix Channel

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

Weather O’Clock and Auto Activities extensions received support for GNOME Shell 44. Along with their respective releases, there were also some visual refinements and bug fixes.

Miscellaneous

barthalion announces

While my job title proudly says “DevOps Engineer”, it really means I’m doing a little bit of everything everywhere. This week has been almost entirely wasted on playing the cat & mouse game with a spammer attacking gitlab.gnome.org. As the part of remediation steps, I ended up disabling external authentication providers like Google, limiting the possibility to create or fork repositories without SSH key configured, and applied on the behalf of GNOME Foundation for Akismet enterprise plan for better spam detection. I have also started banning such abusive accounts instead of outright removing them, and currently the situation seems to be under control.

GNOME has been accepted to the Fast Forward program by Fastly. Infrastructure changes are not live yet, but we will finally have proper zero downtime upgrades of the underlying servers, as we will no longer rely on DNS-based round-robin traffic distribution, and gain the support for IPv6, including Flathub’s website.

Over at Flathub, we’re tying various loose ends related to the upcoming beta version launch. I don’t want to spoil too much as we’re closer to the finish line than we’ve ever been since the first commit 2 years ago, but you can already poke around at beta.flathub.org to see what’s coming.

Hemish 🇮🇳🏳️‍🌈 announces

New interface translations for Hindi language have been done for GNOME Characters, GNOME Calendar, GNOME Clocks, GNOME Weather, Console, Calls, GNOME Initial Setup, GNOME Tour, GNOME Display Manager (GDM), Sound Recorder, libshumate, gnome-bluetooth, xdg-desktop-portal-gnome, libadwaita, Dialect and Solanum. (Translations did not exist for these software)

GNOME Shell and Yelp got a lot of previous translations corrected, and new translations added after accumulation of new strings due to being inactive for past 8-9 years. GNOME Shell and Yelp are fully translated now.

All these translation works are making their way into GNOME 44 release.

GNOME Foundation

Sonny announces

GNOME Foundation has been accepted as a GSoC 2023 mentoring org!

We are glad to announce that once again the GNOME Foundation will be part of Google Summer of Code. We are interested in onboarding new contributors that are passionate about GNOME and motivated to become long term GNOME developers!

list of projects

the announcement

Thank you Felipe Borges for organizing!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#84 Polished Circle

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 17 to February 24.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

This week we are welcoming our 50th app into GNOME Circle. With only existing for 2½ years, the GNOME Circle project has been an enormous success.

We thank all the app maintainers and other contributors for their dedicated work on all those apps. We will do our best to help the community to keep our apps at such good quality.

This week, Chess Clock joined GNOME Circle. Chess Clock allows you to time games of over-the-board chess. Congratulations!

This week, Komikku joined GNOME Circle. Komikku allows you to read your favorite manga. Congratulations!

This week, Eyedropper joined GNOME Circle. Eyedropper allows you to pick colors and generate palettes. Congratulations!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

Sonny reports

Workbench news

Workbench is now fully sandboxed. Starting with the next release, it will protect users from accidents or malicious code. Made possibly by Flatpak ❤️. Read more

Our project proposal “Make GNOME platform demos for Workbench” has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code project. I will be mentoring along with Andy Holmes and Tobias Bernard. Read more

I made a guide in how to get started contributing to Workbench. Read more

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Version 0.5 of Pika Backup is now available. This version includes the following:

Different presets for commonly excluded folders that can be activated independently.

Support for adding exclusion rules based on regular expressions or shell patterns.

Ability to manually delete specific archives.

More automated help with finding and mounting USB drives when starting backups.

More than 20 other changes, including small interface improvements and bug fixes.

I’m also happy to share that Fina joins Pika Backup as a second maintainer. Further, it is now possible to support the development and maintenance on Open Collective. Both steps will help to give the project a stable future.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Luca Bacci has added support for getting pretty names of UWP apps on Windows in GLib, so the GTK app chooser dialogue is now a lot more useful! See screenshots on https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3168

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato reports

GJS 1.75.2 was released today, the beta release for the GNOME 44 series. Here’s a selection of the new features:

There are new Gio.Application.prototype.runAsync() and GLib.MainLoop.prototype.runAsync() methods which do the same thing as run() but return a Promise which resolves when the main loop ends, instead of blocking while the main loop runs. Use one of these methods (by awaiting it) if you use async operations with Promises in your application. Previously, it was easy to get into a state where Promises never resolved if you didn’t run the main loop inside a callback. Thanks to Evan Welsh for working on this.

There are new Gio.InputStream.prototype.createSyncIterator() and Gio.InputStream.prototype.createAsyncIterator() methods which allow easy iteration of input streams in consecutive chunks of bytes, either with a for-of loop or a for-await-of loop. This addition is from Sonny Piers.

DBus proxy wrapper classes now have a static newAsync() method, which returns a Promise that resolves to an instance of the proxy wrapper class on which initAsync() has completed. Marco Trevisan laid the groundwork for this one.

DBus property getters can now return GLib.Variant instances directly, if they have the correct type, instead of returning JS values and having them be packed into GLib.Variants. A quick quality-of-life improvement from Andy Holmes.

Some long-existing typos in Cairo enums were spotted by Vítor Vasconcellos.

More Cairo improvements, tuberry created Cairo.SVGSurface.prototype.finish() and Cairo.SVGSurface.prototype.flush() because previously SVG surfaces were only written to disk when the SVGSurface object was garbage collected, making it uncertain to rely on them.

GNOME Development Tools

Felipe Borges (afk) says

GNOME Boxes now has a more modern virtual machine creation dialog which is more aligned to the GNOME Human Interfaces Guidelines and simplifies the former approach that used pagination. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-boxes/-/merge_requests/571

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme says

Builder gained a toggle to allow you to start your application with the GTK inspector active. This helps in situations where you cannot otherwise activate it with keyboard shortcuts.

hergertme says

Builder now uses a PTY for cloning operations to provide more reliable messages from the git server.

hergertme reports

Builder got a revamped messages panel this week which allows users to troubleshoot issues with their project more easily. Various subsystems in Builder are being updated to raise awareness of operations to users.

Third Party Projects

Alice (she/her) reports

I finally released Elastic - an editor for libadwaita spring animations: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2023/02/24/introducing-elastic/

Dave Patrick announces

I am excited to announce that Mousai now supports offline mode. Through this update, instead of an error, the recordings will be saved and then recognized once you’re back online. This is perfect for anyone who needs to recognize audio on the go. Aside from that, there have been significant improvements in navigation to make it more natural and intuitive.

nxyz says

This week I released Paleta v0.3.0, a complete rewrite in Rust! This release brings with it the advantage of using colorthief-rs, which makes extracting colors blazingly fast!

Download rewritten Paleta from flathub: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/io.github.nate_xyz.Paleta

Tobias Bernard reports

Jonas published version 1.1 of Capsule, with support for mobile form factors!

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter’s C# rewrite continues to move along. This week we rewrote the backend using pythonnet. This framework allows us to embed python directly within our application to use yt-dlp calls directly from python instead of relying on the executable, giving us more fine-grain control of downloads.

Thanks to Brage we also have a new icon for this big release!

I know I said this last week 😆, but we are hoping to have a beta by the end of the weekend!

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain announces

Login Manager Settings v3.alpha.0 was released. This version is not available on Flathub but you can download the flatpak (and AppImage) from its release page.

Some of the new features include

An “Always Show Accessibility Menu” toggle in Top Bar settings

Option to change cursor/pointer size

Release notes available in the About Window

Some other changes include

Proper names are shown for themes instead of name of their directory

Cursor only themes are not presented when choosing icon theme

There’s also a one-time donation request along with a ‘Donate’ hamburger menu item.

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Kévin Commaille reports

Hello all! Fractal 4.4.2-beta2 is available on Flathub Beta.

You read correctly, it’s not Fractal 5 yet. This is a maintenance release that fixes the compilation of Fractal 4.4 with recent libraries and allows to build the Flatpak with the latest GNOME runtime. That means no more warning that the GNOME 41 runtime is outdated!

There are no new features, but since we updated a lot of Rust dependencies we preferred to release a beta version before using it to update our stable release to the latest runtime. So please test it and if no major regression is reported, we will release it as stable in two weeks.

To get it, run the following commands:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta org.gnome.Fractal
flatpak run --branch=beta org.gnome.Fractal
Note that if you always want to use this beta version instead of the stable one, and run it from the icon in your launcher, you will need to change its desktop file to use the command in the last line.

See you soon with some news regarding Fractal 5 hopefully!

Eyedropper ↗

Pick and format colors.

FineFindus reports

A new version of Eyedropper has been released, with many small UX and UI improvements. Most notably is a new icon, designed by bertob, and the ability to export palettes as Adobe Swatch Exchange (ASE), hex, PAL or Paint.NET (txt) files. Minor improvements include an Undo toast after clearing the history and colors no longer displaying NaN. View the full changelog in-app after downloading it from Flathub or on the GitHub release page.

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick says

Denaro V2023.2.1 is here! This week we are bringing users some fixes to minor bugs and various UX improvements!

Here’s the full changelog:

New and improved icon (Thanks @daudix-UFO)!

Fixed an issue where the wrong group was selected in TransactionDialog

Fixed an issue where some LC vars could not be parsed

Various UX improvements

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 51.0 was just released! As said last time, we focused on fixing bugs and quality of life changes.

We revamped the “New Bottle” interface, to address several issues that were raised from users, including but not limited to:

There wasn’t a clear indicator for which environment was chosen, especially when the Custom environment was selected and then collapsed.

The window would increase and shrink in each page, and when the Custom environment was selected or collapsed. This caused a lot of distractions as the window would expand and shrink unexpectedly.

There are also minor quality of life changes that will hopefully improve the user experience:

The Library icon has been changed from a heart to books, to represent a libary.

There is now a toast when launching executables with “Run Executable”. Before, there wasn’t a clear indicator when the program was launching.

Runners are now sorted according to a priority list. From the highest to the lowest priority: Soda, Caffe, Vaniglia, Lutris, and then the rest. Whenever you want to create a new bottle, or change the runner of an existing bottle, everything will be displayed in order.

Bottles can now be named without any character restrictions. This means, for example, “Assassin’s Creed”, “Sid Meier’s Civilization”, or “Paw Patrol: On A Roll” are now valid names.

Bottles will now send a notification when a bottle has been created, but only when the window is unfocused.

There are also several bug fixes that include:

Adding a shortcut to Steam wouldn’t add and would throw an error.

Importing full backups wouldn’t import and would throw an error.

A lot of various issues with the library, like empty covers and crashes.

Various bugs regarding text encoding, in games and in Bottles

Bottles list not being updated correctly after deleting a bottle.

You can find all information in the release page!

GNOME Foundation

Caroline Henriksen announces

As the Brand Manager for the GNOME Foundation, I am involved in many of the Foundation’s projects, but most of my daily tasks involve graphic design, website maintenance, and social media management. This week I’ve been preparing for our booth at SCaLE next month by ordering new GNOME t-shirts and writing messages about the event to share in our Friends of GNOME newsletter and on our social channels. I’ve also been working on building registration forms for Linux App Summit (LAS) (look for event registration to open very soon), designing LAS merchandise (these will be for sale in person by per-order or online in the LAS shop), addressing lots of GUADEC 2023 planning tasks, and working on the GNOME 44 release video with Freehive.

Contributors welcome! If you would like to join me in working on GNOME social media or Foundation and Engagement Team graphic design projects find me on matrix @chenriksen.

Open Calls for Participation: We’re still looking for locations for both GNOMEAsia 2023, and GUADEC 2024. If you’re interested in learning more about hosting a GNOME event or want to submit a proposal for either of our open calls you can learn more about GNOMEAsia 2023 here or GUADEC 2024 here. Deadlines for both of these bids are coming up soon so submit your proposals asap!

Volunteer Opportunities: GNOME will be hosting a booth at SCaLE in Pasadena, CA on March 10-12. If you are in the Los Angeles area or planning to attend SCaLE, we could use your help at our booth! Contact info@gnome.org to volunteer.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#83 Sharing Is Caring

Fri, 17 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 10 to February 17.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Thanks to the contribution of Hendrik Müller, the Wi-Fi panel is now able to generate QR codes to share the connection.

Thanks to the outstanding work of Felipe Borges and Jakub Steiner, the Mouse & Touchpad panel has received a gorgeous facelift, with animations exemplifying what the preferences of the panel do. It also received a redesigned behavior test dialog, and a new “Pointer Assistance” preference that controls the mouse acceleration profile.

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

verdre announces

The GNOME Shell team has been busy finishing up some major changes to quick settings this week: Thanks to @fmuellner and Georges Stavracas (feaneron) GNOME Shell quick settings now have subtitles, the bluetooth toggle got a submenu to allow for quickly connecting to devices, and we show a list of apps that are running in the background.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

since GTK has recently added support for better texture filtering, AdwAvatar now looks better with scaled images when using GdkTexture as a custom paintable. Apps using custom paintables will have to update their code separately to get the same result.

GNOME Console ↗

A simple user-friendly terminal emulator.

Alice (she/her) reports

Console now has a tab overview, replacing the old tab switcher on small sizes but also available on desktop in addition to tab bar

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Sonny says

Thanks to Jordan Petridis GTK Demo and Widget Factory are now available for aarch64 in the GNOME nightly flatpak repository. https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Nightly

Weather ↗

Show weather conditions and forecasts.

Chris 🌱️ reports

Weather has received some last-minute UI updates for GNOME 44:

The details view now has a flat headerbar.

The temperature line is now a smooth curve.

Thanks to Cleo Menezes Jr. and Oscar Pritchard, respectively, for their MRs!

GNOME Contacts ↗

Keep and organize your contacts information.

nielsdg announces

GNOME Contacts 44.beta has been released! This is an exciting new release with some cool new stuff:

Contacts can now be shared with a QR code thanks to Hendrik Müller, which allows for a simple and easy way of passing on contact information across devices

Birthdays on a leap day will now get a birthday reminder on February 28 in non-leap years thanks to Ruben Schmidmeister

The main menu has been renamed to follow the GNOME HIG (kudos to Hari Rana (TheEvilSkeleton)!) and now contains an action item to export all contacts

Added support for multiple keyboard shortcut that were previously missing, like <Ctrl>F, <Ctrl>,, <Ctrl>Enter and more

It was previously impossible to remove a birthday from a contact, which has now been fixed

Some translation issues were found and solved with the help of Sabri Ünal

A bug where some title buttons where shown twice when using left-aligned title buttons has been fixed with the help of Markus Göllnitz

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Jamie announces

Epiphany has a brand new UI for handling permissions, to replace the ageing GtkInfoBar solution

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield announces

Commandline tagging is back - the Tracker 3.5.0beta release fixes some issues in the tracker3 tag command, and adds test coverage to guard against future regressions.

Third Party Projects

Sonny says

verdre made and released a medication tracker app named “Capsule” https://flathub.org/apps/details/nl.v0yd.Capsule

gianniradix says

Aviator 0.2.0 has dropped! This update includes a newer version of SVT-AV1 with defaults that more effectively tune for visual quality & support for film grain synthesis applied as a filter at decode time, a progress bar, a Stop Encode button, support for more buttons in the header bar, a stereo downmixing switch for audio, AdwAboutWindow, and more! You can read more about Aviator here

Sonny announces

I released a new version of Oh My SVG featuring the new icon by Sam Hewitt and several design and quality of life improvements. Get it on Flathub: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/re.sonny.OhMySVG

Aaron Erhardt says

Relm4 0.5, an idiomatic GUI library based on gtk4-rs, was just released with many improvements.

Since the first beta release, we have extended the support for asynchronous code, added widget templates, more tooling and a lot of other improvements. You can find more information about the release in the official blog post.

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter is in the process of being rewritten in C#. The rewrite brings a more stable backend to Tube Converter with support for download progress and better preformance when running multiple downloads. We hope to have our first beta released on Sunday, once a WinUI version is complete. Check out the progress here !

Cawbird ↗

A native Twitter client for your Linux desktop.

CodedOre reports

Hello everyone! It’s been a while since the last update on our GTK4 rewrite of Cawbird.

Sadly the biggest news is not the recently completed rework of the session system, which should handle interaction better. Instead it is that Twitter has banned all third-party clients. As a result, we have dropped the backend for the Twitter 2.0 API. Instead being a multi-platform client, the focus is now on Mastodon alone.

Anyway, apart from the rework done for sessions, there were a few additions lately:

The user profile page now shows when a link was verified by Mastodons servers.

Thanks to IBBoard, posts can now be liked and reposted in the client.

Initial support for hiding sensitive content.

I know there weren’t news about this rewrite in the last months, but I hope I can share more news soon!

Miscellaneous

Sonny reports

Linux App Summit call for proposal closes tomorrow (18/02) - last chance to submit a talk, workshop or bof proposal. https://linuxappsummit.org/cfp/

Philip Goto reports

Many GNOME projects make use of the internal translation system Damned Lies, but there are also a lot of projects that don’t, including GNOME Circle apps. Because these projects can be easily looked over, I made an overview of them with links to their translation systems.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/philip.goto/external-translations

GNOME Foundation

Rosanna announces

The GNOME Foundation staff wants to increase communications with the wider GNOME community. The plan is for us to take turns writing updates here to let y’all know who we are and what we are doing.

Greetings! I am the Director of Operations for the GNOME Foundation. After spending last week at FOSDEM and State of Open Con, this has been a catch up week for me: going through the mounds of paper on my desk, working on GNOME’s financial records, prepping invoices for the advisory board, handling tax forms, paying bills, and other not-exactly-exciting-but-essential-stuff.

Volunteer opportunity: GNOME will be hosting a booth at SCaLE in Pasadena March 10-12. If you are in the Los Angeles area, we could use your help with staffing our booth. Contact info@gnome.org or zana on matrix to help.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#82 Software Performance

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from February 03 to February 10.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

Georges blogged about some nice performance improvements he’s made in gnome-software recently: https://feaneron.com/2023/02/07/profiling-optimizing-gnome-software/

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Emmanuele Bassi has just landed a new GPathBuf API in GLib, for easily building file paths, https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3216

GNOME Incubating Apps

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie reports

This week we made a bunch of progress in planning out the image rendering for Loupe. Not only did we land the first upstream tweak we needed, but we also discussed neat upcoming features in GTK that Loupe can make use of.

I also landed a few minor tweaks.

Added a double-tap gesture on touchscreens for zooming in and out

Added a more natural rubber-band effect for zoom gestures when hitting the maximum or minimum zoom level

Added some space between the images in the sliding view

Fixed some issues for right-to-left text direction

Fixed swipe gesture on touchscreens

Added shortcuts for the Home and End button to got to the first or last image

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

slomo says

Just in time for the GNOME 44 API/ABI freeze there was a new gtk-rs release, and new releases of the Rust bindings for various other GNOME libraries. Check https://gtk-rs.org/blog/2023/02/10/new-release.html for the release notes.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan says

TWIG-Bot Last weekend, Gaphor 2.16.0 has been released.

The Model browser now supports multi select

The GUI has been improved: diagram name shows in the header, improvements in spadding, backdrop when no diagrams are opened and icons. Thanks to Tobias Bernard.

The editor’s CSS editor now supports dark mode and variables.

It’s now easier to add top-level packages and diagrams in the model browser.

Third Party Projects

nxyz says

This week I released Paleta, a simple gtk4/libadwaita app that allows you to extract colors from an image and manage them in palettes. Extraction is done with the color-thief library and palettes are saved persistently. You can get it from Flathub.

Hunter Wittenborn announces

After a few months of work, Celeste has been released. Celeste is a file synchronization application, written in GTK, that can connect to a wide variety of cloud providers, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, ownCloud, and WebDAV. More storage types are also planned for the future, including Microsoft OneDrive and Amazon S3.

Celeste can be installed as a Flatpak, Snap, or Debian package.

The project is currently in it’s alpha state, so if you have any issues please report them on the project’s issue tracker.

fiaxh reports

Dino 0.4 was released. Dino is a secure and privacy-friendly messaging application. It uses the XMPP (Jabber) protocol for decentralized communication. The release adds support for message reactions and replies. We also switched from GTK3 to GTK4 and make use of libadwaita now.

Diego Iván says

This week, I released a PDF Metadata Editor. Edit the title, author, keywords, creator, producer, creation and modification dates of your PDF documents. You can get it from Flathub.

Daniel Wood announces

This week Design, a 2D CAD application for GNOME gets all touchy! Adding gesture input, usability improvements on small screens and more…

Touch input for pan, pinch to zoom and double tap to zoom all

Fix tabs not being shown

Fixes for text rotation

Fix files being read incorrectly

Fix ARC selection

Improve selection precision

Added ability to Save As

Handle keyboard shortcuts

Design 43-alpha3 is available from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

tfuxu says

This week, Gradience version 0.4.0 have been released, this release is a preparation for 0.8.0, the next major release that will bring GNOME Shell theming support and other long awaited features. Version 0.4.0 introduces a CLI interface, some bug fixes and general quality of life improvement changes.

