#96 Polished Settings

• Curated by Felix

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.

Kévin Commaille says

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:

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!