After two years of development, I’m glad to announce that Apostrophe 3.0 is here! Almost every aspect of the application has seen improvements, from the obvious ones like the port to GTK4 and the refined interface, to several improvements under the hood. Among the new features are:
A new toolbar so you don’t have to remember markdown syntax
A more secure approach when opening and rendering files
Autoindentation and autocompletion for lists and braces
An improved Hemingway mode
The document stats will also show stats for the selected text
Railway version 2.5.0 was released. It contains updates to the GNOME 46 runtime, as well as the addition of the PKP provider (and removal of the INSA provider due to the API failing to search for locations). It furthermore now tries to query the remarks of journeys in the system-language, fixes a crash for the Spanish translation of the app and provides a fix for the RMV provider throwing an error.
Last month Reuben Thomas completed his port of Enchant to Vala! Enchant is a spellchecking library also used in GNOME. Read the blog post about it and also his experience on porting another project (Zile) to Vala here.
The Tracker SPARQL developers are very happy to welcome rachle08 and Demigod who will be joining the team as part of Google Summer of Code, working on a project to add a web-based query editor and generally improve the developer experience.
In Tracker SPARQL, Carlos Garnacho worked around a non-backwards compatible change released in SQLite 3.45.3. This change causes errors that look like ambiguous column name: ROWID (0). The fix will be in the next stable release - see Discourse for more details.
I’ve released my first app on Flathub! Mingle is a simple app
to play with Google’s Emoji Kitchen and copy them to your clipboard. It is written in Vala and has been my little pet project these past few months as a learning exercise.
The GStreamer GTK4 video sink got support for directly importing video frames as dmabufs on Linux when using GStreamer 1.24 / GTK 4.14, in addition to the already existing support for importing OpenGL textures or video frames in normal system memory. This new feature is available in version 0.12.4 of the sink plugin.
This is especially useful for video players using hardware decoders or applications that display a video stream from a camera (via v4l2 or pipewire), and allows side-stepping the GL/Vulkan rendering of the video frames inside GTK under certain conditions and let the composition be done by the Wayland compositor or even directly pass the dmabufs to the GPU kernel driver. Doing so would reduce GPU utilization and by that frees resources for other tasks and reduces power consumption. See Matthias’ blog post on the GTK blog for more details about the dmabuf and graphics offloading support in GTK.
Planify 4.7 is Here! Discover the New Features and Improvements
We’re thrilled to announce the arrival of Planify 4.7! This version brings a host of exciting enhancements and new features that will make your task and project management experience smoother and more efficient than ever. Let’s take a look at what we’ve added:
Advanced Filtering Function
Now in Planify, you can filter your tasks within a project based on priority, due date, and assigned tags. Take control of your tasks like never before!
Custom Sorting in Today View
Personalize the Today view by sorting your tasks the way you prefer. Make your day more productive by organizing tasks your way!
Instant Task Details
With our new task detail view in the sidebar, you can quickly access all relevant task information while in the Board view. Keep your workflow uninterrupted!
Efficient Management of Completed Tasks
Now, deleting completed tasks is easier than ever. Keep your workspace clean and organized with just a few clicks!
Attach Files to Your Tasks
Never lose track of important files related to your tasks. With the file attachment feature, keep all relevant information in one place.
Celebrate Achievements with Sound
Want a fun way to celebrate your achievements? Now you can play a sound when completing a task. Make every accomplishment even more satisfying!
Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
We’ve addressed a number of errors, from project duplication to issues with animation when adding subtasks. Additionally, we’ve updated translations in various languages, including Hindi, Bulgarian, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish.
Download the latest version of Planify on Flathub now and take your task management to the next level!
For any feedback, suggestions or bug reports, please file an issue at the Github issue tracker.
Gameeky 0.6.4 is now available on Flathub. This new release brings minor fixes for running Gameeky on other platforms and it’s now fully available in Brazilian Portuguese 🇧🇷, thanks to Rafael Fontenelle. As a result of Rafael efforts, the offline documentation can now be translated using regular gettext-based tools and therefore much easier to do so.
