#5 Freeze Frenzy

• Curated by Thib

Update 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.

Alexander Mikhaylenko 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.

Alexander Mikhaylenko announces

libadwaita now supports style classes .numeric for easily making a widget use tabular figures, and .pill for 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 TextEncoder and TextDecoder global objects. Use these in your new code, instead of importing the old imports.ByteArray module.

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() and GObject.Object.prototype.bind_property_full(). Evan fixed GLib.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 tag trimming.

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!