#5 Freeze Frenzy
August 13, 2021 • 18 News • Curated by ThibUpdate on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 06 to August 13.
Core Apps and Libraries
Files ↗
Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.
Allan Day says
in Files, Ondrej Holy added support for creating encrypted archives.
Mutter ↗
A Wayland display server and X11 window manager and compositor library.
Alice (she/her) reports
Workspace transitions are now more seamless, with windows on both workspaces appearing focusing instead of switching at the end of transition.
Libadwaita ↗
Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.
Alice (she/her) announces
libadwaita now supports style classes
.numericfor easily making a widget use tabular figures, and.pillfor buttons, as seen in applications like Clocks.
Software ↗
Lets you install and update applications and system extensions.
Allan Day says
Milan Crha’s rework of the respository preferences was merged. Adrien Plazas added his own improvements, as well as improving the UI of the recently installed updates dialog.
Allan Day announces
Milan Crha improved the layout of the OS upgrade banners.
GJS ↗
Use the GNOME platform libraries in your JavaScript programs. GJS powers GNOME Shell, Polari, GNOME Documents, and many other apps.
ptomato announces
In GJS, Evan Welsh added the
TextEncoderandTextDecoderglobal objects. Use these in your new code, instead of importing the oldimports.ByteArraymodule.To the GJS debugger Florian Müllner added an option,
set ignoreCaughtExceptions, on by default, to not break on exceptions if they are already going to be caught elsewhere in the code.More bug fixes in GJS: Florian fixed
Gtk.Widget.install_action()andGObject.Object.prototype.bind_property_full(). Evan fixedGLib.log_set_writer_func(). Other various bug fixes from Evan and Florian as well as Chun-wei Fan and myself.
Connections ↗
A remote desktop client.
Allan Day reports
Felipe Borges and Jakub Steiner updated the Connections onboarding, to have more steps and clearer illustrations.
GNOME OS ↗
The closest to upstream you will ever get.
jjardon announces
The nightly OS images we build and publish at os.gnome.org now have automated testing done by OpenQA. This will help us ensure they stay working and is a great tool to detect regressions in our platform at integration time. More details in the announcement in discourse: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/introducing-openqa-gnome-org/7270 This work was kindly sponsored by Codethink, you can read the blog post we have done about this work here: https://www.codethink.co.uk/articles/2021/gnome-with-openqa/
Circle Apps and Libraries
Health ↗
Collect, store and visualise metrics about yourself.
Cogitri announces
GSoC intern Visvesh added support in Health for sending the user notifications to remind them that they haven’t met their daily step goal yet.
Cozy ↗
An audiobook reader and manager.
geigi announces
Cozy v1.1.0 featuring an UI redesign has been released! It’s also the first step to fully support mobile by adopting libhandy in many places.
Metadata Cleaner ↗
View and clean metadata in files.
Romain reports
Metadata Cleaner has been updated and is now available in 14 languages! Help translate it to your language for the next release, which will feature a brand new UI built with GTK4 and libadwaita.
Decoder ↗
Scan and Generate QR Codes.
Maximiliano announces
Decoder 0.2.0 has just been released. In this update we feature one of the first real world uses of the Freedesktop camera portal thanks to the ASHPD library and PipeWire. You can read more about it at my blog. You can get Decoder at Flathub.
Third Party Projects
Lorem ↗
Placeholders a few clicks away.
Maximiliano reports
Introducing Lorem, a new app to generate tasteful placeholder text for you projects.
You can get Lorem at Flathub.
Metronome ↗
Practice music with a regular tempo.
Adrien Plazas announces
I released the first version of Metronome, get it on Flathub.
Fractal ↗
Matrix messaging app for GNOME written in Rust.
Alexandre Franke reports
In our fractal-next branch, Julian tweaked the style of the ugly “this is an early development version, here be dragons” warning, while GSoC intern Kai did a couple maintenance tasks: he updated some documentation and fixed clippy warnings.
The stable branch also saw some activity, with new contributor 🎉 Amanda fixing two bugs (#392, #803) with a single merge request, sorting out our handling of
Documentation
Julian 🍃 reports
I have added a new chapter about the interface builder to “GUI development with Rust and GTK 4”.
Miscellaneous
Felix announces
The “This Week in GNOME” website got few improvements. Rafael Mardojai CM added heading anchors to make it easier to link to specific news and added a shiny symbolic icon for the project links.
Hebbot (the Matrix bot which generates the TWIG blog posts) got upgraded to v2.0. It has learned how to handle images / videos, and can now insert them directly into the rendered markdown. Creating new posts has been significantly simplified and now makes even less work for the author. For example, Hebbot now automatically generates a command to quickly download all images/videos at once. More information can be found in the release notes.
C Wunder says
We reached 60K members @ our Subreddit (r/GNOME). 🎉
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!