Here are some of the changes:

Added CLI interface, useful for creating scripts or for those who prefer terminal tools (CLI guide available here)

Now Gradience warns user when switching to other presets, if current one has unsaved changes

When running Gradience from terminal, you will see easier to understand error messages, thanks to the new logging facility

Fixed sorting in “Explore” tab of Preset Manager not working with non-English locales

Now Gradience will now internally use hexadecimal color values or RGBA formatted colors if transparency is used

And some other bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. You can find more detailed changelog here.

As always, the latest release is available to download from Flathub.

Gir.Core ↗

Gir.Core is a project which aims to provide C# bindings for different GObject based libraries.

badcel announces

Gir.Core 0.3.0 was released. Most prominent features in this release include:

Addition of WebKitGtk to the supported libraries

Improved runtime behaviour if using .NET 7 instead of .NET 6

New C test library to not rely on API of other libraries to do unit tests

Support for detailed signals via GObject.Signal.Connect

The GType of a class / interface is now available in the public API

Additionally there were several bugs fixed, some new API was made available and some code cleanup took place. For details checkout the release notes.

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.2.0 is here! Your favorite weekly pizza man is back with a new update for your favorite personal finance manager! In this update, we gave users the ability to add passwords to protect and encrypt their account files, we provided a way for users to transfer money between accounts of different currencies, and we improved the look and feel of the application, as well as many, many other features and enhancements. Here’s a full changelog:

Added the ability to add a password to an account (This will encrypt the nmoney file)

Added the ability to transfer money between accounts with different currencies by providing a conversion rate in TransferDialog

Added the ability to configure how Denaro uses locale separators in amount fields

Added the ability to copy individual transactions

Added the ability to sort transactions by amount

LC_MONETARY and LC_TIME will now be respected

Added “Help” button to toast notification when there are 0 imported transactions

Recent accounts are now available to select from the TransferDialog

Improved importing of qif and ofx files

Added a “New Window” action to the main menu

Shell Extensions

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

Version 16 of Auto Activities has been released.

In this new version, the user is able to choose between showing the activities overview or the apps grid when there are no windows in the workspace. In addition, the maximum window check delay limit has been increased from 1 to 10 seconds

Special thanks to Zetta1Reid0 who helped implement this.

Follow the development Get it on GNOME Extensions

Just Perfection ↗

A tweak tool to customize the GNOME Shell and to disable UI elements.

Just Perfection GNOME Shell Extension version 23 released with more features such as overview spacing size, screen recording and sharing indicator visibility, switcher popup delay, …

This version named after Spanish painter Francisco Goya.

We also had some bug fixes in this version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyY5MXKeqgk

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#81 FOSDEM Weekend

Fri, 03 Feb 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 27 to February 03.

Miscellaneous

Sonny announces

It’s FOSDEM time! FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas and collaborate.

It’s happening this weekend in Brussels on Saturday 04/02 and Sunday 05/02.

Find us at the GNOME booth or join the GNOME social event.

GNOME Development Tools

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

hergertme reports

Builder’s project tree has been ported away from GtkTreeView to GtkListView to improve scalability and allow for more modern features going forward. This also includes support for Drag-n-Drop using the new GTK 4 APIs.

hergertme says

Builder also has received updates to global search to support filtering and previewing search results.

GNOME Incubating Apps

Sophie announces

Loupe has been accepted into the GNOME Incubator. The GNOME incubation process is for apps that are designated to be accepted into GNOME Core or GNOME Development Tools if they reach the required maturity.

The target for Loupe is to become the new Image Viewer in GNOME Core. You can track the progress in the the Core milestone.

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie says

While we are busy working on the core part of Loupe – the image-loading machinery – we still have a bunch of news:

Landed a change in GTK that allows us to use swipe gestures to navigate through images

Mostly re-implemented image browsing fixing many bugs and making navigating through images much smoother

Added support for moving images to the trash

Added tracking of changes in image directory and reloading images when changed

Added a bunch of missing shortcuts

Fixed many small bugs

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Warp ↗

Fast and secure file transfer.

Fina announces

Warp 0.4 has been released with QR Code support. Scan the code with any of the supported apps and begin the transfer immediately.

Other new features: Select custom save location and seasonal progress bar colors.

We also have experimental Windows support now, see README.md for more details.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan announces

The next release of Gaphor will have full dark-mode integration, even in the diagrams. The CSS features for diagrams have been extended to allow for special styling for dark and light mode.

Third Party Projects

Fyodor Sobolev announces

Cavalier is an audio visualizer based on CAVA. Now it has 4 drawing modes, several new options to customize interface, keyboard shortcuts for changing most of the settings on the fly, and an ability to import/export settings.

lwildberg says

This week the app “Schemes”, an app to create and edit syntax highlighting style-schemes for GtkSourceView written by Christian Hergert, was submitted to flathub and is now available there. Have fun while being creative and produce beautiful new styles!

Iman Salmani announces

I’m working on a iplan application for planning personal life and workflow. its not ready for publish but i cant stop myself.(mybe its ready for next week) i have warm welcome to contribution and suggestions. in version 1 i will focus on offline features and availability.

Fyodor Sobolev reports

Hello TWIG! My first post here, I should have started writing here earlier, but better late than never 😅 Time Switch is an app to run tasks after a timer. In the latest release there was added an ability to set clock time in 24h format when a timer should finish, and also a timer can now be paused.

Daniel Wood announces

Design, a 2D computer aided design (CAD) application for GNOME was released this week. Features:

Supports the industry standard DXF format

Uses common CAD workflows, commands and canvas management

Drawing creation and manipulation using command line or toolbar input

Layer management and manipulation

Entity interrogation and modification

Design 43-alpha2 is available from Flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

This week we released phosh 0.24.0 and related components for the Linux based mobile phones near you. See here for a summary of changes.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#80 Different Locales

Fri, 27 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 20 to January 27.

Third Party Projects

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Maybe it’s already known that Phosh’s testsuite runs the phone shell under different locales. When doing so it takes screenshots so we can make sure translations fit under the size constraints of mobile devices and designers have an easy way to validate contributor changes. This weeks news is that we doubled the amount of screenshots taken covering most of the modal dialogs now. This is how it looks in Ukranian (the untranslated strings are from the tests itself which we don’t bother translators with):

slomo announces

GStreamer 1.22 was released this Monday, including the improvements of one year of development. Some of the highlights of the release are

New gtk4paintablesink and gtkwaylandsink renderers

AV1 video codec support improvements

New HLS, DASH and Microsoft Smooth Streaming adaptive streaming clients

Qt6 support for rendering video inside a QML scene

Minimal builds optimised for binary size, including only the individual elements needed

Playbin3, Decodebin3, UriDecodebin3, Parsebin enhancements and stabilisation

WebRTC simulcast support and support for Google Congestion Control

WebRTC-based media server ingestion/egress (WHIP/WHEP) support

New easy to use batteries-included WebRTC sender plugin

Easy RTP sender timestamp reconstruction for RTP and RTSP

ONVIF timed metadata support

New fragmented MP4 muxer and non-fragmented MP4 muxer

New plugins for Amazon AWS storage and audio transcription services

New videocolorscale element that can convert and scale in one go for better performance

High bit-depth video improvements

Touchscreen event support in navigation API

H.264/H.265 timestamp correction elements for PTS/DTS reconstruction before muxers

Improved design for DMA buffer sharing and modifier handling for hardware-accelerated video decoders/encoders/filters and capturing/rendering on Linux

Video4Linux2 hardware accelerated decoder improvements

CUDA integration and plugin improvements

New H.264 / AVC, H.265 / HEVC and AV1 hardware-accelerated video encoders for AMD GPUs using the Advanced Media Framework (AMF) SDK

New “force-live” property for audiomixer, compositor, glvideomixer, d3d11compositor etc.

Lots of new plugins, features, performance improvements and bug fixes

See the release notes for more details https://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/releases/1.22/

Crosswords ↗

A simple Crossword player and Editor.

jrb announces

GNOME Crosswords 0.3.7 was released. This release features a massive internal rewrite, unlocking new functionality and giving a performance boost. Among the user visible features:

Custom game widget for adaptive layout, supporting animations

New supported puzzle type: Arrowwords

Support puzzles with zero or one column of clues, such as alphabet crosswords

New options for preferences dialog:

Preference: Hide puzzle sets by default and let the user select the ones they want.

Preference: Hide puzzles after they’re solved

Add tagging to puzzle-sets to provide more information to users

Add count of unsolved puzzles

Fix zoom for all game UI elements

Support horizontal and vertical cell dividers

Fixes for Onscreen Keyboard support

This release is also marked for mobile compatability. Read the full release announcement for more information. It’s available for download in Fedora and flathub.

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Michael Catanzaro announces

Natanael Copa deleted GLib’s slice allocator, which will now internally use g_malloc() and g_free(). - https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/2935

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#79 Research Results

Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 13 to January 20.

Miscellaneous

Allan Day announces

I published the results of the gnome-info-collect research that was done last August - https://blogs.gnome.org/aday/2023/01/18/gnome-info-collect-what-we-learned/

Circle Apps and Libraries

Tangram ↗

A browser for your pinned tabs.

Sonny reports

Tangram 2.0 is out and available on Flathub.

Ported to GTK4 / libadwaita

Responsive/mobile UI

New and clearer onboarding experience

Improved Web performance

Follow system light/dark theme

Thank you to everyone involved in the GTK4 port of WebKit ♥️

Third Party Projects

Cyber Phantom reports

Sudoku Solver, a new application written in rust using GTK4, libadwaita and blueprint has landed its first release this week on Flathub with version 1.0.1. It’s a brand new way to pass time for all the Sudoku enthusiasts or people who like looking at random numbers on a grid.

This app was built with the sole purpose of learning about the the technologies behind GNOME and getting familiar with rust along the way. If you have any suggestions you can leave them on our gitlab, we’d appreciate that.

The app can be downloaded on Flathub - https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.gitlab.cyberphantom52.sudoku_solver

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick announces

Denaro V2023.1.0 stable is here! For those of you who don’t know, Money was rewritten in C# and with all it’s great new features and rewrite comes a new name: Denaro (Money in Italian)

We have been hard at work over the past two months developing and constantly testing this release, bringing our users highly-requested features and providing an overall better experience when using the app.

I cannot thank enough all those who have translated the application, contributed new code, tested betas, and provided bug reports, including:

My right-hand man: @fsobolev

@Suork

@chuangzhu

@oscfdezdz

@bordam

And everyone on @weblate

Here’s a full changelog:

Denaro is now available to translate on Weblate!

Money has been completely rewritten in C# and now has a new name: Denaro! With the C# rewrite, there is now a new version of Denaro available on Windows!

Added an Account Settings dialog to allow users to customize their accounts better

Added an “Ungrouped” row to the groups section to allow filtering transactions that don’t belong to a group

Added the ability to attach a jpg/png/pdf of a receipt to a transaction

Reworked the repeat transaction system and added support for a biweekly interval

Added the ability to export an account as a PDF

Added the ability to sort transactions by id or date

Added the ability to hide the groups section

Made a group’s description an optional field

Performance improvements and better handling of large accounts

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 50.0 was just released! First of, we ditched the monthly release cycle to one where we release a new version whenever we deem ready. This gives more time for us to implement and polish upcoming features without being pressured with time. So, we changed the version number, starting from 50.0, to avoid confusion as much as possible.

In this update, we mainly focused on fixing bugs and polishing the interface. Based on our testing and user feedback, we found that previous versions had a lot of performance issues and inconsistent interfaces throughout the app, so we decided to freeze feature additions to focus mainly on fixing bugs and improving the interface. Furthermore, we also agreed that we will mainly focus on them for the next couple of versions. The next versions won’t be as “fun” as they used to be, but the improves will definitely provide a better and more polished experience!

To summarize the main improvements:

Unfortunately, Bottles requires the internet to download data to provide the latest information for runners and other metadata, which slowed down the startup drastically. We spent a lot of time to optimize this part to make the startup load quicker. Now, the startup went from 3 seconds to about 1.5 seconds if you have a connection of 50KB/s!

Not only was startup slow, we also realized that loading each bottle had a slight delay and sluggish transition, which felt unpleasant. We also spent the time to improve the performance of loading information of a bottle, so it should now feel performant again!

Other changes include:

Gamescope improvements and fixes

Dependency installation is faster and more stable

The health check has more information for faster debugging

NVAPI has a lot of fixes and is more stable, should now work properly

Fix crash when downloading a component

Backend code improvement by avoiding spin-lock

More variables for installer scripting

Fix onboard dialog showing “All ready” while it was in fact not ready

Improvement to build system

Enabling VKD3D by default when creating bottles for gaming

Fix crashes when reading Steam files with bad encodings

Fix components not updated correctly in the UI after installation/uninstallation

FSR fixes

Fix the issue when a program closes after it was launched from “Run executable”

Filter types of files when opening the file chooser

Again, this update isn’t as fun as the other updates, but the experience should still feel much more responsive and snappier!

To read more about the update, feel free to read our release post!

GNOME Shell Extensions

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

A new version of Weather O’Clock has been released. An extension to display the current weather inside the pill next to the clock. GNOME Weather is required for this extension to function.

Get it on extensions.gnome.org. Release Notes

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#78 Volume Levels

Fri, 13 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 06 to January 13.

Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Marco Melorio says

The redesign of the sound panel of GNOME Settings is continuing! This week the “Volume Levels” section has been moved in a separate window, to make the main panel more compact by default. Also, the app icons in the new design are now bigger and full-colored and the rows also include a volume level indicator.

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Carlos Garnacho added support in the Tracker database library for exporting data as JSON-LD. This will be available via the tracker3 export command in Tracker 3.5.

This feature builds on a series of incremental improvements around data serialization and deserialization in libtracker-sparql. See MR tracker!523 for more details.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

This week Dan Yeaw released Gaphor 2.15.0. The improvements include, but are not limited to:

Basic git merge conflict support by asking which model to load

Improvements to CSS autocomplete for Gaphor’s style sheets

Native file chooser support in Windows

Fixed UTF-8 encoding issues on Windows

Fixed translations not loading in Windows, macOS, and AppImage

Many thanks to everyone who helped out with translating Gaphor. Special thanks for Jonathan and Óscar Fernández Díaz for their code contributions.

Third Party Projects

Paulo reports

Black Box 0.13.0 is finally out! This release brings much-anticipated features and bug fixes:

Customizable keyboard shortcuts with support for fully disabling shortcuts

Background transparency

Customizable cursor blinking mode

Experimental Sixel support (Settings > Advanced > Sixel Support)

Fixed scrolling on touchpad and touchscreens

Fixed issues with copy/paste

You can check out the full release notes here.

Romain announces

I updated UI Shooter, my tool to take screenshots of GTK4 widgets, used for example in CI to take screenshots in different languages for documentation. The new release correctly sets the direction of widgets in right-to-left languages, and the container image now includes all langpacks fonts.

Rnote ↗

Sketch and take handwritten notes.

flxzt says

I just merged the tabs branch into main in the Rnote repository. Thanks to the awesome “TabView” libadwaita widget the tabs themselves were really easy to implement. Alongside with it I also implemented a global colorpicker, and made the UI more pretty with floating toolbars. There are still some things left to do and likely bugs to squash, but I am really excited to get this out as a beta release soon.

Denaro ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick reports

Money has been renamed to Denaro! As many of you have seen, Money has been rewritten in C# and has many new features. To further signify this great new release, Money has been renamed to Denaro! Although there is a new name, the code will continue to use NickvisionMoney for namespaces and .nmoney for files. All .nmoney files from previous stable Money releases are 100% compatible with Denaro.

Denaro V2023.1.0-rc1 was also released! Compared to previous betas:

We implemented a completely new Account Settings dialog that allows users to further customize their Denaro accounts (including support for a custom currency).

We also implemented the Export to PDF feature, which generates a beautiful overview report of your account with groups, transactions, and receipts all included.

Documentation for the app is also available, built using yelp-tools which is available through the Help menu item on both GNOME and WinUI!

We hoped to release the stable version today, but we found a memory leak that we are investigating and are trying to fix. New planned release day is Sunday :)

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain reports

gdm-tools v1.2 has been released.

It is a boring bug fix release improving the install/uninstall experience. The only notable new feature is a --no-ask option to the install script which enables hands-free/non-interactive install process.

I still recommend Login Manager Settings over this but for the people who want to use gdm-tools, the install/uninstall process should be better now.

Flare ↗

A unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi reports

Flare version 0.6.0 has been released. In the last few months, there were not too many updates happening with Flare, but many bugs were fixed that leads to Flare being more stable and usable. In total, in the last three months, there were seven minor releases of Flare fixing bugs.

This week, Flare version 0.6.0 has been released with the major addition for notifications in the background. This means that (once the option is enabled in the settings) Flare will be able to start in the background and send message notifications without it being manually opened by the user. Furthermore, there has been some work done on restarting Flare after waking up from suspension, which is great for usage in Linux-based phones that regularly enter and exit suspension. This addition was mainly implemented by Cédric Bellegarde.

In additions to these major features, a workaround has been found for the notorious issue where Flare would not work with libsecret on some distributions. If you previously had that problem with Flare, applying that workaround should make Flare usable on your distribution. Furthermore, the summary of Flare has received a minor update to correct a grammatical mistake that was present for over six months.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#77 Happy New Year!

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 30 to January 06.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

Tobias Bernard announces

The design team has been discussing alternatives to the app menu for indicating window focus in GNOME Shell, and we are seeking feedback on a prototype of the proposed new behavior.

The Why

Back in 2018, we removed the unique menu items from the app menu. However, we kept the menu itself, so that it could be used as a window focus indicator, and so it can show a loading spinner for apps that are slow to show a window.

However, when doing user research over the past few years, we’ve noticed that people are often confused by the app menu in the top bar. Often, they think that it’s a task switcher, a shortcut to a specific app, or don’t understand what it is at all. It seems to be a trip hazard for new users.

Additionally, we’ve realized that the app menu doesn’t work very well as a window focus indicator. It doesn’t differentiate multiple windows of the same app, it’s only present on the primary monitor, and it’s sometimes located a long way from the window that it’s indicating.

We’re therefore investigating an alternative design for indicating window focus, which would both improve the focus indicator experience, and potentially enable us to stop showing the app menu in the top bar. The new design adds a subtle scale effect to newly focused windows when switching workspaces, super+tabbing, or closing a window.

For the loading spinner, we are still exploring alternatives, but feel that this is a relatively easy design problem to solve. Showing a spinner in the top bar is one obvious option.

Call for Testing

Thanks to @Leleat we have a prototype of the new focus indicator behaviour, in the form of a GNOME Shell extension. We’re looking for people to test this extension and give feedback about whether it works for them as a replacement for the app menu as a focus indicator. If you never use the app menu it’d be still be helpful for you to test it, to know whether you notice it being gone.

To participate, install this extension: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/5612/focus-indicator

Feedback can be provided as comments on the Discourse announcement or on Matrix in #gnome-design.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Tangram ↗

A browser for your pinned tabs.

sonnyp announces

Tangram had 2 new releases

1.5 available on Flathub is an update of Tangram GTK3 with an up to date GNOME runtime and WebKit engine

2.0 beta available on flathub beta repository is a GTK4 / libadwaita port.

🧪 It’s note quite ready but if you’d like to test or use; follow these instructions:
flatpak kill re.sonny.Tangram
flatpak remove re.sonny.Tangram
flatpak --user remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak --user install flathub-beta re.sonny.Tangram
flatpak run --branch=beta re.sonny.Tangram
⚠️ NVIDIA GPU: There is a bug affecting graphics – expertise needed https://bugs.webkit.org/show\_bug.cgi?id=228268

Third Party Projects

دانیال بهزادی reports

Carbuteror 4.0 released with porting the main window to libadwaita. It is a graphical application for connecting to Tor mainly designed with GNU/Linux mobile phones in mind. Under the hood it uses a CLI program named “Tractor” which lets users to connect to Tor in userspace.

It is already available in English, Persian, Spanish, Turkish, Croatian, Portuguese, German, French and Norwegian Bokmål

Source: https://framagit.org/tractor/carburetor/

Sjoerd Broekhuijsen announces

This week I released version 1.3.4 of Graphs, a data manipulation and graphing tool written for the GNOME environment. The latest release adds the ability to get the indefinite integral or the derivative of your data, as well as the possibility to perform Fourier Transforms. Since the last time I wrote about Graphs, there’s been a bunch of other exciting new features as well such as the ability to plot data on different axes, as well as a ton of bug fixes. As always, the latest version of Graphs is available on Flathub

Money ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick reports

Money V2023.1.0-beta3 is here! This beta features a brand new repeat transactions system (with support for biweekly transactions), as well as some design tweaks and performance improvements.

Money is also now available to translate on Weblate! We welcome all users to come and translate Money is their language :)

Continued thanks to all the developers, testers, and translations (especially Fyodor Sobolev) for all their hard work as we gear up for the stable release next week!

