#230 Happy New Year!

January 2, 2026 • 9 Notes • Curated by Felix

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!

Sophie (she/her) says

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!