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#132 Bottom Sheets

• Curated by Felix

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

Platform

Hardware support

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.

Alice (she/her) says

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!