(Excuse the missing icons in the video, this is from a manual build on WSL. When running from Builder/flatpak this does not happen 🫠)

Sound Recorder ↗

A simple, modern sound recorder.

Chris 🌱️ reports

The Sound Recorder TypeScript port has been merged. TypeScript is easy to use on top of our GJS ecosystem, and provides compile-time type checking.

Eyedropper ↗

A powerful color picker and formatter.

FineFindus announces

I’ve released the 0.5.0 version of Eyedropper. The biggest improvements are the ability to change how a color is formatted (for example customize rgb(r, g, b) to Color::rgb(r, g, b)), two new color formats: LMS and Hunter-Lab, and a placeholder page when no color is picked.

Eyedropper can be downloaded from flathub.

Miscellaneous

sonnyp reports

Romain fixed an issue in xdg-desktop-portal-gnome where opening a folder would necessarily be in read-only. Which this change – the default will be read/write and the user can select “read only” – just like for files. As an app developer, it means you’ll be able to use the document portal to let users choose save locations.

Sam Thursfield announces

The OpenQA tests for GNOME are now set to run against every change to ‘master’ in the GNOME integration repo gnome-build-meta. Thanks to everyone who helped us get to this point!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#76 Last Fragments of 2022

Fri, 30 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 23 to December 30.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie reports

This week, Lorem joined GNOME Circle. Lorem allows you to generate placeholder texts. Congratulations!

Fragments ↗

Easy to use BitTorrent client.

Felix announces

Fragments 2.1 is now available on Flathub. It brings many new features and improvements, like…

Allow changing the location of a single torrent

New menu option to resume all torrents

Torrent errors are now displayed instead of ignoring them silently

Display message when the configured download/incomplete directory is not available

Transmission daemon is only started when necessary, and no longer runs continuously in the background

Application window can now be closed with CTRL+W

Fixed issue that already added magnet links were not recognised

Fixed a crash related to the “Automatically Start Torrents” setting

User interface improvements by using new Libadwaita widgets

In summary, the update makes Fragments much more user-friendly, as errors are now displayed directly, rather than being quietly ignored, which has led to many confusions in the past.

In addition, my other apps such as Shortwave and Audio Sharing have also received updates in the last few weeks, which include small improvements and bug fixes, and upgrades them to the new GNOME 43 platform with the latest Libadwaita widgets.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw says

Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, version 2.14.0 is out! Among numerous other improvements, Arjan Molenaar and Tobias Bernard have been quite the duo improving the UI and UX with updates to the welcome screen, keyboard shortcuts, tabs, and toolbars. For example, the welcome screen went from a grid of logos to a list of options that add much better guidance for users. Other improvements include:

New element handle and toolbox styles

Use system fonts by default for diagrams

Add tooltips to the application header icons

Make sequence diagram messages horizontal by default

Make keyboard shortcuts more standard especially on macOS

macOS: cursor shortcuts for text entry widgets

Load template as part of CI self-test

Update docs to make it more clear how to edit CSS

Switch doc style to Furo

Add custom style sheet language

Support non-standard Sphinx directory structures

Continue to make model loading and saving more reliable

Move Control Flow line style to CSS

Do not auto-layout sequence diagrams

Use new actions/cache/(save|restore)

Remove querymixin from modeling lists

Improve Windows build reliability by limiting cores to 2

Croatian, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, and Finnish translation updates

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

A new release of Authenticator is out! The release contains various bug fixes and improvements:

Mutli Camera support when scanning a QR code

Camera: Use GL when possible

Fix an issue when restoring an AEGIS backup file

Avoid duplicated items when restoring a backup

Allow disabling favicons download in general or on a metered connection

Updated providers list

Use new libadwaita widgets

Third Party Projects

Khaleel Al-Adhami reports

The new release of Converter is out! With this release, you can now convert multiple images (with preview!) at the same time to the same format. It now supports HEIF/HEIC, BMP, AVIF, JXL, and TIFF. It also supports exporting PDF pages into images. It can convert animated GIF into WEBP as well as split all of the GIF frames into individual images. It can also split ICO files into individual images. Other than supporting more formats, now you can drag and drop to the application and use “Open With” from your file browser. Get it from Flathub.

knuxify reports

Ear Tag 0.3.0 has been released! This release introduces support for more tags, plenty of performance improvements and various bugfixes. You can get the latest version from Flathub.

Money ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick announces

Money V2023.1.0-beta1 is here! This is a HUGE update (although not including any new features yet) as Money has been completely rewritten in C#! Besides a GNOME version, since everything is now in C#, we are also introducing Money for Windows!

The GNOME version is written using the gir.core library. The .nmoney files used in the GNOME version are fully-compatible with the WinUI version and vice-versa. Money is also receiving some design tweaks to be more usable on mobile devices.

New features, including PDF reports, a new account setup dialog, and more, are planned before releasing the stable version :)

The beta is available in flathub-beta:
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
flatpak install flathub-beta org.nickvision.money
flatpak run org.nickvision.money//beta

GNOME Shell Extensions

Simon Schneegans reports

The latest release of the Burn-My-Windows GNOME Shell extension includes a ridiculous portal effect inspired by the iconic Rick and Morty series! In total, the extension now offers 18 effects, each of which has plenty of customization options.

Miscellaneous

After more than a year, we finally did a new release of flatpak-github-actions, which are a set of Github Actions that allows building and publishing a Flatpak from Github CI. Details can be found at https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak-github-actions/releases/tag/v5

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#75 Redesigned Sound

Fri, 23 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 16 to December 23.

Core Apps and Libraries

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Marco Melorio has been working on implementing the redesign of the Sound panel of GNOME Settings. This week, a more modern version of the output test dialog was merged! There are more changes in the pipeline, so keep an eye for next updates.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Jamie reports

AdwBanner, a simple bar with contextual information, has landed in LibAdwaita

Third Party Projects

Sjoerd Broekhuijsen says

Last week I launched Graphs, a new libadwaita tool I’ve been working on for plotting and manipulation of data. Graphs allows you to import and plot data from two-column data files (or any amount of columns really), and transform and manipulate these data sets in a breeze. Alternatively, it is possible to easily generate data from equations. You can transform and plot multiple data files at the same time, both imported and generated data is treated the same and can be saved as text files for further use. I’ve been using Graphs to assist with my PhD project and I hope it can be useful for others as well. It is still in the early stages of development, but most of the core features are implemented and I am very open to feedback of any kind. The latest version of Graphs is available on Flathub.

abb128 announces

Live Captions v0.2.0 has been released on Flathub, which adds an option for a transparent window, customizable window width, and the issue of text expanding the window has been fixed. It also now shows a warning if captions aren’t being generated fast enough to keep up with realtime.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido (away) announces

Chris Talbot contributed a new plugin for phosh that allows to display emergency contact information on the lock screen. We also added the ability for plugins to have preferences:

Miscellaneous

Since the file chooser icon view work was merged on GTK4, we have received information from trusted sources that the Linux usage on the desktop took over all other OSes combined. We did not expect that it to happen so soon, but as it seems, this missing feature was really the one and only blocker of massive adoption. Our sources also mentioned that we crossed the Year of Linux Desktop user count threshold. This can all be verified in this important graph that was shared with us:

(Note from TWIG author: 😉)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#74 Decades Later

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 09 to December 16.

Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

The GTK4 file chooser widget has received a grid view, with bigger thumbnails. This is the culmination of more than a decade of work, and was only made possible by GTK4’s complete rewrite of its rendering system, and the introduction of highly performant and scalable list & grid widgets.

This will be available in the next release, numbered 4.10 and scheduled for early 2023. You can read more here.

We hope you enjoy it ❤️

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Not a lot is happening in libadwaita land atm, but one small addition: adw_message_dialog_choose() - a way to use AdwMessageDialog with a GIO async func, same as the new dialog APIs in GTK 4.9.x:

    [GtkCallback]
    private async void clicked_cb () {
        var dialog = new Adw.MessageDialog (this,
                                            "Replace File?",
                                            "A file named “example.png” already exists. Do you want to replace it?");

        dialog.add_response ("cancel", "_Cancel");
        dialog.add_response ("replace", "_Replace");

        dialog.set_response_appearance ("replace", DESTRUCTIVE);

        print ("Response: %s\n", yield dialog.choose (null));
    }

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Allan Day reports

In Settings, Felipe Borges landed a collection of polish changes. The Thunderbolt panel will now only show when there is Thunderbolt hardware, the About panel now uses AdwEntryRow for the hostname, and the Printer panel now uses AdwStatusPage when it is empty. sunflowerskater also added a description to the battery percentage switch.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie announces

This week, Emblem joined GNOME Circle. Emblem allows you to generate project avatars for your Matrix rooms and git forges. Congratulations!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

Workbench has seen many improvements since the last update on TWIG, here are the highlights:

Available in 43.2:

Show Vala diagnostics (powered by Vala Language Server)

Reset window preview on close

Add a warning about Blueprint being experimental technology

Available in the next release:

Show JavaScript diagnostics (powered by Rome Language Server)

Fix preview of non GtkBuildable

Prevent UI crashes

Switching between XML and Blueprint will now convert between the two

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan reports

I wrote a small blog on how to set up macOS keyboard shortcuts with GTK4. GTK 4 does no longer automatically substitute Ctrl for Command on macOS, but we still want to provide our macOS users with a pleasant user experience.

Third Party Projects

XDG portals 1.16.0 was released this week. The major highlights of this release are:

Background monitoring service, a new service that detects sandboxed applications running in the background without a user visible window. This information can be consumed by desktop environments to provide richer control over these apps, for example like this.

The new Global Shortcuts portal, which allows applications to be notified of shortcuts being activated even when they’re unfocused. So far only the KDE backend implements this portal, but hopefully more backends will implement it in the future.

alexx says

This week I published my new app called Live Captions to Flathub. It captions your desktop audio or mic in realtime locally. It only supports English for now.

In the future, I hope to update it with more accurate models, more languages, and more features. I hope some people will find this app useful. https://flathub.org/apps/details/net.sapples.LiveCaptions

This week I released “Diccionario de la Lengua” a small app to luck up words from the online dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy. Spanish-speaking GNOME users might find it of interest. You can get it from Flathub.

Mazhar Hussain announces

Since the last time I wrote about nautilus-code on This Week in GNOME,

It has been ported to Python which makes it easy to

Support Nautilus version 43 and earlier at the same time

Install to $HOME directory

Default install location has changed to $XDG_DATA_HOME. So, installation does not require sudo privileges now.

Support for VSCode Insiders Flatpak has been added.

I have added a new Issue Form for Editor/IDE Support Request so it is even easier to submit a request to add support for an IDE or code editor.

Pods ↗

A podman desktop application.

marhkb reports

Pods now has all the features for the first stable version and is now in the release candidate phase. Among the features are:

uploading/downloading files to/from a container

container terminal interaction

lots of visual improvements

etc.

The plan now is to fix as many bugs as possible, complete translations and finish this Design Task.

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie reports

Since our last update, there have been many new features and bug fixes for Loupe. When opening an image, the window now appears in the correct aspect ratio and shows a spinner until the image is loaded. The properties now show several details about photos from the Exif data, including the nearest town if the GPS location is available. The location can also be opened in apps like Maps. Drag and drop out of the Loupe window now works as well. Zooming via scroll-wheel should feel even more natural, and zoom is now limited to 2000%.

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain announces

I missed a few of This Week in GNOME postings. In that time, Login Manager Settings v2.0 was released with added power options, import/export mechanism, adaptive ui, and some more features and bug fixes. Full release notes are available here.

This week, I

added the option to change cursor size.

uploaded pre-built packages (AppImage & Flatpak) with the new feature to my Patreon if anyone is interested in that.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#73 Removing Autotools

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from December 02 to December 09.

Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

After four years, the GTK maintainers are removing the Autotools build from the GTK 3.x branch; if you want to build or package GTK 3.x you will now have to use the Meson build system. The documentation has been updated accordingly. The resulting build artifacts have been checked for consistency, and the Meson build has been tested on different platforms and toolchains, but if you are experiencing regressions make sure to file an issue on the GTK issue tracker.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

Adrien Plazas has been working hard at replacing uses of deprecated GTK APIs in gnome-software with modern replacements from GTK and libadwaita

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Marco Trevisan has been carefully digging through complex interactions between different types of refcounting in GObject, and adding a lot of tests as he goes

Third Party Projects

Upscaler 1.1.0 was released! This release adds and changes a couple of features:

Replace Upscaling dialog with page

Add Open With functionality

Improve appstream

Check algorithm output in case of failure

Add percentage

Improved icon

Suggest file name when selecting output location

Rename “Open File” to “Open Image” for consistency

With all of this, we also received a lot of translation!

Documentation

I have started working on a “PyGObject Guide”. It has started as a port of the well known “Python GTK+ 3 Tutorial” to GTK4, with some restructuring and extending.

This is the perfect time if anybody wants to jump in to help or give feedback.

You can look the current state of the guide here.

Miscellaneous

Sam Thursfield reports

We are running a survey on how people use search in GNOME, with the goal of improving automated testing. Please share a sentence or two on what content you search through. Remember that if your use case has automated testing, it’s more likely that bugs will be quickly found and fixed.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#72 Automated Testing

Fri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 25 to December 02.

Core Apps and Libraries

Mutter ↗

A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.

The Mutter & Shell team published an article about the recent developments on automating the testing of the compositor of the GNOME desktop. Have a read!

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Jordan Petridis reports

After more than a year of work, the rusty GStreamer Paintable Sink for GTK 4 has received support for GL Textures, reducing dramatically the CPU consumed (from 400-500% to 10-15% for the a 4k stream scenarios we tested) and allowing for zero-copy rendering when used with hardware decoders.

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

GNOME Settings continues to receive polish, reviews, and new designs from various contributors. We’re already stashing exciting improvements for the next release:

Continuous improvements to the Device Security panel have been added. These improvements range from better wording of the security features, new designs for the dialogs, and making the panel more actionable. Thanks to Kate Hsuan and Richard Hughes for diligently working on this.

The Accessibility panel was redesigned. This is the first panel implementing a more modern navigation model in Settings. More panels should be redesigned for this navigation pattern in the future. Thanks to Sadiq for this.

The Date & Time panel is now more mobile friendly, by using a two-column layout to the month selector. This change was also thanks to Sadiq.

The Network & Wi-Fi panels now use libnma’s own security widgets for managing connections. This is a massive cleanup in the codebase, and allows us to concentrate efforts on a single place. This change was made possible by Lubomir Rintel.

Various polishes and smaller improvements to lots of panels, like Users, Wacom, Region and Language, and others

Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw says

Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, feature release version 2.13.0 is now out! It includes some great updates, including:

Auto-layout for diagrams

Relations to actors can connect below actor name

Export to EPS

Zoom with Ctrl+scroll wheel works again

It is also got some great UI improvements, with GTK4 and libadwaita now the default for Linux and Windows.

Third Party Projects

lwildberg announces

I am announcing the first release of the new app “Meeting Point”. It is a video conferencing client using BigBlueButton in the background. At the moment the features exposed in the still experimental UI are:

join meetings (also with passwords) hosted by senfcall.de, a free BigBlueButton provider

watch webcam video streams of participants

read the public group chat

see a list of all participants

listen to audio (can be turned off)

delete the group chat history, if you are moderator

The source code is here. To try Meeting Point out, open it with GNOME Builder and hit the run button. New features will come soon! I will be also happy to guide anyone who is interested through the internals :)

Khaleel Al-Adhami says

Introducing Converter, a libadwaita GTK4 app that lets you convert and manipulate images in a sleek interface. It is built on top of imagemagick as well as other python libraries.

Converter 1.1.0 was released with SVG support and resizing operations! It’s available on flathub: https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.gitlab.adhami3310.Converter

Girens for Plex ↗

Girens is a Plex Gtk client for playing movies, TV shows and music from your Plex library.

tijder says

Girens version 2.0.1 just released. With this version the transcoding protocol is changed to DASH. Thanks to changing the transcode protocol some resume playback bugs are fixed. Also now if items are loaded from the server in the section view a loading icon is showed. The sidebar containing the titles of the section have now an icon next to it. Also the translations are updated. For more details about the changes see the changelog.

Blueprint ↗

A markup language for app developers to create GTK user interfaces.

James Westman reports

blueprint-compiler v0.6.0 is out! This is mostly a bugfix release, but it also adds a typeof() operator for specifying GType properties like Gio.ListStore:item-type. It also includes some internal refactoring that paves the way for some great features in the future, including alternate output formats!

BlackFennec ↗

A beautiful and easy to use application for viewing and editing semi-structured data like JSON.

Simon announces

BlackFennec v0.10 is out!

This version introduces actions! It is now possible to execute functions on elements . Try out one of the new actions such as to lower on strings and clear collection on lists.

We have also added the ability to undo and redo any changes you made to your data; a handy feature if you accidentally cleared a collection 😉

My favorite new addition however is copy and paste. You can export or import any element to and from JSON via your clip board!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#71 Increased Circle

Fri, 25 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 18 to November 25.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Boatswain ↗

A guiding hand when navigating through streams.

Sophie announces

This week, Boatswain joined GNOME Circle. Boatswain allows you to control Elgato Stream Deck devices. Congratulations!

Third Party Projects

martinszeltins announces

Introducting a new game written in C, GTK4, Blueprint and Libadwaita - Who Wants To Be a Millionaire. Test your knowledge to see if you can answer all questions and become a virtual millionaire! This is the very first release and I am open to contributions to make this game even better if anyone wants to contribute.

The game has landed on Flathub - https://flathub.org/apps/details/lv.martinsz.millionaire

If you like the Perl programming language, and you wish to use to write your GNOME applications, you can now do so by using these two modules:

Gtk4

Adwaita

They are currently pretty bare bones, but the plan is to improve them with additional, more idiomatic overrides for the C API, before being published on CPAN. Help is welcome!

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick reports

Tagger V2022.11.2 is here! This is a small release that fixes some issues users were facing. Here’s the full changelog:

Tagger will now properly set an album art’s mime type to be properly displayed in some music players

Changed ‘Delete Tags’ shortcut to Shift+Delete to allow for Delete button to work in entry widgets

Added Croatian translation (Thanks @milotype!)

Money ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick reports

Money V2022.11.1 is here! This release features a brand new look for Money! This new redesign features a new way of organizing groups and transactions, allowing for a quick overview of all transactions and an easy way to filter your account view. The TransactionDialog was also redesigned to make creating and editing transactions easier. Besides the big redesign, we also added the ability to transfer money from one account to another with ease. Here’s the full changelog:

We completely redesigned the application to provide an easier and more efficient way to manage your accounts, groups, and transactions

Added the ‘Transfer Money’ action to allow for transferring money to another account file

Added support for filtering transactions by type, group, or date

You can now double-click a .nmoney file and it will open directly in Money

The CSV delimiter has been changed to a semicolon (;)

Fixed an issue where some monetary values were displayed incorrectly

Fixed an issue where repeated transactions would not assign themselves to a group

Loupe ↗

A simple and modern image viewer.

Sophie reports

Loupe gained support for zooming and scrolling in images via many different input types, including touchpad and touchscreen gestures. Combined with some cleanups and added keyboard shortcuts, Loupe now provides the basic features of an image viewer.

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

Daudix UFO reports

Gradience 0.3.2 is out! This version fixes some major issues and introduces some under-the-hood improvements, as well as some new features, some of them are:

Issues with the Firefox GNOME theme plugin under Flatpak are fixed

CSS now loads correctly after applying a preset

Fixed an issue with presets always being saved as User.json

Presets are now removed correctly

The internal structure was refactored

Various typos were fixed

The README was fully rewritten

All screenshots are now in high resolution

New and updated translations

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#70 Useful Progressbars

Fri, 18 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 11 to November 18.

Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

Milan Crha has added progress reporting to rpm-ostree downloads in GNOME Software, so updates in Silverblue should now have a more useful progress bar

Third Party Projects

Dušan Simić reports

Dynamic Wallpaper v0.1.0 has landed! It’s a simple app that helps you make a dynamic wallpaper that changes if you use light or dark mode in GNOME (the type of wallpaper has been released with GNOME 42).

Thanks to over 20 contributors, this new release is finally ready. Version 0.1.0 brings a new clean design that nicely blends into rest of modern GNOME apps. It lets you give a name to your new wallpaper, select which file would be used for light mode and which for dark mode and by clicking the “Create” button, you’re ready to go 🚀.

I’ve first released this app in April this year but have not been able to bring it to a point that I’m satisfied enough with the ui that I’d be happy to share it here. Thanks to Hacktoberfest, there have been many contributions to the project an so far it has been translated to 13 languages 😁.

The app is so far available on FlatHub and AUR.

Paulo says

Black Box 0.12.2 is out. This patch fixes some annoying bugs related to selecting and pasting text. It has been a while since the last release, but you can expect more updates in the following months, starting with customizable keyboard shortcuts.

nautilus-code v0.5 was released.

nautilus-code is a Files (nautilus) extension that adds right-click menu options to open current/selected folder in a code editor or IDE e.g. VSCode, GNOME Builder, etc. Click here to see a full list of supported code editors and IDEs or here to request support for a code editor or IDE.