Retrieving the log commits and calculating the graph is now much faster. Opening up the log for, i.e. the gnome-shell repo, will now only take some seconds, if “Show all branches” is checked it will take roughly 15 seconds. Before it took roughly 1 minute 40 seconds, depending on your hardware of course.
There is now also a merge dialog available to merge a branch or commit into the current head. It is also possible to start a merge directly from the log context menu.
For easier usage, a help output has been added to both the turtle_cli and the turtlevcs python package, a bash completion file has been added and an emblem dialog has been added to the settings dialog.
And there are many more minor fixes and tweaks, see the full changelog.
Mahjongg has received a whole slew of improvements in the last few weeks:
Complete dark/light mode support with separate backgrounds for each tileset
Faster loading times (almost instant, compared to the previous ~5 seconds for some tile layouts)
Moved tile layout switcher to the main menu, for easier access
Ported to newer GTK/libadwaita widgets, such as Gtk.ColumnView and Adw.Dialog
All known bugs addressed (issue tracker is empty!)
These changes are not released yet, but are available for testing in the nightly Flatpak package: flatpak install gnome-nightly org.gnome.Mahjongg.Devel
Here comes the bride Fractal 7, with extended encryption support and improved accessibility. Server-side key backup and account recovery have been added, bringing greater security. Third-party verification has received some bug fixes and improvements. Amongst the many accessibility improvements, navigability has increased, especially in the room history. But that’s not all we’ve been up to in the past three months:
Messages that failed to send can now be retried or discarded.
Messages can be reported to server admins for moderation.
Room details are now considered complete, with the addition of room address management, permissions, and room upgrade.
A new member menu appears when clicking on an avatar in the room history. It offers a quick way to do many actions related to that person, including opening a direct chat with them and moderating them.
Pills are clickable and allow to directly go to a room or member profile.
As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
We want to address special thanks to the translators who worked on this version. We know this is a huge undertaking and have a deep appreciation for what you’ve done. If you want to help with this effort, head over to Damned Lies.
We are already hard at work for our next release, so if you want to give us a hand you can start by looking at our Newcomer issues or just come say hello in our Matrix room.
Glycin is gaining support for other programming languages. Glycin is a library that features sandboxed and extendable image loading and is used by Image Viewer. It is written in Rust and so far only provided a Rust API. As part of my work for GNOMESTF, it has now gained initial support for being used with other languages. The basis for this is the C-API. Via GObject introspections it is now also usable with GJS, Python, and Vala (untested).
The advantages of Glycin over the well-proven GdkPixbuf are improved security, more reliable and dynamically adjusted memory usage limits, and reliable termination of loading processes. Currently, the drawbacks include a slightly increased overhead and missing support for anything but Linux.
We are happy to announce that GNOME was assigned eight slots for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects this year!
GSoC is a program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. A number of long term GNOME developers are former GSoC interns, making the program a very valuable entry point for new members in our community.
In 2024, we will be mentoring the following projects:
The GNOME Asia 2024 Call for Locations is open! If you are interested in hosting this year’s conference in your city make sure to submit an intent to bid by May 15, and a final proposal by June 6. More details about how to submit a proposal can be found here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/04/30/call-for-gnome-asia-2024-location-proposals/
The GUADEC 2025 Call for Locations is also open! For next year’s conference, we’re accepting bids from anywhere in the world. If you would like to bring GUADEC to your city make sure to submit an intent to bid today (May 3) and your full proposal by May 31. More details can be found here: https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/04/18/call-for-guadec-2025-location-proposals/
Registration is open for GUADEC 2024. This year’s conference takes place on July 19-24 in Denver, Colorado, USA. Let us know if you’ll be attending, remotely or in person, by registering on guadec.org. For anyone attending in person, we’ve organized a social outing to a Colorado Rockies baseball game! You can learn more and register to attend here: https://events.gnome.org/event/209/page/331-colorado-rockies-baseball-game
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!
