#234 Annotated Documents

January 30, 2026 • 14 Notes • Curated by Felix

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 23 to January 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Document Viewer (Papers) ↗

View, search or annotate documents in many different formats.

lbaudin announces

Papers can now be used to draw freehand annotations on PDF documents (ink), as well as add text to them! These features were merged this week and are now available in GNOME nightly, more details in this blog post.

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

As usual, a few GTK developers are meeting up before FOSDEM for the planning hackfest; we are discussing the current state of the project, and also where do we want to go in the next 6-12 months:

  • the new SVG rendering code
  • accessibility
  • icons and other assets
  • platform support, especially Windows and Android
  • various improvements in the GLib code
  • the state of various dependencies, like gdk-pixbuf and accesskit
  • whether to introduce unstable API as an opt in for experimentation, before finalising it

You can follow along the agenda, and the notes here: https://pad.gnome.org/gtk-hackfest-2026

We are also going to be at the GNOME social event on Saturday in Brussels, so make sure to join us!

Emmanuele Bassi says

Matthias just released a new GTK 4.21 developers snapshot, in time for GNOME 50’s beta release. This release brings various changes:

  • the state saving and restoring API has been made private; we have received feedback by early adopters, and we are going to need to go back to the drawing board in order to address some issues related to its use
  • GSK shaders are now autogenerated
  • GTK does not depend on librsvg any more, and implements its own SVG renderer, including various filters
  • the Inspector has a heat map generator
  • SVG filters can be used inside CSS data URLs
  • GtkAspectFrame’s measurement has been fixed to properly (and efficiently) support more cases and fractional sizes

Additionally, we have multiple fixes for Windows, macOS, and Android. Lots of things to look forward for the 4.22 stable release!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

After a quite long hiatus, I continued writing on the gtk4-rs book. This time we introduce the build system Meson. This sets the stage for more interesting features like internationalization: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/meson.html

Mahjongg ↗

Match tiles and clear the board

Mat announces

Mahjongg 49.1 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release mainly focuses on usability improvements, and includes the following changes:

  • Implement pause menu with ‘Resume’ and ‘Quit’ buttons
  • Add Escape keyboard shortcut to pause game
  • Pause game when main window is obscured
  • Pause game when dialogs and menus are visible
  • Don’t allow pausing completed games
  • Don’t show confirmation dialog for layout change after completing game
  • Fix text entry not always receiving focus in Scores dialog
  • Translation updates

Third Party Projects

Danial reports

We are announcing an important update to Carburetor, our tool for easily setting up a Tor proxy. This release focuses on crucial improvements for users in Iran, where Tor remains one of the few reliable ways to stay connected.

Following the massacre of protesters by Iran state which reportedly led to the killing of more than 60,000 individuals in a couple of days (this includes shooting injured people into the head on the hospital beds), the Internet and all other means of communications such as SMS and landlines suffered a total shutdown. After dozen of days, network access is now very fragile and heavily restricted there.

In response, this update adds support for Snowflake bridges with AMP cache rendezvous, which have proven more reliable under current conditions. To use them, ensure these two bridges are included in your inventory:

snowflake 192.0.2.5:80 2B280B23E1107BB62ABFC40DDCC8824814F80A72 url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn
snowflake 192.0.2.6:80 8838024498816A039FCBBAB14E6F40A0843051FA url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn

We’ve also removed the previous 90 seconds connection timeout, as establishing a connection now often takes much longer due to extreme throttling and filtering, sometimes more than 10 minutes.

Additionally, dependencies like Tor and pluggable transports have been updated to ensure better stability and security.

Stay safe. Keep connected.

justinrdonnelly announces

I’ve just released a new version of Bouncer. Launching Bouncer now opens a dashboard to show the status of required components and configurations. Longtime users may not notice, but this will be especially helpful for new users trying to get Bouncer up and running. You can get Bouncer from Flathub!

Jeffry Samuel says

Alpaca 9 is out, now users can now implement character cards to make role-play scenarios with their AI models, this update also brings changes to how Alpaca integrates Ollama instances, simplifying the process of running local AI even more. Check out the release discussion for more information -> https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca/discussions/1088

Daniel Wood reports

Design, 2D computer aided design (CAD) for GNOME sees a new release, highlights include:

  • Enable clipboard management (Cut, Copy, Paste, Copy with basepoint, Select All)
  • Add Cutclip Command (CUTCLIP)
  • Add Copyclip Command (COPYCLIP)
  • Add Copybase Command (COPYBASE)
  • Add Pasteclip Command (PASTECLIP)
  • Add Match Properties Command (MA)
  • Add Pan Command (P)
  • Add Zoom Command (Z)
  • Show context menu on right click
  • Enable Undo and Redo
  • Improved Trim (TR) command with Arc, Circle and Line entities
  • Indicate save state on tabs and header bar
  • Plus many fixes!

Design is available from Flathub:

https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

slomo announces

GStreamer 1.28.0 has been released! This is a major new feature release, with lots of exciting new features and other improvements. Some highlights:

  • GTK4 is now shipped with the GStreamer binaries on macOS and Windows alongside the gtk4paintablesink video sink
  • vulkan plugin now supports AV1, VP9, HEVC-10 decoding and H264 encoding
  • glupload now has a udmabuf uploader to more efficiently share video buffers, leading to better perf when using, say, a software decoder and waylandsink or gtk4paintablesink
  • waylandsink has improved handling for HDR10 metadata
  • New AMD HIP plugin and integration library
  • Analytics (AI/ML) plugin suite has gained numerous new features
  • New plugins for transcription, translation and speech synthesis, etc
  • Enhanced RTMP/FLV support with HEVC support and multi-track audio
  • New vmaf element for perceptual video quality assessment using Netflix’s VMAF framework
  • New source element to render a Qt6 QML scene
  • New GIF decoder element with looping support
  • Improved support for iOS and Android
  • And many, many more new features alongside the usual bug fixes

Check the extensive release notes for more details.

rat reports

Echo 3 is released! Echo is a GUI ping utlity.

Version 3 brings along two notable features: instant cancelling of pings and a “Trips” tab showing details about each trip made in the ping.

As well as smaller changes to the layout: removed the ping options expander and moved error messages below the address bar.

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.lo2dev.Echo

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline 3.2.0 was released. This release updates the underlying video player, Clapper, to the latest version. This in particular allows specifying options passed to yt-dlp for video playback, including cookies files or extractor arguments. Besides that, it also adds some new keyboard shortcuts for toggling fullscreen and the sidebar, and fixes quite a few bugs.

One important note: Shortly before the release of this version, YouTube decided to break yt-dlp. We are working on updating the yt-dlp version, but as a temporary workaround, you can add the following string to the yt-dlp extraction arguments configurable in the preferences: youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless.

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection says

Just Perfection extension is now ported to GNOME Shell 50 and available on EGO. This update brings bug fixes and new features, including toggles for backlight and DND button visibility.

Internships

lbaudin announces

Malika is now halfway through her Outreachy internship about signatures in Papers and has made great progress! She just published a blog post about her experience so far, you can read it here.

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!