This version

adds support for Nautilus 43

fixes an issue where folder paths with whitespaces in them were not handled properly

Unfortunately, to add support for Nautilus 43, support for 42 and earlier had to be dropped. So, an accompanying legacy version (v.5.0.legacy) which supports Nautilus 42 and earlier, was also released.

Introducing Upscaler, an application that allows you to upscale (increase the resolution) and enhance images! Upscaler is a front-end for Real-ESRGAN ncnn Vulkan and uses its algorithms to upscale and enhance images. I’d like to thank them for making this amazing project!

Upscaler 1.0.0 was recently released, and it’s available on Flathub! https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.gitlab.theevilskeleton.Upscaler

Money ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick reports

Money V2022.11.0 is here! We have spent the past few weeks implementing many new user-requested features, greatly improving the experience of Money, and fixing many bugs while polishing the release. I couldn’t be more thankful to all the contributors who have provided translations, feedback, and endless testing and patience (especially @zothma and @fsobolev). Money wouldn’t be how it is today without all of your help :)

Here’s the changelog:

Introducing Groups: Add groups to an account and associate transactions with groups for a more precise finance management system

Money will automatically obtain the user’s currency symbol, money format, and date format from their locale

Money will remember up to 3 recently opened accounts for quick and easy access

Fixed an issue where a new account was not created if overwriting an old one

Added translation support

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Login Manager Settings v2.beta.1 was released.

Bugs Fixed

Developer name in about window not being translated

Could not change logo image sometimes

“Apply Current Display Settings” feature not working on some Ubuntu-based systems (proper fix)

Updated

Screenshots

Translations

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.11.14 was released!

In this update, the details view has been completely redesigned to improve the user friendliness of Bottles. The sidebar has been removed and the pages have been moved into the details view itself.

The option to run an executable is much more prevalent and launch options are neatly placed in their own dropdown next to it. Options to add and install programs have been moved after the programs list.

Settings page has also received an overhaul. Similar settings have been rearranged into groups, making it easier to navigate and find options.

A lot of quality of life improvements have been made to Bottles to improve usability. “States” have been renamed to “Snapshots”, several dialogs have been rephrased, “Documentation” has been renamed to “Help”, “kill” was renamed to “force stop” to avoid using violent terms, several mnemonics were added, along with a few more improvements that bring Bottles closer to GNOME Human Interface Guidelines.

For more information about the new update, check out our release page!

Boatswain ↗

A guiding hand when navigating through streams.

Boatswain 0.2.2 is out! This new release comes with drag n’ drop support to move button actions around, as well as a bunch of interface improvements, more icons to pick, better handling of light background colors on buttons, and more!

This latest release is available on Flathub. You can read more at https://feaneron.com/2022/11/18/boatswain-0-2-2-is-out/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PovvlgxctRo

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#69 Zapping Through Videos

Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 04 to November 11.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie says

This week, Zap joined GNOME Circle. Zap allows you to play all your favorite sounds from a sound board to make your livestreams more entertaining. Congratulations!

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

NewsFlash 2.1.3 was released this week. It mostly features improvements for Google Reader API based implementations e.g. FreshRSS & Inoreader. For existing users of these implementations I suggest to reset your account in NewsFlash and log back in for the best experience.

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Dan Yeaw says

Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, recently completed some modernization of our UI using libadwaita. Our next release will feature a new about dialog, message dialogs, and tab view. ✨

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Patrick Monnerat has fixed an insidious bug in glib-mkenums where private enum members wouldn’t be used for calculating subsequent enum values. This is their first contribution, thank you Patrick!

Third Party Projects

Sophie says

Loupe gained support for showing images in the correct orientation based on metadata, as well as manually rotating images via buttons and touch gestures.

OS-Installer

A generic third-party OS-Installer that can be customized by distributions.

OS-installer has reached version 0.3. Here are the bigger changes in the half a year since 0.2:

Lists scroll more intuitively and look nicer

Optional welcome page with distro-customizable text added

Summary page to confirm selection added

Optional feature page added with which distributions can provide additional options

Added and updated translations (Croatian, Dutch, Estonian, French, Georgian, German, Italian, Occitan, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian)

Keyboard page got overhauled to be simpler

Many new config options for distributions, e.g. skipping the user and timezone page when using gnome-initial-setup

The first distributions started to experiment using OS-installer, which is great to see :) Also, I want to thank all the translators for their great contributions! ♥️

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

Tube Converter V2022.11.0 has been released! In this release we introduced support for translations (with some language translations already available) and fixed some other issues. Here’s a full changelog:

Fixed an issue where videos could not be downloaded on ARM64

Fixed an issue where ‘Best’ and ‘Good’ would download the same video quality

Improved design of the Logs dialog

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick announces

Tagger V2022.11.0 has been released! In this release we introduced support for translations (with some language translations already available) and fixed some other issues. Here’s a full changelog:

Fixed sizing issue for Advanced Search Information dialog

Komikku ↗

A manga reader for GNOME.

Valéry Febvre (valos) says

Komikku, the manga reader (but not only).

Komikku is now in 1.4.0! Since 1.0.0, many exciting changes have been made.

New Features

[Explorer] Added a Global search

[Servers] Added a Local server that allows to read comics in CBZ or CBR formats

[Servers] Added Comic Book Plus [EN]

Improvements

[Library] Improved loading: a waiting page with a progress bar has been added

[Library] Landscape covers are now converted to portrait

[Downloader] Improved download speed

[Reader] Improved rendering of Page numbering

[Reader] Improved Webtoon reading mode

Bug fixes

[Reader] Fixed detection of ‘read’ chapters

Crosswords ↗

A simple Crossword player and Editor.

jrb announces

GNOME Crosswords 0.3.5 was released, and is available on flathub. You can read the release announcement here. New in this release:

Over 100 new puzzles available!

New Adaptive layout to handle a wide variety of screen sizes

New setting: switch-on-move

Window size restoration on restart

Define mime types for ipuz/jpz/puz files and loads jpz/puz files from the command line

.puz convertor imports circles and rebus puzzles

Support more complex enumeration use-cases

Improvements to cell shape contrast and color

HTML support for clues and metadata

Better display and placement of intro/notes fields

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi reports

gi-docgen 2022.2, the new version of the documentation tool used to generate C API references from GObject introspection data, is now available on PyPI. New in this release:

emblems are used to visually identify deprecated and unstable symbols

improved styling and responsiveness

improved the description of autogenerated descriptions

added the “serve” command, which will generate the reference and publish it using a local HTTP server

GNOME Shell Extensions

I have released the version 15 of Auto Activities. An extension that shows activities overview when there are no windows in the workspace.

I am pleased to announce this release which brings some news. The first is that I was talking to the owner of the original project, who at the moment was no longer interested in maintaining it for personal reasons. I asked him to transfer the repository to me, and now I am the new maintainer.

Changelog:

Add metadata support for GNOME 43

Modernize preference dialog using Libadwaita

Some bug fixes

Follow the development Get it on GNOME Extensions

Miscellaneous

Thib says

GNOME has been around the Fediverse for a while and we’re still active there. With recent events you may want to follow us on https://floss.social/@gnome

niko reports

Documented Gnome Shell with mobile patches (link) and various Gnome 43 adaptive apps on a OnePlus 6 running PostmarketOS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmRMg546UY

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#68 New Dialogs

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 28 to November 04.

Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

There’s going to be a whole new API available in GTK 4.10 for dialogs:

GtkFileDialog replaces GtkFileChooserDialog

GtkColorDialog replaces GtkColorChooserDialog

GtkFontDialog replaces GtkFontChooserDialog

GtkAlertDialog replaces GtkMessageDialog

All these new classes are not widgets, and are designed around asynchronous calls instead of signal emissions. Once you call a method to perform the desired action, you’ll get a callback when the user closes the dialog window. Head over to the GTK development blog, for an article on the newly introduced API and its design.

This new API allows us to deprecate the following classes and interfaces:

GtkFileChooserDialog, GtkFileChooserWidget, and GtkFileChooser

GtkColorChooserDialog, GtkColorChooserWidget, GtkColorButton, and GtkColorChooser

GtkFontChooserDialog, GtkFontChooserWidget, GtkFontButton, GtkFontChooser

GtkMessageDialog

GtkDialog itself has been deprecated. You should derive your own GtkWindow for any sort of custom dialog in your application; if you use libadwaita you can already use ready-made dialogs like AdwPreferencesWindow and AdwMessageDialog.

Third Party Projects

Money ↗

A personal finance manager.

Nick says

I’m happy to announce the release of Money and it’s availability on Flathub . Money is a personal finance manager for GNOME with an easy-to-use and beautiful interface.

Endeavour ↗

An intuitive and powerful application to manage your personal tasks.

Jamie reports

Endeavour version 43 has been released! This release featured lots of bug squashing and slight UI improvements, for a more stable experience. Endeavour can be downloaded from Flathub

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi reports

gi-docgen, the introspection-based documentation generator used (among others) by GTK to publish its API reference has gained the ability to show if a symbol, type, signal, or property is currently unstable and will be available in the next stable release. This should help visually distinguish newly added API in the reference generated directly from bleeding edge sources. The same style is also used to present when a symbol was introduced, and when it was deprecated.

GNOME Shell Extensions

Cleo Menezes Jr. reports

The first version of Weather O’Clock has been released. An extension to display the current Weather on the left side of the clock without de-centering it from the panel. GNOME Weather is required for this extension to function.

Install it from extensions.gnome.org.

GNOME Foundation

Thib says

GNOME is moving away from GIMPnet! You can read the full announcement here: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/gnome-moves-away-from-gimpnet/12046

If you are in charge of a project and you have a room listed in our #community:gnome.org Space (reproduced here), and want to use that opportunity to explicitly unbridge, please let us know in this thread.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#67 File Descriptors and Scopes

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 21 to October 28.

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Simon McVittie has just added a g_autofd attribute to GLib, which you can use to automatically close FDs when exiting a scope, just like g_autofree and g_autoptr() (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/3007)

Third Party Projects

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick says

Tagger is now at V2022.10.5! This release added support for new audio file types. Here’s the changelog:

Added support for oga files

Added support for m4a files

Girens for Plex ↗

Girens is a Plex Gtk client for playing movies, TV shows and music from your Plex library.

tijder says

Girens 2.0.0 is released. This is the biggest update of Girens since the first release. In this release the following things are done:

Migrated from GTK 3 to GTK 4

Migrated from Libhandy to Libadwaita

Migrated to Blueprint for ui files

Improved lists for large libraries (thanks to the new Gtk4 lists)

Redesigned the album/artist view

Redesigned the show view

Added French and Norwegian translations

Improved the windowed view

A lot of bug fixes

Also this week I added support for weblate translation. If someone want’s to help with translating, it is now a lot easier.

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Login Manager Settings v2.beta.0 has been released.

New Features

Power settings

Import/export to file

Enlarge welcome message shown on login

Bug Fixes

“Apply Current Display Settings” feature not working on Ubuntu and similar systems

Some text showing up untranslated even if translation existed (fix by Sabri Ünal)

Some typos (fix by Kian-Meng Ang)

Other Changes

The app is now adaptive

Main window is adaptive

Pop-up dialogs are adaptive

App uses the new “About” window

Terminal output is colored now

For full release notes visit https://github.com/realmazharhussain/gdm-settings/releases/tag/v2.beta.0.

Flare ↗

A unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi says

Flare 0.5.3 was released. Compared to the last TWIG-update, Flare gained minor new features as pasting attachments into the input box, opening attachments in the default program and notifications for incoming calls . In 0.5.3 an additional critical bug has been fixed that rendered the application useless since 26. Oct 2022 because Signal updated their certificates. I urge everyone to update such that Flare works again. I am sorry for any inconveniences that happened due to this incident and hope we can learn from it such that it does not happen again.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#66 Foundation Updates

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 14 to October 21.

GNOME Foundation

Thib announces

Some (good) news from the Foundation!

🇧🇪 Foundation staff is busy with GNOME Asia and prep work for LAS. We’ve also asked for a stand at FOSDEM, and hope to see you in Brussels in February

🧑‍💼 Synchronising everyone in the ED Search Committee has been a little difficult over the summer. After a hiatus, we’re making steady progress again. We’re coming after you, next ED!

🧹 The sysadmin team has also been busy getting rid of legacy services to reduce their maintenance load, focus on the essential ones, and give Flathub some love. Our mailing-lists won’t accept nor distribute new mail and most of them will be moved to Discourse. The archives will remain online. All of the IRC bots have been decommissioned and are about to be replaced by hookshot, the multi-purpose Matrix bot that speaks GitLab. More on “getting rid of legacy services” soon.

📈 Last, but definitely not least: you might remember the three initiatives we told you about a while ago? Newcomers, Local-First Apps, and Flathub Payments. There’s one making outstanding progress: Flathub Payments. We’re working on raising funds through some grant applications to cover the staff and operating costs, and have lawyers working on the compliance, corporate and governance matters we need in the background to support payments and donations in Flathub.

💻️ On the more technical side of things, there are only a couple of tasks remaining for correctly generating invoices in Stripe before Codethink’s final work phase is complete. We’re going to start building a roadmap to launch the new features over the coming months. You can follow the progress here and here.

🤝 A special thank you to our president Robert McQueen in particular for sinking countless hours in orchestrating the Flathub Payments project (including hilarious paperwork and exhilarating legal stuff) and huge kudos to Codethink for being an amazing partner to work with. They have definitely been going above and beyond to support Flathub. We cannot stress enough how great they have been, thank you Codethink!

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Emmanuel Fleury has continued his campaign of tackling the oldest GLib bugs, by adding support for optimised g_str_has_prefix() and g_str_has_suffix() checks when passed static strings — the request for this feature was 18 years old (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/24)

Philip Withnall reports

Thomas Haller has dug into a race condition with EINTR handling and close() in g_spawn_*() and has fixed it and documented his findings (https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/2947)

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

The GTK4 port of Epiphany has finally landed

Circle Apps and Libraries

Identity ↗

Compare images and videos.

Ivan Molodetskikh announces

I’ve published Identity 0.4.0! It’s got a new Media Properties dialog showing some information about the current video. Opening files with drag-and-drop or copy-paste on Flatpak now also works thanks to the update to the GNOME 43 platform.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

A new gtk-rs release is out with plenty of improvements and bug fixes. Details can be read at https://gtk-rs.org/blog/2022/10/18/new-release.html

Third Party Projects

sonnyp announces

I published Retro, a toy digital segment clock that can be customized with CSS.

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick announces

Tube Converter is now at V2022.10.3 and has seen many improvements and new features this week. Here’s some of the changes:

Added a preference to embed metadata in a download

Added the ability to download subtitles for a video

Implemented proper stop function for download

‘New Filename’ is now allowed to be empty. If it is empty, the video title will be used

Improved video url checking

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick reports

Tagger is now at V2022.10.4 and has seen many improvements and new user-requested features this week. Here are some of the changes:

Added an Advanced Search function to search through contents of files’ tags to find properties that are empty or contain a certain value . Type ! in the search box to activate it and learn more

Added ‘Discard Unapplied Changes’ action

Tagger now remembers user-filled tag properties waiting to be applied

Fixed ogg file handling

Improved closing and reloading dialogs

Hebbot ↗

Hebbot is the bot behind TWIG that manages all the news.

Felix announces

Thib has made Hebbot (aka TWIG-Bot ) a little smarter. Hebbot now scans your messages for keywords, and can automatically match them to appropriate projects. A small, but nice improvement, which reduces the administration effort of TWIG again noticeably.

In concrete terms, this means that you no longer have to define the usual_reporters field in in the bot configuration.

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

Flatseal 1.8.1 is out! It brings support for the new --socket=gpg-agent permission, Tamil and Hebrew translations, use of different colors for override status icons, updated Flatpak icon, a few important bug fixes and more.

Get it on Flathub!

Eyedropper ↗

A powerful color picker and formatter.

FineFindus says

Version 0.4 has of Eyedropper has been released. In addition to the features of the last few weeks, it is now possible to search by the color name. To view the full changelog, visit the release page or download the newest version from Flathub.

Kerberos Authentication ↗

An application to acquire and list Kerberos tickets.

Guido says

I’ve ported krb5-auth-dialog to GTK4 and libadwaita making it usable on mobile phones too. While at that I fixed the PKINIT support with smart cards when using Heimdal Kerberos.

GNOME Shell Extensions

glerro says

Hi i have created a new Gnome Shell extension that add a switch to the WiFi menu, in the GNOME system menu, that show a QrCode of the active connection. This can be useful for quickly connecting devices capable of reading QrCode and applying the settings to the system, without having to type in the name and the password of the WiFi. (e.g. Android Smartphone).

Miscellaneous

Sophie says

Apps for GNOME received a bunch of changes in the background. These changes will not only help with the maintenance of the code base but will also allow sharing a joint base with other projects currently in development. If everything went well, this should not have changed anything in the website’s appearance.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#65 Officially Deprecated

Fri, 14 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 07 to October 14.

Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

After two years of soft-deprecation, GTK 4.10 (planned for March 2023) will officially deprecate GtkTreeView, GtkIconView, GtkComboBox, and all the API related to cell renderers. You should follow the GTK4 migration guide to see how to replace them with the new model objects and list view widgets.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Video Trimmer ↗

Trim videos quickly.

Ivan Molodetskikh announces

I’ve released Video Trimmer 0.8.0! It’s been updated to the GNOME 43 platform, bringing working drag-and-drop to open videos on Flatpak and a new About dialog. Video Trimmer also no longer closes when trying to open an inaccessible file.

Third Party Projects

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

flatpak-vscode 0.0.30 is out, with mostly improvements & bugfixes:

Add command to show application’s data directory

Fallback to the Flatpak-installed flatpak-builder (org.flatpak.Builder) when it is not found on host

Automatically resize output terminal when terminal window resizes

Drop rust-analyzer runnables.extraArgs target-dir override

Update to node v16

Don’t require finish-args

Tube Converter ↗

An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend).

Nick reports

I’m proud to introduce Tube Converter . An easy-to-use video downloader (yt-dlp frontend) written in C++ with GTK4 and libadwaita! Supports running multiple downloads at once and a variety of file types (mp4, webm, mp3, opus, flac, and wav). Check it out on Flathub!

Tagger ↗

An easy-to-use music tag (metadata) editor.

Nick reports

Tagger is now at V2022.10.3 and has seen many new features, ux improvements, and bug fixes throughout the week. Here is a full changelog since last week’s post:

Tagger will now notify the user of changes waiting to be applied to a file (A confirmation dialog will also be displayed when reloading a music folder or closing the application with changes waiting)

Added the ability to submit tag metadata to AcoustId

Added the ability to right-click the music files list when files are selected to access a tag actions context menu

The ‘Delete Tag’ action must now be applied to be saved to the file

The ‘Tag to Filename’ action must now be applied to change the filename on disk

Improved ‘Download MusicBrainz Metadata’ accuracy and performance

Improved file size calculation

Fixed an issue where the ‘Apply’ action would clear the file selection

Fixed window sizing issues for low-res screens

Girens for Plex ↗

Girens is a Plex Gtk client for playing movies, TV shows and music from your Plex library.

tijder says

This week I started porting Girens to Gtk4 and Libadwaita. Thanks to porting the app it got a few nice extra features:

Wayland support for video playback.

Improved lists for large libraries (thanks to the new Gtk4 lists).

The borderless view modus is much better.

Before I can release this version, their is still a lot of work to be done.

Eyedropper ↗

A powerful color picker and formatter.

FineFindus says

Eyedropper now supports HWB and CIELCh formats, as well as showing the ‘name’ of the color specified by the CSS color keywords or the xkcd color survey.

Extension Manager ↗

Browse and install GNOME Shell extensions.

firox263 says

Extension Manager 0.4 has been released, coinciding with 250,000+ downloads on Flathub 🎉.

It features:

Fully adaptive mobile-friendly user interface

Upgrade Assistant to check extension compatibility before upgrading

Paginated search results

Unsupported extensions are hidden by default

Fullscreen image viewer

Handles new gnome-extensions:// URI scheme

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.10.14 was released!

We improved the interface by using common names to emphasize the goal of options. Previously, we used project names, but we figured that these names were unclear for newcomers, as names did not convey their intention. For example, “DXVK” was renamed to “Direct3D 9/10/11 Compatibility”.

For more information about the new update, check out our release page!

Miscellaneous

The experimental GNOME OS OpenQA tests now verify that each core app starts up as expected. Here’s an example test run: https://openqa.gnome.org/tests/338#

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#64 Everything Green Again!

Fri, 07 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 30 to October 07.

Miscellaneous

Sam Thursfield reports

GNOME’s OpenQA testing initiative has seen some progress, the existing tests are all passing again, and the tests have migrated to a new openqa-tests.git repo to enable much faster cycle times when developing tests. For more details, see: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/openqa-gnome-2022-edition/11427

Core Apps and Libraries

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.

lwildberg says

Since GNOME Builder 43 was released, it does not bundle the Vala Language Server anymore. To continue getting diagnostics, completion and more code intelligence features, you need to use the language server from Vala’s Flatpak Sdk. To enable it in your project, add these lines to your Flatpak manifest:
{
    "id" : "org.example.MyApp",
    "runtime" : "org.gnome.Platform",
    "runtime-version" : "43",
    "sdk" : "org.gnome.Sdk",
    "sdk-extensions" : ["org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.vala"],
    "build-options" : {
        "append-path" : "/usr/lib/sdk/vala/bin",
        "prepend-ld-library-path" : "/usr/lib/sdk/vala/lib"
    },
...
For everyone else not developing using Flatpak, you need to install the language server on your system. Of course this can also be done through Toolbx or similar technologies.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Secrets ↗

A password manager which makes use of the KeePass v.4 format.

Maximiliano announces

Secrets 7.0 was just released! Numerous bug fixes and improvements were added

Basic check for file conflicts

Password history support

Support for trash bin

Redesigned custom entry attributes

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Sophie reports

Pika Backup gained support for excluding directories that contain a CACHEDIR.TAG. Cached Directory Taggings is a general specification that allows apps to exclude folders from backups. It is for example used by the Rust language to mark its target directories.

In further exclusion news: There is now a rudimentary dialog to exclude folders or files via shell type patterns and regular expressions.

Third Party Projects

sonnyp reports

Announcing Playhouse 1.0!

Playhouse is a playground for HTML/CSS/JavaScript which makes it easy to prototype, teach, design, learn and build Web things.

Features:

HTML/CSS/JavaScript editors

live Web preview

auto-save

developer tools

dark/light mode support

Powered by GTK4, WebKitGTK, GtkSourceView and GJS

Nick reports

Tagger V2022.10.0 is here! We put a lot of work into this release: re-working the tag editing experience, and thus more intuitive and easier to use. We’ve also added a new preference for managing MusicBrainz metadata and fixed many bugs as well. Here’s a full changelog:

Tagger now requires clicking the ‘Apply’ button to save changes to selected tags after inserting/removing album art, converting filenames to tags, or downloading metadata from MusicBrainz. Changing a file selection without clicking ‘Apply’ will preserve the changes to the tags, however, if the music folder is changed/reloaded or if the application is closed without clicking ‘Apply’, the changes will be lost. Deleting Tags continues to be a permanent action that will take affect as soon as the action is confirmed from the message box

Added the ‘Overwrite Tag With MusicBrainz’ option to preferences

Added the ability to click on the album art in the tag properties pane to insert album art

FIxed an issue where Tagger wouldn’t handle UTF-8 characters correctly

Fixed an issue where applying a filename change was not updating the must files list

Romain announces

I released the first version of Zap, a new soundboard application. Download it from Flathub and make your livestreams and videocasts more entertaining!

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

Daudix UFO says

This week, Gradience gained some UI polish, usability and under-hood improvements, some of them:

Preset Manager now opens immediately

“Log Out” message after applying theme

Improved UI of Preset Manager

Now presets can be starred

Added preset repo switcher with which you can display only presets from specific repo

All contributors now listed in “About” window, let us know if you are not listed

Text now follows GNOME Writing Guidelines

Fixed flatpak theming

Added repo template for user preset sharing

This changes will be available in version 0.3.1 that will be available on Flathub very soon.

Flare ↗

A unofficial Signal GTK client.

schmiddi says

Flare 0.5.0 was released. Besides some important bug-fixes, Flare gained the ability to search for contacts, show notifications and has seen many usability- and user interface improvements. Furthermore, the new message dialogs and about window of libadwaita are now used.

Eyedropper ↗

A powerful color picker and formatter.

FineFindus announces

I’ve implemented in Eyedropper the long awaited feature of a palette dialog, suggesting different colors schemes based on the currently picked color. It now also uses libadwaita 1.2 and the new AdwAboutWindow.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#63 Experiments and Prototypes

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 23 to September 30.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie says

This week, Workbench joined GNOME Circle. Workbench lets you experiment with GNOME technologies, whether tinkering for the first time or building and testing a GTK user interface. Congratulations!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

Workbench 43 is out!

Display CSS errors inline

Blueprint 0.4.0

VTE 0.70.0

Use AdwAboutWindow

Fix responsiveness when working on large Blueprint files

Various bug and crash fixes

Use GNOME 43 platform/SDK

Make sure to check what’s new for developers in GNOME 43 and give it a try in Workbench 43.

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas reports

After the 2.0 release of NewsFlash last week followed a quick 2.0.1 to fix a nasty database migration issue. But now development of version 2.1 has started with more fixes and two new features already merged:

Tags are now also displayed in the article list. So now you can directly see which article has which tags assigned.

A simple share mechanism. Nothing fancy with logins etc. Just a auto-generated URL. But this means you can add your own share service easily.

Kooha ↗

A simple screen recorder with a minimal interface. You can simply click the record button without having to configure a bunch of settings.

SeaDve announces

I am pleased to announce Kooha 2.2.0. This release introduces fresh new features and bug fixes from over a hundred commits. Here’s the summary of some of the most significant changes:

New area selection UI inspired from GNOME Shell

Added option to change the frame rate through the UI

Improved delay settings flexibility

Added preferences window for easier configuration

Added KOOHA_EXPERIMENTAL env var to show experimental (unsupported) encoders like VAAPI-VP8 and VAAPI-H264

Added the following experimental (unsupported) encoders: VP9, AV1, and VAAPI-VP9

Unavailable formats/encoders are now hidden from the UI

Fixed broken audio on long recordings

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

danyeaw says

Excited to announce Gaphor, the simple UML and SysML tool, version 2.12.0 is released!

GTK4 is now the default for Flatpak

Save folder is remembered across save actions

State machine functionality has been expanded, including support for regions

Resize of partition keeps actions in the same swimlane

Activities (behaviors) can be assigned to classifiers

Stereotypes can be inherited from other stereotypes

Many GTK4 fixes: rename, search, instant editors

Many translation updates

Third Party Projects

Nick reports

Tagger V2022.9.2 is finally here! This release mainly adds support for automatically downloading and applying tag metadata from MusicBrainz with support for retriving the album art, if avaliable, as well!

Here’s a full changelog:

Added support for downloading tag metadata from MusicBrainz

Fixed an issue where Tagger would not allow opening more than about 1024 files

Fixed an issue where the chromaprint fingerprint contained an extra alien unicode character

Rewrote the MusicFile model used by Tagger to be faster and better support a large music library

Various UX improvements (Tagger should feel much more snappier and responsive)

Komikku ↗

A manga reader for GNOME.

Valéry Febvre (valos) reports

Pleased to announce the release of version 1.0.0 of Komikku, the manga reader (but not only).

After several months of efforts, the porting of Komikku on GTK4 and libadwaita is finished.

Refreshing of the UI to follow the GNOME HIG as much as possible

Library has now two display modes: Grid and Compact grid

Faster display of the chapters list, whether there are few or many chapters

Full rewriting of the Webtoon reading mode

Modern ‘About’ window

[Preferences] Reader: Add ‘Landscape Pages Zoom’ setting

[Preferences] Reader: Add ‘Maximum Width’ setting

[Servers] Add Grisebouille by @gee [FR]

[Servers] MangaNato (MangaNelo): Update

[Servers] Mangaowl: Update

[Servers] Read Comic Online: Update

[L10n] Update French, German, Spanish and Turkish translations

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Julian Sparber reports

This week we tagged Fractal as 5.alpha1. This is our first release since Fractal has been rewritten to take advantage of GTK 4 and the Matrix Rust SDK. It is the result of eighteen months of work. Currently supported features are:

Currently supported features are:

Sending and receiving messages and files

Sending files via Drag-n-Drop and pasting in the message entry

Rendering of rich formatted (HTML) messages, as well as media

Displaying edited messages, redacting messages

Showing and adding reactions

Tab completion of user names

Sending and displaying replies

Sharing the current location

Exploring the room directory

Sorting the rooms by category

Joining rooms

Sending and accepting invitations

Logging into multiple accounts at once

Logging in with Single-Sign On

Sending and reading encrypted messages

Verifying user sessions using cross-signing

Exporting and importing encryption keys

Managing the connected devices

Changing the user profile details

Deactivating the account

Major missing features are:

Notifications

Read markers

As the name implies, this is still considered alpha stage and is not ready for general use just yet. If you want to give this development version a try, you can get it from the [GNOME Apps Nightly flatpak repository] (https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Nightly). A list of known issues and missing features for a 5.0 release can be found in the Fractal v5 milestone on Gitlab.

We also published a blogpost about the security quick scan performed by Radically Open Security as part of the NLnet grant https://blogs.gnome.org/jsparber/2022/09/27/fractal-security-audit/

Documentation

Julian 🍃 says

I’ve published the final section of the Libadwaita chapter in GUI development with Rust and GTK 4. It has been reviewed by Ivan Molodetskikh and Alice (she/her).

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#62 Forty-three!

Fri, 23 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 16 to September 23.

This week we released GNOME 43!

This new major version of GNOME is full of exciting new features like a redesigned Shell quick settings menu, a modernized file manager, new device security settings - and of course much more. More information can be found in the GNOME 43 release notes.

Readers who have been following this site for a few weeks will already know some of the new features. If you want to follow the development of GNOME 44 (Spring 2023), keep an eye on this page - we’ll be posting exciting news every week!

Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

NewsFlash 2.0 has just been released on flathub. It has been ported to Gtk4 and can now sync with Nextcloud News & FreshRSS. For more details take a look at issue 55, 56 & 57 of “This Week in GNOME”.

Dialect ↗

Translate between languages.

Dialect was updated to use new widgets from libadwaita 1.2 like AdwAboutWindow and AdwEntryRow, it also received an style update to have a more flat look. These changes will be released in an upcoming version targeting GNOME 43 along with other minor improvements.

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu reports

I’ve implemented some basic autocompletion for Apostrophe. It completes parenthesis, brackets, unordered lists, ordered lists and nested lists

Third Party Projects

FineFindus reports

I’ve released version 0.3.0 of Eyedropper. This release features a basic color shades generation and the ability to customize the order of the shown color formats. The app has been translated into French by rene-coty and German. It is now available on Flathub.

alexhuntley announces

I released version 0.7.0 of Plots, a simple graphing app for GNOME. It introduces a new color picker, a preferences dialog, and support for the system dark theme.

Plots was then ported from GTK 3 to GTK 4 and Libadwaita, with the current version 0.8.1 available on Flathub now.

Sophie announces

I’m announcing my small new project Key Rack. Key Rack will allow you to browse and edit Passwords, Tokens, and similar things that Flatpak apps store encrypted. The app is intended for developers for debugging and for everyone for looking up the password that you forgot again. Key Rack currently has alpha quality.

Why a new app? The TL;DR is: Currently, for technical reasons, your passwords might appear only in the Passwords app you are used to, or only in Key Rack. Maybe Key Rack will show all of them one day.

A more details explanation is the following: Existing apps like Passwords and Keys (Seahorse) allow access to the global key storage (accessible via Secret Service.) Since the global storage has no access control for Flatpaks, the recommended way to store keys in Flatpaks is for apps to use a local Keyring encrypted with a key derived from the secret obtained from the secret portal. Both libsecret and oo7 provide convenience APIs for your app, that automatically use a local Keyring when used inside a Flatpak.

Telegrand ↗

A Telegram client optimized for the GNOME desktop.

Marco Melorio reports

Summer is officially over, so now it’s a good time to wrap up what has been done in Telegrand in the meantime. Here’s a quick summary of the nearly 180 commits that happened since the last update:

Reimplemented chat search in a new panel, which can now also search for global chats

Show a list of recently found chats in the new search panel when no query is set

Added timestamp to the messages in the chat history

Added “sending status” and “edited” indicators to the messages in the chat history, by Marcus Behrendt

Added a scroll to bottom button in the chat history, by Marcus Behrendt

Show mini-thumbnails for media messages in the chat list, by Marcus Behrendt

Added sending status indicator for last messages in the chat list, by Marcus Behrendt

Added the ability to mark chats as read or unread in the chat list, by Marcus Behrendt

Use new libadwaita widgets like AdwEntryRow and AdwMessageDialog, by Marcus Behrendt

Show when a chat is from a deleted user account, by Carlod

More really exciting things are in the works, so stay tuned for the next updates!

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

0xMRTT announces

Gradience Team is happy to announce new version of Gradience 0.3.0. This release introduces many new features and improvements.

Added plugins support, this allows creating plugins for customizing other apps

Preset Manager performance are significantly enhanced, presets are downloading much faster and app don’t freeze on preset removal

Added search to Preset Manager

Community presets refactor

Preset Manager is attached to the main window

Added Quick Preset Switcher back, with it you can switch presets with less clicks

Save dialog now shows up when you close app with unsaved preset

Currently applied preset now auto-loads on app start-up

Toasts now less annoying

Added theming warning to Welcome screen

Added Mini Welcome screen on update from previous version

Added aarch64 builds

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Login Manager Settings v1.0 (stable) has been released.

There are not many changes compared to v1.0-beta.4. One significant change is that it utilizes blueprint-compiler v0.4.0 now instead of v0.2.0.

Changes in v1.0-beta.4 and previous beta versions for v1.0 have already been posted to TWIG in #58, #59, and #61.

If you would like see all changes since the previous stable release either go to GitHub Releases or Flathub page for the app.

Miscellaneous

jjardon announces

A preview of GNOME OS images for some mobile devices are available (at the moment pine64’s PinePhone and PinePhone Pro. They both rely on the GNOME OS infrastructure so we have working atomic updates thanks to ostree! A preview of this work is already available, read more about it here: https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2022/gnome-os-mobile/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#61 Overview Tabs

Fri, 16 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 09 to September 16.

Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

I’ve released libadwaita 1.2.0: https://blogs.gnome.org/alexm/2022/09/15/libadwaita-1-2/

Alice (she/her) announces

and immediately following 1.2.0, AdwTabOverview and AdwTabButton have landed

Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu reports

I’ve finished porting Apostrophe to GTK4. There are still things to iron out but a beta release should be around the corner. The whole UI has been improved, tons of bugs fixed and there are some new features like selection stats. Some things didn’t make it though: there’s no spellchecking support at the moment and the preview popover has been removed due to poor discoverability, although I have plans to have an even better replacement.

Third Party Projects

schmiddi says

Version 0.4.0 of Flare, an unofficial Signal client, was released. Besides some smaller improvements, this includes support for persistent message storage. This greatly increases the usability of the application compared to previous versions.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

Workbench gained support for inline CSS errors emitted directly by the GtkCssProvider. Now that both Blueprint and CSS support inline errors, you can design user interfaces with confidence without looking at the console.

In addition, sluggishness has been solved on large Blueprint documents.

Pods ↗

A podman desktop application

marhkb reports

The last update of Pods in TWIG was on April 22. Since then, a lot has happened. Several hours and gallons of coffee have gone into lots of new features. The most important among these are

an application icon created by allaeddineomc

the provision of basic functions for pods (overview, detail view, start, stop, delete, …)

the management of connections to different Podman instances

bulk actions like starting or deleting multiple containers at the same time.

the ability to build images from Dockerfiles

a process viewer for containers and pods

views for raw inspection data of images/containers/pods

insights about the health status of a container

several other small features and improvements

Last but not least, I would like to mention that Pods is now available on Flathub Beta.

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain reports

Login Manager Settings has received some updates since the first beta for v1.0 was released. The latest beta version is 1.0-beta.4.

A real (working) AppImage is available now. You can download it from here.

Screenshots have been updated

Added support for incomplete shell themes

If value of --verbosity option is invalid, the app refuses to launch now instead of assuming the maximum value.

Fixed: Flatpak version of the app could not change logo

Fixed: When extracting default shell theme, it would be saved directly to /usr/local/share directory instead of /usr/local/share/themes

Fixed: Release info for version 1.0-beta.2 was not being shown in GNOME Software

Cawbird ↗

A native Twitter client for your Linux desktop.

CodedOre says

In this week, the GTK4 rewrite of Cawbird recieved the ability to hide replies from your timelines. If a thread is present in your timeline, it will also be displayed as an thread. Additionally, the initial part of the preferences window was added, which includes apart from a few appearance settings the graphical interface to add and remove accounts.

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles was recently ported to Blueprint! Blueprint is a new markup language to create GTK interfaces. It is more efficient for development as the syntax is less verbose and more visually pleasing in contrast to XML. Thanks to its efficiency, Bottles’s codebase was reduced by 800 lines!

Miscellaneous

Allan Day reports

It was announced that there have been an amazing 2,200 responses to gnome-info-collect. Data collection is scheduled to end on Monday 19 September.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#60 Demo Day

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from September 02 to September 09.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

verdre announces

There’s a new post about the mobile GNOME Shell with updates and lots of videos on the GNOME Shell blog.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

GTK 4.8.0, the new stable release of GTK is out! Relevant changes since the previous development snapshot are:

various bugs related to input handling in GtkTreeView were fixed; app developers are still encouraged to port their code to the list widgets

support for more font features has been added in the font selection dialog

various accessibility fixes, including the high contrast theme

GTK now supports high resolution scroll events and color picking on Windows

GTK now generates introspection data on Windows

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie announces

GNOME Circle got a larger update on its app criteria and review procedures. We now have a more detailed and updated checklist that also allows maintainers to check their apps before submitting them to GNOME Circle.

In the about two years of existence of the GNOME Circle initiative, the review process developed more and more into a cooperative process of maintainers, reviewers, and the broader community working together to get good apps into a awesome shape for joining the GNOME Circle. We hope that the new procedures will help us in continuing this process.

Sophie says

We finally made a public Matrix channel for GNOME Circle available under #circle:gnome.org. The channel will receive sporadic @room notifications for important updates and changes within Circle. But it is also open to general questions and discussions about GNOME Circle. All GNOME Circle maintainers are asked to join the room to receive the notifications.

Third Party Projects

James Westman announces

Blueprint 0.4.0 is out! This release changes the compiler to use .typelib rather than XML .gir files, which speeds up compile times. Also, multi-step lookup expressions are now supported.

mirkobrombin says

The first stable release of Atoms (1.0.2) is available on Flathub! Atoms is an application that allows you to access multiple distributions at the same time without actually installing them. Under the hood uses proot, a user-space implementation of chroot and others. The following distributions are currently supported in Atoms: Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, AlmaLinux, AlpineLinux, Centos, Debian, Gentoo, RockyLinux.

knuxify announces

Ear Tag 0.2.0 has been released!

This release includes:

Support for opening multiple files. You can now open multiple files at once and select multiple files to edit. Useful for mass-applying tags to albums, etc.

Support for OGG/FLAC cover art with mutagen’s vorbiscomment support.

…as well as some new translations and various other minor fixes and improvements.

You can get it from Flathub or grab the source code on the release page.

FineFindus announces

I’m announcing the second release of Eyedropper. Eyedropper is an easy-to-use color picker and formatter. Just pick a color from the screen and view it in different formats. This release adds a new history list, the option to hide unwanted formats, as well as support for XYZ and CIELAB models. You can download the latest release from github page.

Crosswords ↗

A simple Crossword player and Editor.

jrb reports

GNOME Crosswords 0.3.5 was released, and is available on flathub. You can read the release announcement here. New in this release:

Color styling support for borders and corners

Multi-character input for rebus puzzles

Barred crosswords are fully supported

Acrostic puzzle improvements

Enumerations are rendered

French Language support

New game preference to skip completed entries

Browse mode to look at puzzles when complete

Numerous playability and style improvements, and many bug fixes

If you’re interested in playing or writing crosswords, feel free to drop by #crosswords:gnome.org and say hi!

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.8.28 was released!

We are introducing Library Mode. Library Mode is a new way to access programs installed in your bottles.

At first your library will appear empty. Open a bottle and choose the program you want. Then, from the context menu, press “Add to My Library” to add the game in the library. Covers are automatically identified and downloaded from SteamGridDB. We are still working on the ability to add covers manually.

The Legacy Tools section has been re-organized with more specific and intuitive names, eliminating the noise that more advanced users (who this section is aimed at) might have encountered.

There are many other changes and improvements in this release. Below are some noteworthy ones, for all others, please refer to the GitHub organization.

Library mode is now a stable feature and enabled by default

Dependencies “copy_file” action now creates the path if not exists (see maintainers docs.)

Opening a bottle, a dialog is shown if the runner is not installed

The C: drive is now marked as persistend in the Drives section and cannot be edited by the user

All dialogs can now be closed pressing Escape

The dark mode switcher is now available only for system which doesn’t support the standard

Simplification of “Legacy Tools” section, thanks to @Knebergish

Minor UI improvements, thanks to @TheEvilSkeleton, @orowith2os, @marhkb

Fix a bug in the template system, was trying to unpack a partial one

Fix a bug in setting overrides for old-structured program entries

Fix a bug in vmtouch management

Fix a bug in the WineCommand interface which was causing a crash if the executable path is not accessible

Fix a bug in the Steam Manager, was generating wrong shortcuts when the program name has spaces in it

Fix long names in library mode

Fix a bug in bottle creation, sometimes it created a symlinks loop in the userdir

Fix a bug in the crash dialog, the similarity check was set too high resulting in no similar reports

GNOME Shell Extensions

Simon Schneegans reports

Version 20 of the Burn-My-Windows GNOME Shell extension has been released. It includes four new retro-styled pixel effects! One of them is inspired by the legendary screen transitions of the original Doom video game. Watch the full trailer https://youtu.be/MLM7iFdGqvM

Romain says

A new version of Night Theme Switcher, my GNOME Shell extension for automatically switching the desktop’s color scheme at sunset and sunrise, has been released! It brings support with GNOME 43 and integrates with its new Dark Mode quick setting, and has new Czech, Greek and Japanese translations thanks to the community.

Read the full release notes on the repository and install it from extensions.gnome.org.

Miscellaneous

Felix says

The design of the This Week in GNOME website got updated to match the libadwaita card styling.

If you read TWIG via an RSS reader, I recommend you take a look at thisweek.gnome.org. I’m really happy with the updated look!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#59 Beautiful Calls

Fri, 02 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 26 to September 02.

Core Apps and Libraries

Calls ↗

A phone dialer and call handler.

Evangelos says

Sam Hewitt has redesigned the call display. The redesign prevents parts of the window overflowing when button labels extended to two lines (as happens in some locales). Apart from fixing the overflow it is also really beautiful \o/

Circle Apps and Libraries

Pika Backup ↗

Keep your data safe.

Sophie announces

Pika Backup now helps with excluding files that are unnecessary to save or too large for backups. The new dialog also provides the option to exclude a single file instead of a complete folder.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Amberol 0.9.1 is out, and available of Flathub!

Support for ReplayGain metadata in the audio files; Amberol allows you to automatically follow the volume recommendation for track and album if the metadata is available

Support for external cover art files in the same directory as a song

Shuffling now is more reliable, and adding songs to a shuffled playlist will not scramble the existing order

Lots of smaller UI paper cuts, metadata loading fixes, and translation updates

Third Party Projects

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

Phosh 0.21.0 and Phoc 0.21.1 are out with lots of bug fixes and experimental support for lock screen widgets like upcoming events:

Komikku ↗

A manga reader for GNOME.

Valéry Febvre (valos) says

After several months of effort, Komikku’s porting to GTK4 and libadwaita is coming to an end.

Brave people can install the Flatpak beta version available in the flathub-beta remote.

The highlights of this new major version:

Refreshing of the UI to follow the GNOME HIG as much as possible

Library has now two display modes: Grid and Compact grid

Faster display of the chapters list, whether there are few or many chapters

Full rewriting of the Webtoon reading mode

Modern ‘About’ window

Many thanks to Tobias Bernard for his many design tips.

Gradience ↗

Change the look of Adwaita, with ease.

Daudix UFO reports

After more than a month of developement, we happy to announce that Gradience is now available on Flathub 🎉

Thanks to all contributers who maked it real 🚀

Some changes in v0.2.0 - v0.2.2

App published on Flathub (We submitted it at moment of publication last TWIG)

Added perferences window for managing flatpak ovverides

Added backup functionality for gtk.css to prevent loss of users current settings

Various UI improvements

You can download v0.2.0 from Flathub, or test newest versions by downloading Nightly build

Geopard ↗

A Gemini client

ranfdev reports

A new Geopard release is ready! Geopard is a colorful gemini browser. In this release:

Added ability to reload the current page

Nicer list items formatting

Fixed annoying bug where selecting the text would sometimes transform a paragraph into a title, temporarily

Fixed crash when the app theme is overridden

Fixed unresponsiveness when a big page is loading

Complete rewrite of the gemini parser to make it more robust and improve handling of edge cases

Get it while it’s hot, from flathub

A settings app for the login manager GDM.

Mazhar Hussain announces

Login Manager Settings v1.0 beta is now available on flathub-beta remote.

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi announces

A new section has appeared in the GNOME Developers Documentation website: useful tools for GNOME contributors and application developers! Learn how to use Valgrind, Massif, and Sysprof, and if you have additional tools, feel free to contribute a page with documentation and examples.

Miscellaneous

The GNOME implementation of the file chooser portal now remembers the last folder used by an app. This is a small improvement, but its impact and usefulness is disproportionate!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#58 Cartographer's Delight

Fri, 26 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 19 to August 26.

Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad reports

Upcoming Maps GTK 4 and libshumate port with the last touch-ups by Chris 🌱️ for GNOME 43, also sporting porting from libsoup 2 to libsoup 3 and using the OAuth 2 protocol instead of OAuth 1.1a for signing up editing points-of-interest in OpenStreetMap

Third Party Projects

Mazhar Hussain announces

Login Manager Settings v1.0 is in beta now.

Thanks to Thales Bindá, the app has a new icon that follows GNOME HIG.

It got a few new dialogs to show errors to the user instead of panicking on the terminal.

Previously, the app froze after hitting ‘Apply’ until it was done applying settings. That has been fixed.

The app now shows a log-out dialog (if required) after applying settings.

When applying current display settings, scaling is also applied (may not work on all systems).

The app is now DBusActivatable

But many of the changes happened to the code itself, making it easier to work on the app in future. One of those changes was how the settings were being saved; which means the users will lose some of their settings. I will refrain from making such user-experience breaking changes in the future though. I only let it happen because the app was new, incomplete, still in a version below 1.0 and the change would make coding experience dramatically better.

Daudix UFO announces

This week, Gradience v0.2.0 released 🚀 here are some exciting updates:

Added a presets manager, with it you can rename, delete and download other users’ presets

Added a welcome screen

Improved monet theme generation

Small UI improvements

You can download v0.2.0 from GitHub. Gradience will be available on Flathub very soon 🎉

Documentation

federico announces

Librsvg now has a development guide, intended for interns and newcomers to the code. It’s available at https://gnome.pages.gitlab.gnome.org/librsvg/devel-docs/index.html

GNOME Shell Extensions

oae announces

I have released the first version of Pano. An extension that manages the clipboard history. Currently, it supports;

Code blocks (w/ syntax highlighting)

Color codes (hex/rgb)

Images (w/ size and resolution information)

Links (w/ previews)

Texts

File Operations (Cut/Copy)

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#57 Flashy Colors

Fri, 19 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 12 to August 19.

Circle Apps and Libraries

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

Thanks to a contribution of Pierre Auclair NewsFlash gained the ability to render Latex math formulas inside of articles with the help of mathjax.

Kooha ↗

A simple screen recorder with a minimal interface. You can simply click the record button without having to configure a bunch of settings.

SeaDve reports

Kooha 2.1.0 was released with the following new features and fixes:

Previously selected video sources are now remembered.

It is now possible to cancel while flushing the recording.

Settings toggle button now uses different icons to discern state more clearly.

Added 3 seconds delay option.

MP4 encoder failing to initialize on uneven resolutions is now fixed.

Fixed time display on time greater than an hour.

Recordings are now stored default in a “Kooha” XDG videos subfolder. (This won’t affect existing settings.)

“Show in Files” button now highlights the recording in the file manager.

Improve support information through the about window.

Other error handling and stability improvements.

Third Party Projects

0xMRTT announces

This week, Gradience (Adwaita Manager) have some improvements

Project was renamed to “Gradience” to remove any confusion with official GNOME app.

Monet engine performance improved (2 sec in v0.2.0 and 2.5 minutes in v0.1.0)

Fixed invisible text in “cards” when Monet palette was applied

Small UI improvements

Paulo says

It’s been over a month since Black Box was announced on TWIG. Since then, a lot has changed. Most recently, version 0.12.0 brought:

Support for searching text in the terminal

Support for customizing the number of lines kept in the buffer

Support for reserving part of the header bar to drag the window

Improved theme integration and refined UI

Lower CPU usage, thanks to an update in VTE

Also, 18 bugs have been fixed, and new translations have been added for 2 languages, with 2 more on the way. Check it out!

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.8.14 was released!

We are introducing vmtouch to cache data and improve performance! This can be enabled from preferences.

We are also introducing a new dialog to configure vkBasalt settings, to change effects and color lookup table!

To further integrate vkBasalt, we now allow modifying vkBasalt configurations per-bottle. This means that each bottle can now have a separate vkBasalt configuration!

We brought back the dark mode switcher as well, as many desktop environments and distributions don’t come with a dark style preference. That way, users have the option to force dark mode.

Other changes include:

Prevent programs from launching when clicking on the entry instead of the play button

Windows can now be closed by pressing Escape

The Library view now supports program settings overrides

“Add to Steam” and “Add Desktop Entry” now supports integrations (Epic, Ubisoft, etc.)

The bottles-cli “programs” option now list programs from integrations as well

Gamescope is now compatible with FSR

Minor UI improvements

Fix missing translations, thanks to @A6GibKm

Fix a bug in “Add to Steam”, was not supporting ~/.steam

Fix a regression on renaming programs, this was causing duplicated entries

Fix a bug in the internal-sandbox, wine symlinks were not unlinked if the username had special characters

Fix a bug in generating desktop entries for programs with spaces in their names

Fix a bug in the copy_dll dependency action, wildcards were not handled correctly, thanks to @siroccal

Fix a bug in loading gstreamer libraries, were not respecting the bottle architecture

Fix a regression in library mode, adding a new program was causing a loop when the bottle name and path mismatched

Improved translations

For more information about the new update, check out our release page!

Documentation

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 says

I’ve published two new sections of the gtk-rs book. They introduce Libadwaita, show how to add it to a gtk-rs app and let the Todo app use Libadwaita with minimal changes to the code base. You can find the libadwaita chapter here: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/libadwaita.html.

The sections have been reviewed by Alice (she/her) and Ivan Molodetskikh.

Miscellaneous

Emmanuele Bassi announces

25 years ago this week, Miguel de Icaza announced GNOME, a project for creating a free software desktop environment and application development platform. A quarter of a century later, and the GNOME project is still here, working to make a better, free, open desktop for everyone. Happy birthday, GNOME, and let’s raise a glass to the next 25 years!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#56 Refined Documentation

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 05 to August 12.

Core Apps and Libraries

Tracker ↗

A filesystem indexer, metadata storage system and search tool.

Sam Thursfield announces

Carlos Garnacho landed a major performance fix in Tracker Miners. Directory renames should now be processed within a few seconds even when many files are indexed. See https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/tracker-miners/-/merge_requests/400 for details.

GNOME Contacts ↗

Keep and organize your contacts information.

nielsdg says

Contacts can now import and export contacts in the vCard format (usually recognized by their .vcf file extension). This was the most popular feature request in the Contacts issue tracker for quite a while, so this should make quite a few people happy 😁

Calls ↗

A phone dialer and call handler.

Evangelos announces

Calls now allows sending SMS from the call history 🎉 and starts up faster and has more fluid scrolling with large histories of more than 1k entries (which should especially help on weaker hardware) \o/

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

This week, a new version of GJS was released for GNOME 43.beta.

It pulls in the JS engine from Firefox 102, bringing such APIs as Object.hasOwn() and Intl.supportedValuesOf(). With contributions from Evan Welsh, Chun-wei Fan, and myself.

It’s now possible to use GObject.BindingGroup.prototype.bind_full() with JS functions. Previously this method was unusable in JS. Thanks to Florian Müllner.

Gio.FileEnumerator is now iterable, both synchronously (with for-of or array spread syntax) and asynchronously (with for-await-of). Thanks to Sonny Piers.

Updates to the in-repo documentation and examples, by Andy Holmes and Sonny Piers.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie announces

This week, File Shredder joined GNOME Circle. File Shredder allows you to securely delete files that should not be recoverable. Congratulations!

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas announces

NewsFlash gained support for basic highlighting of code blocks.

Third Party Projects

Daudix UFO reports

Adwaita Manager was significantly redesigned, Thanks for hard work of @0xMRTT who maked it real and @daudix-UFO for providing design mockups.

Adwaita Manager is a tool that allows you to customize Libadwaita applications and the adw-gtk3 theme with simple UI, as well with Material You Palette generation from wallpaper, Thanks @avanishsubbiah for porting Monet engine to Python!

The name was changed to Gradience to remove any confusions. The project still available at the same URL

Also, @ArtyIF has migrated Adwaita Manager to Adwaita Manager Team, which allowed to add new maintainers, @0xMRTT, @daudix-UFO and @AndroGR.

More amazing changes will come in near future!

Note: Adwaita Manager is NOT an official GNOME app, the name will change in v0.2.0

Documentation

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Pages on the GNOME Developers Documentation website now have a link to let you easily view and edit the source text in GitLab; if you spot an issue, or if you want to improve the documentation, you can now do that directly from your web browser.

lwildberg reports

This week the port of the whole getting started tutorial to Vala on developer.gnome.org was merged and is now available online! Also the widget template tutorial was ported thanks to Vojtěch Perník .

GNOME Shell Extensions

Just Perfection ↗

A tweak tool to customize the GNOME Shell and to disable UI elements.

Just Perfection extension version 21 (code name Reynolds) has been added 7 new features including:

OSD position

Alt Tab icon size

Alt Tab window preview size

Alt Tab window preview icon size

Dash separator visibility

Looking glass size

Take screenshot button visibility in window menu

We also had some bug fixes.

This version named after English painter Joshua Reynolds.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#55 Wallpapers & Screenshots

Fri, 05 Aug 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 29 to August 05.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

Ivan Molodetskikh reports

I optimized GNOME Shell’s layout performance a little bit, and then a tiny bit more. This code runs every frame during the overview animations so it’s important that it’s fast.

Photos ↗

Access, organize and share your photos on GNOME

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

GNOME Photos now uses the Wallpaper portal for setting a picture as your background / lockscreen.

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

Cleo Menezes Jr. announces

GNOME Web gets a more friendly way to get screenshots. It is now possible to do this through the context menu by choosing the Take Screenshot option or pressing Shift + Ctrl + S.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Solanum ↗

Balance working time and break time.

Chris 🌱️ reports

Solanum now has the ability to completely reset sessions without restarting the app. New contributor Dani Rodríguez is responsible for implementing this. Thank you, Dani!

NewsFlash feed reader ↗

Follow your favorite blogs & news sites.

Jan Lukas says

NewsFlash recently gained support for Nextcloud News. It only supports API v1.3 which will be available in their next release 18.1.1. So Make sure to update you Nextcloud News if you plan to sync with NewsFlash. Since my last update on TWIG was some time ago I should also mention the updated tagging workflow: you can create tags & tag articles now in one step without a single click. The login & reset pages have gotten a libadwaita makeover and are now more mobile friendly. And of course the new libadwaita about dialog has to be mentioned.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

Amberol 0.9.0 is out, now with fuzzy matching when searching inside the playlist, loads of bug fixes in the code, style, and dependencies that deal with loading metadata, and translation updates. You can get the new release from Flathub or the software center application nearest to you.

Third Party Projects

Chris 🌱️ reports

Loupe now has the ability to show file properties. NOTE: These are based on the file’s basic info and not exif data currently. Properties based on exif data will come later.

ranfdev announces

I’m announcing Lobjur, a simple GTK4 client for https://lobste.rs.

Features:

Browse the hottest and most recently active stories

View the comments of each story

Browse stories by tag, by domain, or by user.

View some information about the user who just commented below that awesome story

Also, as far as I know, this is the first application on flathub to use ClojureScript and GTK.

Get this application from Flathub !

knuxify announces

The first version (and first minor patch) of Ear Tag has been released! Ear Tag is a small and simple music tag editor meant to be used for editing single files, rather than entire music collections like many other tagging programs. You can get it on FlatHub, or get the code from the release page.

cwunder says

One of our GSoC students Anupam Kumar had great progress on the development of Chromecast (Cast v2) protocol support on GNOME Network Displays. You can read it more here.

Documentation

Two new tutorials are now available on the GNOME developers documentation website: how to implement drag and drop with GTK and how and when to use composite widget templates. The full project code for the Getting Started tutorial is also now available on GitLab.

GNOME Shell Extensions

lupantano reports

ReadingStrip is an extension for Gnome-Shell. It works as a reading guide for computer and this is really useful for people affected by dyslexia. It works great in helping children focusing to read very well, it marks the sentence that they are reading and hides the previous and the next one. It’s already used in education projects at schools, it puts the attention on screen but it’s also really useful for programmers and graphic designers who want to check their works.

Miscellaneous

Vojtěch Perník reports

The new Czech GNOME community website, along with the Czech Matrix room and Mastodon/Twitter accounts, has been released! Thanks to the GNOME Infrastructure team for their help with publishing the page, and to Martin Thibault and Felix Häcker for their help with creating the Matrix room!

Bilal Elmoussaoui reports

GNOME Nightly has now the necessary infrastructure for building and deploying your nightly apps targetting aarch64. More details on the following blog post. https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2022/08/04/aarch64-for-gnome-nightly-apps/

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#54 More Portings

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 22 to July 29.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Initial Setup has been ported to GTK4 and libadwaita

GNOME Console ↗

A simple user-friendly terminal emulator.

Alice (she/her) reports

Console has been ported to GTK4

WebKitGTK ↗

GTK port of the WebKit rendering engine.

adrian reports

A new stable release of WebKitGTK is now available. Version 2.36.5 not only includes fixes for security issues, but also makes video playback work again in Yelp and fixes the WebKitWebView::context-menu signal in GTK4 builds. The first development release in the next series, 2.37.1, has been available for a couple of weeks, featuring the new WebRTC implementation based on GstWebRTC among many other improvements.

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

GNOME Builder has received more than a hundred commits since last update, and is quickly progressing towards feature parity after landing the massive port to GTK4. The highlights of the past weeks are:

In-file and project-wise searches are back

Large refactoring of how project and global settings are layered

Auto-hiding minimap

XML and C indenters are back

Introduction of a new action muxer and an alternative way to activate actions

A variety of internal rearchitecturing in preparation for future changes

Circle Apps and Libraries

Podcasts ↗

Podcast app for GNOME.

Jordan Petridis says

After more than a year of development, the GTK 4 port of Podcasts has been merged. Huge thanks to Christopher Davis and Maximiliano for the joined effort of porting the codebase, but as well to Bilal Elmoussaoui and Julian Hofer for the exhaustive reviews.

We are putting the finishing touches still but you will be able to enjoy a new release o Podcasts in the month ahead.

Third Party Projects

Aaron Erhardt announces

The first beta of Relm4 0.5, an idiomatic GUI library based on gtk4-rs, was released with many improvements.

With this release, large parts of Relm4 were redesigned to be much more flexible and easier to use. Notable changes include better interoperability with gtk4-rs and many improvements to the view macro syntax which allows you to even use if-else expressions in the UI declaration! You can find more information about the release in the official blog post.

Rnote ↗

Sketch and take handwritten notes.

flxzt says

Rnote, the freehand note-taking and sketching app received a new update: v0.5.4! The app now has a new icon and symbolic (with the help of @bertob, thanks! ), finally added text input (with typewriter sounds), a new PDF import dialog with the added option for different PDF spacing preferences. Screenshots can now be pasted directly from the clipboard (thanks @RickStanley ) and there is now the possibility to enable input constraints when creating shapes (thanks to @sei0o ).

More new features: two new selector modes ( selecting individually, selecting by intersecting with a drawn path ). The workspace browser got a much needed redesign, and now has customizable workspaces (inspired by the Paper app ). Finally the Marker pen style now draws underneath other strokes, making it possible to mark text without obstructing it.

Cawbird ↗

A native Twitter client for your Linux desktop.

CodedOre says

After a longer pause, I continue to work on the libadwaita rewrite of Cawbird. This week the following was added:

Support for Video and GIF playback

Using an redirect to automatically get the authentication code after authorization on the servers website.

We also now have automated Flatpak builds of the current development status, which you can get at https://github.com/CodedOre/NewCaw/actions

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.7.28 was released!

We are introducing a new versioning system that reliably lets you downgrade to previous states in case a recent change goes wrong.

Additionally, we have implemented covers in Library Mode to automatically add cover images in games. We can’t thank SteamGridDB enough for their amazing service and collaboration.

For more information about the new update, check out our release page!

GNOME Shell Extensions

lupantano announces

ReadingStrip is a extension for Gnome-Shell with an equivalent function to a reading guide on the computer, that’s really useful for people with dyslexia.

Major update: Vertical strip added. This is really useful for graphic designers who want to check if their margins and indentations line up properly when displayed on the screen.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#53 GUADEC 2022

Fri, 22 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 15 to July 22.

GNOME Foundation

Emmanuele Bassi reports

GUADEC 2022, the GNOME conference, is currently under way in Guadalajara, Mexico. On Thursday, during the Annual General Meeting of the GNOME Foundation, the famed Pants Award given by the Foundation to a member of the GNOME community in recognition of their work, was awarded to Sophie Herold for her sterling work on the GNOME Circle and Apps of GNOME initiatives.

GNOME Releases

Jordan Petridis announces

The first alpha of GNOME 43 was released! The Highlights include:

The new Libadwaita widgets!

AdwAboutWindow

AdwEntryRow and AdwPasswordEntryRow

AdwMessageDialog

Builder and Files are now ported to GTK 4

Epiphany now has HTTP/2 support, as well as Web Extensions and Web apps improvments

Read the announcement and the complete changelog here

Core Apps and Libraries

Parental Controls is now ported to GTK4 and libadwaita

Circle Apps and Libraries

Health ↗

Collect, store and visualise metrics about yourself.

Cogitri announces

Health version 0.94.0 has been released, including many bugfixes and more reliable notifications.

Commit ↗

An editor that helps you write better Git and Mercurial commit messages.

sonnyp says

A new release of Commit message editor is out. It adds a theme switcher, better dark mode support, improved keyboard support and a fix for auto-capitalization when amending.

Third Party Projects

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp says

A new release of Workbench is out with crash fixes and underlining of errors in Blueprint code using the Language Server Protocol.

Inline display of error messages is ready, but will have to wait for GNOME platform 43.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#52 Happy Birthday!

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 08 to July 15.

I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary! 52 weeks ago, 52 TWIG issues later, or to put it simply - one year ago I launched TWIG!

The first issue was published on July 16, 2021, and was named “#1 Scrolling in the Dark”. After discussing the concept with some other GNOME contributors, we had to search for “news” in order to have enough material for the first issue.

Now, one year later, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have set a new record for news on the anniversary. There has never been that many news as this week in the whole year! I am cautiously optimistic, and claim the concept has now become established in the GNOME community, and is being used by more and more projects to quickly and easily announce news.

What do you think about TWIG? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? Criticism? Compliments? Let us know! You can contact us in our Matrix #thisweek:gnome.org room anytime!

But now to the actual news - Next year is sure to be at least as exciting!

GNOME Foundation

Thib reports

GUADEC is already happening! You can find the complete timetable here and most information on https://guadec.org

This year the event is hybrid: some of us are lucky enough to be able to make it to Guadalajara, but for those who aren’t, the talks will be broadcasted online as well.

Register on https://guadec.org to get all the details on how to join the event remotely.

Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof reports

Files 43.alpha has been released, with the largest change set for an alpha release since version 3.29.90

This is the first fully functional GTK4-based development release. Notably, drag-and-drop works again, courtesy of Corey Berla!

Chris 🌱️ reports

Nautilus now uses AdwFlap for the sidebar. At small sizes the sidebar automatically hides, and a button to show it appears. The sidebar can also be shown and hidden with a swipe on touchscreens.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

with the merging of AdwAboutWindow, I’ve submitted MRs to port multiple apps to the new window:

Disk Usage Analyzer

Characters

Text Editor

Weather

Fonts

Files

Calendar

Logs

Music

Clocks

Calculator

Extensions

Alexander has also submitted a port for Contacts.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

GTK 4.7.1 has been released! This is a new development snapshot towards the 4.8 release, which will be available in GNOME 43. A few of the latest changes:

a new text widget, GtkInscription, which can be used inside list views and wherever you want the text to respond to the UI layout instead of the other way around

performance improvements for GtkListView, with culling of out of view rows

support for fractional letter spacing in CSS

improvements in the accessibility of GtkStack and GtkTextView

improved touchpad support on Windows

multiple input fixes when using Wayland

GNOME Builder ↗

IDE for writing GNOME-based software.

Thanks to the massive amounts of work of Christian Hergert, Builder was ported to GTK4 and libadwaita. This port was merged this week, and the first unstable release with it (43.alpha0) was published. This version of Builder has a different app-id, org.gnome.Builder.Devel, and therefore needs to be manually installed. Some of the highlights include:

New tabbed editor which uses traditional tabs instead of Builder’s document stack

A new status bar at the bottom with contextual information, such as the git branch, language syntax options, and others

Dark and light styles

Improved flow for creating new projects

Support for many other run options when running applications with Valgrind

Deeper integration with the Sysprof profiler

Run applications with specific accessibility settings, such as high contrast

Reorganizable panels thanks to libpanel

More powerful shortcuts management

Command editor to add custom run commands to the pipeline

… and a lot more. Many previously available features are still in the works, and anyone interested can help pushing Builder to the finish line by picking any task at the GTK4 port checklist.

Thanks again to Christian Hergert for this exciting and impressive work on Builder!

Vala ↗

An object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system

colinkiama announces

This week, the new Vala website has been released: https://vala.dev

This will be the new starting point for newcomers to the language and hub for Vala-related resources across the web.

Also, we are currently working on a new documentation website. There is still quite a bit missing, so contributors are appreciated!

Furthermore, the Vala Reference Manual has been ported to a new format here. The source code of both is easily accessible through gitlab.

Eventually all these will replace the current Vala wiki pages.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

GLib has ported from libpcre to libpcre2, which is a huge amount of work done by Aleksei Rybalkin. It shouldn’t cause any behaviour changes for GRegex users, though.

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

In GJS 1.73.1, Nasah Kuma landed a more intelligent output display for the interactive interpreter, which pretty-prints objects’ properties and values based on their type. This improvement also applies to the log() and logError() functions.

ptomato says

Also in GJS 1.73.1, thanks to Sergio Costas, DBus proxy classes now include methods named with the suffix Async, which perform async calls to DBus APIs and return Promises. This is in addition to the existing suffixes Sync (for blocking calls) and Remote (for async calls with callbacks.)

ptomato reports

Another improvement from GJS 1.73.1 from Sonny Piers is an override for Gio.ActionMap.prototype.add_action_entries(). Previously this method wouldn’t work because it required an array of Gio.ActionEntry objects, which are not possible to construct in GJS. Now it can be used with an array of plain objects. (e.g. this.add_action_entries([{name: 'open', activate() { ... }}]);

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie reports

This week, Citations joined GNOME Circle. Citations allows you to manage your bibliographies using the BibTeX format. Congratulations!

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

danyeaw announces

Version 2.11.0 of Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, is out! It adds support for adding elements to diagrams using double click, union types, SysML Enumerations as ValueTypes, and numerous bug fixes. We also greatly improved compatibility with GTK4, and we expect the next release will shift it to be the default version of GTK.

Dialect ↗

Translate between languages.

Rafael Mardojai CM announces

Dialect 2.0.0 has been released! You can get it from Flathub.

It features the following changes:

Ported to GTK4 and libadwaita

New in-app color scheme switcher

Added Lingva Translate support

Google Translate module rewritten from scratch to not rely on external libraries and improve reliability.

GNOME Search Provider improvements

APP ID changed to app.drey.Dialect

Added API keys support for LibreTranslate

Added translation suggestions support for LibreTranslate

Fixed proxies by rewriting the http backend

Character limit is now service-dependent

Major code base refactoring

Third Party Projects

Vojtěch Perník announces

The first version of the word guessing game Blurble was released this week! Blurble is a GTK clone of Wordle written in Vala and made with localization in mind.

Loupe has been updated to follow new mockups from Allan Day.

Geary ↗

Send and receive email.

nielsdg says

Geary is getting some love again, thanks to Cédric Bellegarde (gnumdk) stepping up to co-maintain it together with me

Crosswords ↗

A simple Crossword player and Editor.

jrb says

Crosswords 0.3.3 was released. This is a simple Crossword game for GNOME. New in this version:

A preferences dialog to filter puzzle sets by language

Fully marked for translation.

Dutch and Spanish translations are added

Dutch-language crosswords work with the ‘IJ’ cell

It doesn’t grab focus when clicking on a row

Copy/Paste support

Undo/Redo support

Numerous bug fixes

Use the new libadwaita About dialog

Fixes to build and run on MacsOS

Download on flathub

Bottles ↗

Easily run Windows software on Linux with Bottles!

Bottles 2022.7.14 was released! We introduce a new Wine runner called Soda, which will be supported by the Bottles team. The aforementioned runner is based on Valve’s Wine, with the inclusion of patches from Proton, TKG and GE.

We also bring in new installers UI to make the installation process prettier and more fun.

With that out of the way, here are all the changes available in the release page: https://usebottles.com/blog/release-2022.7.14 !

Bottles was ported to AdwAboutWindow thanks to axtlos!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#51 About New Apps

Fri, 08 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 01 to July 08.

Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) reports

Following message dialogs, Libadwaita now has AdwAboutWindow

Third Party Projects

Paulo says

Announcing Black Box — a beautiful Gtk 4 terminal.

It features customizable tabs, a toggleable header bar, floating window controls, fullscreen support, and Tilix-compatible full-window theming. Last and most importantly, Black Box has tabs in the header bar.

Black Box is written in Vala and built on top of Gtk 4, libadwaita, and VTE. Check it out!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

A new version of Workbench, the app to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies, is out. Here are the highlights:

Add an Icon Browser to find the right icons for your prototypes

Add a Platform tools Library demo to learn about/from GTK Inspector, Adwaita Demo, GTK Demo and GTK Widget Factory

Adopt the de facto standard light/dark style switcher

Replace confirmation dialogs with toasts and undo

Preview now support updates on root objects

Support binding signal handlers from UI

Add APIs to allow using templates from Code

Add Center/Fill preview modes for templates

https://beta.flathub.org/apps/details/re.sonny.Workbench

GNOME To Do / Endeavour ↗

An intuitive and powerful application to manage your personal tasks.

Jamie (She/Her) reports

GNOME To Do has been renamed to Endeavour, with a new feature making it possible to drag tasks between lists

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#50 Extend the Web

Fri, 01 Jul 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 24 to July 01.

Core Apps and Libraries

Web ↗

Web browser for the GNOME desktop.

patrick reports

Epiphany has received numerous improvements to WebExtension support.

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Alice (she/her) announces

Libadwaita now has AdwMessageDialog as an adaptive replacement for GtkMessageDialog.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Milan Crha has improved support for displaying flatpak permissions in gnome-software

Settings ↗

Configure various aspects of your GNOME desktop.

Thanks to the fantastic work of Kate Hsuan and Richard Hughes, device security information is now available in Settings. The security information is provided by the Fwupd project.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

GLib 2.74 will require an additional part of the C99 specification: variadic arguments in macros using __VA_ARGS__. All supported toolchains (GCC, Clang, MSVC) already comply to the standard, so if you use a different compiler make sure it supports C99: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/2791

Two new macros to define enumeration and flags types directly in your C code without using glib-mkenums are going to be available in the next stable release of GLib: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/2788

Third Party Projects

Chris 🌱️ reports

Loupe has gained a brand new gallery view, with smooth image loading, swipe navigation support, and more.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#49 New Views

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 17 to June 24.

Core Apps and Libraries

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof reports

The fresh new Files list view mode has arrived in Nightly, with many bugfixes and new features.

Ignacy Kuchciński announces

Hello there! My name is Ignacy Kuchciński and I’ve been selected for the GSoC’22 program to improve the discoverability of the “New Document” feature in Nautilus, the file manager for GNOME, under the guidance of my mentor Antonio Fernandes.

You can follow my progress with the project by checking out my blog here. You’ll find there a short initial post introducing me, as well as first update post that talks about our plans and milestones for the project.

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Adrien Plazas says

Calendar now has a pinch gesture for its week view. It works on touchscrens and touchpad as well as by scrolling while holding the Ctrl key. It will help the application work nicely on small touchscreens like GNOME mobiles.

Adrien Plazas says

Calendar’s events received a fresh coat of paint. The new style better matches the latest designs and supports the dark style.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Pika Backup ↗

Simple backups based on borg.

Sophie says

Pika Backup 0.4.1 has been released today. It mostly addresses one external problem with scheduled backups and updates several translations.

The new version contains a workaround that fixes scheduled backups not working on some systems when using Flatpak. The systems affected are or were missing a fix for Flatpak’s auto start functionality.

The new version also comes with BorgBackup 1.2.1 on Flathub which brings several minor fixes.

Third Party Projects

Mazhar Hussain reports

Login Manager Settings v0.6 has been released with some very important bug fixes.

Bug fixes

A lot of Fedora (and other SELinux enabled distros) users were experiencing their Login Manager breaking after using this app. This has been fixed.

On Ubuntu, some settings (Shell Theme, Background, Top Bar Tweaks) were not getting applied. This has also been fixed.

Some other minor bugs were fixed.

New features

Command-line options for verbosity and printing application version have been added.

The application got a new GitHub Pages website with a nice Show in App Store link.

Translations

4 new languages

5 languages updated

Switched to Weblate for translations.

Click here for full changelog.

GNOME Shell Extensions

Advendra Deswanta announces

Lock Screen Message is released with GNOME 42 & libadwaita support and longer text feature! (max 480 chars width). So you can add your message with a longer explanations.

Advendra Deswanta announces

Shell Configurator v5 has been released after more than a year since the latest version (v4) was released and suspended the development.

This extension comes with BIG changes, including:

Added GNOME 41 & 42 (with libadwaita) Support

Rewritten and redesigned preferences look

New extension preset and configuration search feature

Added suggested extension section

Added more configurations!

Support more than 10 supported languages

Configuration module system

Bug fixes

and more changes on CHANGELOG.md.

You can install this extension on extensions.gnome.org

You can also contribute this extension by following these rules on CONTRIBUTING.md. All contributors are welcome.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#48 Adaptive Calendar

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 10 to June 17.

Neil McGovern reports

GNOME mourns the loss of Marina Zhurakhinskaya - https://www.outreachy.org/blog/2022-06-14/remembering-and-honoring-marina-zhurakhinskaya-founder-of-outreachy/

‎‎‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎

Core Apps and Libraries

Calendar ↗

A simple calendar application.

Adrien Plazas says

Calendar received a new sidebar containing a date chooser and an agenda view, which replaced the year view and the navigation arrows. It is the first step implementing its new adaptive design, but please note the application isn’t adaptive yet.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Fina announces

Warp 0.2.0 was released: It features many design improvements, lots of new translations, support for mobile devices, improved error handling and much more. Happy file transferring :)

Decoder ↗

Scan and Generate QR Codes.

Maximiliano reports

Decoder 0.3.0 is out, some highlights:

QR codes are always black on white for maximum compatibility

See the text contents of a newly scanned code

Scanned codes are automatically stored in history

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

Amberol 0.8.0 is out: you can now search for songs in your playlist just by starting to type, even when in selection mode. Plus: Amberol can now run in the background through the sandbox portal; cover art is shared across songs in the same album, to reduce memory use; and the window size is correctly restored across sessions. Bonus news: if you use macOS, you can now build and run Amberol using dependencies from the Homebrew project.

Third Party Projects

noëlle announces

Bottles 2022.6.14 was released, bringing GTK4+Libadwaita, performance enhancements, and many smaller interface improvements.

xjuan says

Cambalache 0.10.0 is out! - Adwaita, Handy, inline objects, special child types, and more…

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Marco Melorio says

Hi there! I’m Marco Melorio and I’m participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code, under the GNOME Foundation. I’m working on Fractal, the GNOME matrix client, with the help of my mentor Julian Sparber. More specifically, I’m working on implementing a media history viewer to the app.

To follow my progress on the project you can check out my blog here. I’ve already published a small introduction post about me and a first update post which includes a mockup and milestones about the project.

GNOME Foundation

Neil McGovern reports

Microsoft has awarded GNOME $10,000 for winning its FOSS fund #20 https://twitter.com/sunnydeveloper/status/1536744475979939841

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#47 Counting Items

Fri, 10 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from June 03 to June 10.

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall announces

Benjamin Otte has just added a GListStore:n-items property to GLib, to make it easier to bind UI elements to whether a list store is empty

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

István Derda has added an --uninstall command line option to gnome-software, to allow starting the uninstall process for an app from the command line. This should allow easier integration of gnome-software into other things.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie announces

This week, Amberol joined GNOME Circle. Amberol just plays your music folders and files. Congratulations!

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

Authenticator 4.1.6 is out. The new version includes:

Google Authenticator restore support by Julia

Disabled GTK Inspector in release builds

Redesigned account details QR code

Third Party Projects

James Westman announces

I’ve released blueprint-compiler v0.2.0, the first tagged release! If you’re using blueprint in a project, I highly recommend using this tag instead of the main branch, to avoid any breakage as the language develops toward 1.0. You can do this with "tag": "v0.2.0" in your flatpak manifest and revision = v0.2.0 in blueprint-compiler.wrap.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp says

A new version of Workbench, the sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies, is out. Here are the highlights:

Add Blueprint markup syntax for UI

Add Vala programming language for Code

Add support for previewing templates

Add support for previewing signal handlers

Include all icons from icon-development-kit

Improve application design

Distribute Library examples under CC0-1.0

Respect system preference for color scheme

Add proper light/dark color schemes for Console

Fix error when importing files

https://beta.flathub.org/apps/details/re.sonny.Workbench

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido says

phoc 0.20.0 and phosh 0.20.0.beta1 are out adding swipe gesture support for top and bottom bar, reworked quick settings (which are now also accessible on the lock screen), a switch to latest wlroots (0.15.1) and much more.

Furtherance ↗

Track your time without being tracked

Ricky Kresslein says

Furtherance v1.5.0 was released and it now has a button to repeat tasks (instead of right-click), CSV Export (thanks to Felix Zwettler), a centered timer when there are no saved tasks, and local date formats.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#46 Going Mobile

Fri, 03 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 27 to June 03.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

verdre says

News from the Shell team! We’re improving the experience on small screens and things are progressing quickly, GNOME Shell might run on your phone sooner than you think. Check out our blogpost for more information.

WebKitGTK ↗

GTK port of the WebKit rendering engine.

adrian announces

The recent WebKitGTK 2.36.3 release included fixes for a number of security issues that allowed remote code execution. While we are not aware of any of them being exploited, it is nevertheless strongly recommended to update to the latest release.

There are a number of improvements in the multimedia backend as well: GStreamer elements known to be problematic are now explicitly by default, we have enabled capture from devices which can use hardware-accelerated encoding, fixed display capture using Pipewire, and improved streaming video playback.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall reports

Milan Crha has added support for listing other apps by the same author in gnome-software

Calls ↗

A phone dialer and call handler.

Evangelos reports

Calls can now do encrypted VoIP calls with SIP using SRTP 🎉 Supporting SRTP roughly consisted of two parts:

Change the GStreamer pipeline to do SRTP instead of plain RTP

Handle the key exchange in the signalling

Please note that we don’t make use of the encryption indicator yet, for more details see this issue where you can also find some nice designs by Sam Hewitt of how things should eventually behave.

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

Philip Withnall reports

Benjamin Berg has fixed a nasty deadlock in GFileMonitor in GLib

Circle Apps and Libraries

Gaphor ↗

A simple UML and SysML modeling tool.

Arjan says

Gaphor 2.10.0 has been release last week. Among the improvements Activity diagrams have been extended. Model loading has been improved and Gaphor finally has full drag and drop support from the tree view to a diagram.

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

A new bugfixes release of Authenticator is out. The new release also migrates your tokens from the host keyring to inside the sandbox so other sandboxed apps can’t access them.

Third Party Projects

Flatseal ↗

A graphical utility to review and modify permissions of Flatpak applications.

I am happy to announce the release of Flatseal 1.8.0 🎉. This new release comes with the ability to review and modify global overrides, highlight changes made by users, follow system-level color styles, support for more languages and a few bugs fixes.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Emmanuele Bassi announces

New Amberol release! Lots of small UI fixes to improve consistency and give better feedback when importing songs in the playlist. Colors and spacing between elements have also been improved, as well as general reliability.

Miscellaneous

federico announces

The accessibility infrastructure modules are now merged: https://viruta.org/accessibility-repos-are-now-merged.html

ranfdev announces

Frustrated by the standard .ui file writing experience (that xml is very verbose) and inspired by the blueprint compiler, I’ve decided to write a custom Domain Specific Language to generate .ui files. Compared to blueprint compiler, this let’s you use a complete programming language, with variables and functions, to generate your ui. Check out the project page for more information

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#45 Timeout!

Fri, 27 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 20 to May 27.

Core Apps and Libraries

GLib ↗

The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.

New g_idle_add_once() and g_timeout_add_once() functions just landed in GLib, courtesy of Emmanuele Bassi. They make it simpler to add an idle or timeout callback which is only ever dispatched once.

Philip Withnall reports

Also in GLib land, Thomas Haller’s work to add automatic NULL-termination support to GPtrArray has just landed

Files ↗

Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.

antoniof reports

Solid improvements are coming to the GTK 4 port of Files. This week, with the help of Corey Berla and advice from Alice (she/her), I’ve enhanced the experience for mouse users without hindering future improvements for touch users. As a new feature, now the middle button can be used to open multiple selected files at once.

Third Party Projects

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp says

I added support for previewing templates and signals in Workbench as well as converting back and forth between XML and Blueprint

Furtherance ↗

Track your time without being tracked

Ricky Kresslein reports

Furtherance v1.3.0 was released and now has the ability to autosave and automatically restore autosaves after an improper shutdown. Also, tasks can now be added manually, and task names can be changed for an entire group.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

Various fixes to Amberol, including a refresh of the main application icon, and tweaks to the styling of elements such as the waveform view, volume control, and loading progress bar.

Miscellaneous

Thib says

GNOME is participating to GSoC this year again, and we have no less than 9 interns this year! Health, Chromecast Support, Pitivi (video editor), Nautilus (files manager), Fractal and engagement websites: such are the projects that will receive great contributions this summer!

You can read all the details, welcome the interns and thank the mentors in this post. Many thanks to contributing to a vibrant project and community.

GNOME Shell Extensions

aunetx reports

Blur my Shell has recently seen some big changes, and a lot more are probably coming soon!

To keep you updated:

a color and a noise effect have been added, they can help to make the blur more legible and prevent color banding on low-resolution screens — or to simply have have some fun :p

a lot of the internal preferences have been changed — this probably resulted in some of you having Blur my Shell preferences reset, sorry about this :(

translation have been added to different languages, including French, Chinese, Italian, Spanish, Norwegian and Arabic: if you want to help the project, you can translate the preferences in you own language using Weblate!

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#44 Five Across

Fri, 20 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 13 to May 20.

Core Apps and Libraries

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

gnome-software gained some nice polish from Milan Crha to format file size numbers and units in slightly different font sizes, to highlight the number: https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-software/-/merge_requests/1319

Circle Apps and Libraries

Sophie Herold reports

This week, Warp joined GNOME Circle. Warp allows file transfers from one device to another, just by sharing a code. Congratulations!

Pika Backup ↗

Simple backups based on borg.

Sophie Herold says

Pika Backup version 0.4 has been released. This release wraps up a year of development work and brings major features like scheduled backups, rule-based removal of older archives, and an updated interface using GTK 4 and Libadwaita.

You can get the full story in the corresponding blog post or just try it out.

Third Party Projects

Crosswords ↗

A simple Crossword player and Editor.

jrb reports

I’ve released Crosswords 0.3.0. This is the first version of this game that’s available for download from flathub. New in this release:

.puz file format support

Dark mode / Light mode support

Hint button that suggests words that fit a slot

External puzzle plugins support, including assorted newspaper downloaders

More information is available at the release announcement

Telegrand ↗

A Telegram client optimized for the GNOME desktop.

Marco Melorio reports

Telegrand development has seen quite a number of improvements since the last report. The app is finally shaping up quite well and the light for a first release seems closer than ever! These are the highlights of some of the work that happened since the last report:

Implemented user actions reports (e.g. users typing or sending photos) by Marcus Behrendt

Implemented message event types (e.g. user joining a group) by Carlod

Implemented message photo sending

Improved the message entry look

Added phone country code selection in the login process by Marcus Behrendt

Added more ways to authenticate (e.g. via SMS, call or flash call) by Marcus Behrendt

Hide the message entry when not needed (e.g. while in a channel) by Carlod

Added ability to delete messages

Improved chat history scrolling (now default to the bottom)

Added ability to pin/unpin chats by Marcus Behrendt

Ability to open the relative chat by clicking a notification

Geopard ↗

A Gemini client

ranfdev announces

I’ve released Geopard v1.1.0, the new version of my gemini client. This release brings:

Improved design, with completely new pages for downloads, input requests, external links, errors

Added more spacing between links to make them easier to click on small screens

Added zoom functionality, via shortcuts or directly from the popover menu

Streaming button (alpha) for some audio/video file types

From the last announcement, I’ve also fixed various issues reported on github. Mainly, there was an issue with the handling of downloads, which is now fixed.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

New Amberol release, with lots of papercut fixes, improvement in the UI responsiveness when loading large directories, and accessibility fixes for both the UI and key navigation.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#43 Foundation News

Fri, 13 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from May 06 to May 13.

GNOME Foundation

Thib reports

The GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors would like to inform the members of the GNOME Foundation that regrettably, Alberto Ruiz submitted his resignation from the Board of Directors for a combination of work and personal reasons.

We are pleased to announce that we have appointed Martín Abente Lahaye to serve on the Board as per the bylaws. Martín is an active community member, the author of Flatseal and Portfolio, and has experience promoting and deploying FOSS in educational and impact settings through his previous work with One Laptop Per Child Paraguay, Sugar Labs and Endless. We believe Martín is a great asset to help us implementing our roadmap and are excited to start working together.

Full details in this Discourse post. Welcome onboard Martín Abente Lahaye !

Thib says

The GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors has been working on a high-level roadmap to give the Foundation a clear direction. Rob posted the three initiatives that will keep us busy. Full details in the post, but the strategy is to:

Make the newcomers initiative more sustainable, with paid contributors polishing the documentation and welcoming people on our platform

Make GNOME an appealing platform to develop for, by making Flathub support payments

Make GNOME a local-first platform to empower individuals by reducing their dependency on the cloud and more generally the Internet

In short: funnel more people to contribute to the GNOME project, make them able to earn money from the skills they developed, and allow them to create apps that have a strong impact on the world.

Thib reports

The GNOME Foundation’s Board of Directors has proposed an amendment to the bylaws of the Foundation to allow a limited number of non-members to run for the Board of Directors if they are backed by enough Foundation members.

The rationale behind this amendment is that our roadmap is about getting more people from outside our community to understand and support the GNOME Project. The initiatives we work on are ambitious and need to be funded properly to have the full impact we want them to have. Fundraising is not something most of the current board and Foundation members are very experienced with.

Given the initial feedback and concerns some members have raised, the Board has decided to submit this amendment to full vote. If you are a member of the Foundation, you should have received instructions to vote. If you haven’t, please reach out to Andrea Veri.

In short: we want to open the Board of Directors to people with different skills than the one we have today, to maximise our chances to make GNOME useful for more people, with proper safeguards so it’s still representative of the Foundation members.

Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

Libadwaita has gained AdwPropertyAnimationTarget for animating object properties in addition to AdwCallbackAnimationTarget:
AdwAnimationTarget *target = adw_property_animation_target_new (G_OBJECT (widget), "opacity");
g_autoptr (AdwAnimation) animation = adw_timed_animation_new (widget, 0, 1, 250, target);

adw_animation_play (animation);

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Ivan Molodetskikh reports

GTK 4 has seen a few performance improvements to ListView and ColumnView scrolling. Additionally, a fix for unstable FPS after opening a popup menu has been finally merged. Both of these are already available on the gnome-nightly Flatpak runtime and should be included in GTK 4.6.4.

Software ↗

Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.

Philip Withnall announces

Basic webapps support has just landed in gnome-software, the culmination of a project by Phaedrus Leeds

Third Party Projects

flxzt says

Last week I released Rnote v0.5 . It now features an additional eraser mode, new shape types such as ellipses from foci and bezier curves. Additionally, the undo / redo system was overhauled, handwriting latency reduced and you can now enable automatic saving. There were also some UI tweaks, stability improvements and a lot of internal code refactoring

Fina announces

I released the first version of Warp - A one-to-one file transfer application. Warp allows you to securely send files to each other via the Internet or local network by exchanging a word-based code.

To try it out visit https://flathub.org/apps/details/app.drey.Warp

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

Blueprint support has landed in Workbench. This new markup language from James Westman not only provides a much nicer experience for handwriting GTK, but also comes with a language server which will allow us to present educational hints. GNOME Builder already support Blueprint language server – definitely worth checking out.

sonnyp announces

lwildberg made great progress on Vala support in Workbench. The sub-process can now compile, run, preview and update ! We are making the architecture easy to use for additional language support. Stay tuned.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#42 Numerous Emojis

Fri, 06 May 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 29 to May 06.

Core Apps and Libraries

Characters ↗

A simple utility application to find and insert unusual characters.

Characters now supports composite emoji such as people with skin tone and gender modifiers, or country flags. It also displays emoji in the proper order instead of sorted by their codepoints.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Apostrophe ↗

A distraction free Markdown editor.

Manu announces

I’ve released a new version of Apostrophe with small bugfixes and improvements and updated translations. I’m also working on a GTK4 port, so I don’t plan on releasing more features until that is complete.

Third Party Projects

ranfdev announces

I’m releasing Geopard, a simple, colorful gemini client. Browse the space and reach hundreds of gemini capsules! It let’s you read stories, download files, play games… https://flathub.org/apps/details/com.ranfdev.Geopard

Maximiliano announces

Introducing Citations, your new manager for BibTeX references, this is a (for now) very small app to manage your bibliography and get easy to copy cites for LaTeX and other formats. The app is in heavy development and Iin the next weeks I will improve the performance and add more features before its stable release.

You can get Citations at flathub

Peter Eisenmann reports

Announcing OS-Installer: A generic OS-Installer that can be customized by distributions to install an OS. Translations welcome!

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp says

During Linux App Summit Julian Sparber prototyped with docked GTK Inspector in Workbench. We exchanged lots of interesting ideas around developer tooling and closing the gap with Web inspectors.

sonnyp reports

A new version of Workbench is out - featuring

A brand new Library of examples - including

WebSocket client

Toasts

Application Window

Desktop notifications

Help needed and contributions welcome for new examples and demos.

Platform tools Adwaita Demo, GTK Demo, GTK Widget Factory and GTK Icon Browser for the current platform version are now available in the main menu.

But also

The Console can be collapsed by resizing it

Prevent system.exit from quitting Workbench

Allow calling GObject.registerClass multiple times

Prevent crash when using non GtkBuildable objects

Allow using DBus and Gio.Application

Allow using network

Enable GtkWindow objects preview

Design improvements

Get it on Flathub

Miscellaneous

sonnyp says

Last weekend, many of us were at the Linux App Summit. It was fantastic! Thank you KDE, GNOME, organizers, volunteers, sponsors and everyone involved. Make sure to check out the talks, here are some of my favorites:

Flathub: now and next by Jorge Castro and Robert McQueen

Integrating Progressive Web Apps in GNOME by Phaedrus Leeds

Funding Flatpak Development on Open Collective by Phaedrus Leeds

Fractal-next: The journey of rewriting a GTK Matrix client by Julian Sparber

Bottles by Francesco Masala, Mirko Brombin and Pietro di Caprio

Sophie Herold announces

I have registered the domain drey.app to make it publicly available for app ids. If you want to use app.drey.<YourApp> please register it first.

The idea behind proving this domain is that gnome.org is reserved for core apps and using app ids derived from repository hosting can be long, short-lived, and tied to one author. The name app.drey derives from the term for a squirrel’s nest.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#41 Italian Gestures

Fri, 29 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 22 to April 29.

Core Apps and Libraries

GNOME Shell ↗

Core system user interface for things like launching apps, switching windows, system search, and more.

verdre shows

At LAS, we started working on two-dimensional gestures for gnome-shell, it will soon be possible to do workspace switching while doing the overview gesture

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Sophie Herold announces

Issues where in some constellations the GTK4 file or folder chooser did not allow to save a file or select a folder, have been resolved thanks to some very simple fixes.

GJS ↗

Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.

ptomato says

In GJS, Xi Ruoyao fixed a serious crash that occurred with newer versions of libffi.

Circle Apps and Libraries

Shortwave ↗

Internet radio player with over 30000 stations.

Felix announces

I released Shortwave 3.0! Notables changes / new features:

Updated user interface that uses the new Adwaita design

Support for the new GNOME 42 dark mode

New option to add private stations to the library, which should not (or cannot) be available on radio-browser.info (e.g. local network/paid streams).

Display station bitrate information, which can also be used as a sorting option

New button on the search page that allows to sort the search results

If you want to know all changes, you should check out the complete changelog on Flathub, or my Twitter / Mastodon thread.

Commit ↗

An editor that helps you write better Git and Mercurial commit messages.

sonnyp reports

Version 3.2.0 of Commit message editor is out with

Improve auto capitalization

Add support for gitconfig and hgrc

Support editing any file

Make the primary button label dynamic (Tag, Rebase, Commit, …)

Use 2 spaces indentation

Add menu button

GNOME Platform 42

Various fixes

Third Party Projects

Mazhar Hussain reports

Version v0.5.2 of Login Manager Settings was released. Compared to v0.4, Mouse settings were added, support for right-to-left languages was improved and more text got localization support. The application also got German, Occitan, and Spanish translations. Also, 1st flatpak version of the app was released on FlatHub.

Furtherance ↗

Track your time without being tracked

rickykresslein says

Furtherance v1.2.0 was released and includes a Pomodoro-style countdown timer! The Pomodoro timer can be switched on in Preferences. Also, changing the date of a task when it is the only task in its group no longer causes the application to crash.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

New week, new release of Amberol! Some additional tweaks to the UI, with the playlist queue now on the left hand side of the main window thanks to the design of Tobias Bernard; but, most importantly, the song loading is now more reliable and you should not experience any more unexpected crashes when switching between songs.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#40 Rows and Containers

Fri, 22 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 15 to April 22.

Core Apps and Libraries

Sushi ↗

A file previewer for the GNOME desktop environment.

feborges announces

I am looking for a new maintainer to take care of Sushi (also known as the NautilusPreviewer, a quick previewer for GNOME Files). I will be happy to help a new maintainer onboard and make releases. For more information, visit https://discourse.gnome.org/t/looking-for-a-new-maintainer-for-sushi/9361

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

I’ve finished and landed entry rows originally implemented by Maximiliano. So now we have AdwEntryRow and AdwPasswordEntryRow

Circle Apps and Libraries

Pika Backup ↗

Simple backups based on borg.

Sophie Herold announces

When setting up an existing backup repository, Pika Backup now offers the option to infer settings from existing archives in the repository. If you previously used BorgBackup with a different tool or via the command line, this can help you to configure Pika Backup.

To optimize performance, new repositories are now initialized with the, in this case, faster BLAKE2 hash algorithm, if the current system does not support SHA256 CPU instructions.

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian Hofer reports

I’ve added the (fast) mold linker to the org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable extension. This way, Rust based projects using flatpak can easily benefit from decreased build times. The time spent on linking is especially noticeable for incremental builds. For example, the incremental build of Fragments now only takes 4 instead of 12 seconds. The corresponding MR can be found here.

Instructions:

Add the org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm13 extension along with this extension in order to get clang.

Add /usr/lib/sdk/llvm13/bin to append-path.

Set environment variables:

CARGO_TARGET_X86_64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_LINKER to clang, and

CARGO_TARGET_X86_64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_RUSTFLAGS to -C link-arg=-fuse-ld=/usr/lib/sdk/rust-stable/bin/mold.

In total, the changed parts of your flatpak manifest should look like this:
{
    "sdk-extensions": [
        "org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.rust-stable",
        "org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.llvm13"
    ],
    "build-options": {
        "append-path": "/usr/lib/sdk/rust-stable/bin:/usr/lib/sdk/llvm13/bin",
        "env": {
            "CARGO_TARGET_X86_64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_LINKER": "clang",
            "CARGO_TARGET_X86_64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_RUSTFLAGS": "-C link-arg=-fuse-ld=/usr/lib/sdk/rust-stable/bin/mold",
            "CARGO_TARGET_AARCH64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_LINKER": "clang",
            "CARGO_TARGET_AARCH64_UNKNOWN_LINUX_GNU_RUSTFLAGS": "-C link-arg=-fuse-ld=/usr/lib/sdk/rust-stable/bin/mold"
        }
    }
}

Authenticator ↗

Simple application for generating Two-Factor Authentication Codes.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

I have finally took the time to make a new release of Authenticator including various fancy features. Here is a quick summary of what we have been working on:

Port to GTK 4

Encrypted backup support

Use the camera portal for scanning QR codes

GNOME Shell search provider

Allow editing accounts provider

Better favicons detection

Refined user interface

Third Party Projects

Pods ↗

A podman desktop application

marhkb announces

A lot has happened since the initial announcement of Symphony, a desktop application for Podman.

First, Symphony was renamed to Pods. Thanks to GitHub user fostertheweb for this suggestion. The name is more concise and avoids associations with a music application.

Other new features include:

A manual dark mode, which can be activated independently of the system style

Image details are now displayed in a separate page within a leaflet instead of in an ExpanderRow

You can now open a dialog to display basic information about Podman

Containers can now be renamed easily via a dialog

The prune dialog has been reworked and now offers more options

A circular indicator now gives information about a container’s CPU and memory status

Container logs can now be viewed and searched

A dialog can now be used to create and start new containers from existing images

Furtherance ↗

Track your time without being tracked

rickykresslein says

Furtherance, a time-tracking app for GNOME, version 1.1.2 was released with the ability to add tags! Some smaller improvements: the app icon is now aligned better, the start and delete buttons are now blue and red, respectively, and three more translations were added.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

It’s Friday, and there’s a new release of Amberol, the music player with no delusions of grandeur! In this release I’ve added a few niceties, like being able to see the position in waveform of the currently playing song; a remove button for modifying the playlist; and a whole new adaptive UI layout that works just as well on the desktop as it does on a mobile device. You can find Amberol 0.4.0 on Flathub.

GNOME Foundation

Thib says

Where is the Foundation even going? Not in the cloud!

I wrote this post to shed some light on a programme the Foundation wants to conduct, how it will impact the GNOME Project, and how the contributors can help shaping it.

https://discourse.gnome.org/t/foundation-strategy-funding-decentralised-local-first-applications/

Neil McGovern says

Registration is now open for GUADEC (July 20th - 25th) https://events.gnome.org/event/77/

Neil McGovern reports

Linux App Summit (https://linuxappsummit.org/) starts on Friday 29th, check out the schedule at https://conf.linuxappsummit.org/event/4/timetable/#all

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#39 Sending Locations

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 08 to April 15.

Third Party Projects

Fractal ↗

Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.

Bilal Elmoussaoui announces

I have added static location events support to Fractal.

Mousai

SeaDve announces

Mousai now has a new UI and has been ported into the newer version of libadwaita.

Furtherance

rickykresslein reports

Furtherance 1.1.1 was released and it has a new icon! Total daily time sums are now displayed (with the option to turn them off) and there were many bug fixes. It has also been translated into German, Spanish, and Italian.

Workbench ↗

A sandbox to learn and prototype with GNOME technologies.

sonnyp reports

Workbench gained a Library of demos/examples - there are just a couples for now - contributions welcome. Making demos is a great way to get started with GTK/GNOME development, build something cool with Workbench and open an issue.

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

We added swipe gestures to phosh’s top and home bar and moved the settings menu closer to the designs:

Cawbird ↗

A native Twitter client for your Linux desktop.

CodedOre says

There were some new additions to the libadwaita rewrite of the Twitter client Cawbird, with the addition of the Account system, the ability to load the timeline of an user and a rework of the media display.

Boatswain ↗

A guiding hand when navigating through streams.

Since I announced Boatswain, an app to control Stream Decks, quite a few new features and improvements found their way into the app:

Boatswain now works well with all known models of Stream Deck (Original gen1 and gen2, Mini, XL, and MK.2)

MPRIS integration, with which it is possible to control the currently active media player

If you have multiple Stream Decks available, it is now possible to use one Stream Deck to switch the profile of other Stream Deck

More integration with OBS Studio by introducing actions to mute & unmute audio sources, and show & hide other sources

I recently wrote a more detailed article about it.

Amberol ↗

Plays music, and nothing else.

I have released Amberol 0.3.0, the latest development snapshot of the music player with no delusions of grandeur. Amberol just plays your local music, without trying to manage your music collection, edit the metadata of your music files, or build playlists. You can download the latest version from Flathub.

Documentation

Maximiliano says

libsoup documentation has been ported to gi-docgen, you can read the new docs here 🚀

GNOME Shell Extensions

aunetx says

Blur my Shell has been updated and mostly rewrote for GNOME 42. It now uses libadwaita for its (beautiful and modern) preferences, and is more customizable!

It also has a more uniform transparent theme for the overview components, such as the dash or the applications folder; and you can also blur the window selector in the new screenshot tool. Last but not least, you can now blur your applications, although this is… quite buggy (and beta), but fun!

Miscellaneous

David Heidelberg says

Hey all, this week we have working flatpak runners AARCH64 (relevant for PINE64 products - PinePhone etc., Librem 5, postmarketOS phones, also few desktop machines). Kudos goes to me for HW and Bartłomiej Piotrowski for doing all the work and wiring it up :) Feel free to integrate them into your nightly builds workflows and possibly hopefully into CI templates https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/citemplates/-/issues/11

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

#38 Among Toasts And Tabs

Fri, 08 Apr 2022 00:00:00 GMT

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 01 to April 08.

Core Apps and Libraries

Libadwaita ↗

Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.

A few changes to AdwToast: Kévin Commaille added a way to set custom widgets as titles, while Emmanuele Bassi added a convenience adw_toast_new_format() constructor.

AdwTabBar style has got updated. Which tab is selected should be much more obvious now, especially in dark variant or with only 2 tabs open

Sophie Herold reports

I have added a use-markup property to AdwPreferencesRow. Previously, classes like AdwActionRow always treated values for title and subtitle as Pango markup. The new property can be used to disable this behavior. This is especially useful if the values are obtained from external data/input. You might want to check your code if you have missed this detail.

For AdwComboRow the default value for use-markup will be FALSE. This is because the default factories do not expect Pango markup. Therefore the use-subtitle property is incompatible with the previous behavior of the subtitle interpreting the subtitle as Pango markup.

Third Party Projects