The new image decoding code has finally landed in Loupe. This change will be the basis for many features to come, like supporting color profiles, animated images, and potentially sandboxed decoding. Already landed has the support for viewing SVGs. Thanks to GTK 4 and tiled rendering, you can view large SVGs without the UI seeing any performance penalties. However, a few known rendering bugs still have to be fixed.
The GDK-PixBuf support has, for now, been removed from Loupe. Loupe already supports many image formats directly, making it unclear if support for GDK-PixBuf plugins is required. Please let us know if an image format vital to you is missing from the list of supported formats.
Apart from this, we have:
Fixed some memory leaks,
redone the scroll-wheel logic to support high-resolution scroll wheels,
made rotation and pan gestures work correctly on touch screens, and
merged many more bug fixes, tweaks, code improvements, and documentation.
Finally, a small optical change: Drag and drop now features a newly designed thumbnail that provides more contrast to the content behind it.
In just 2 weeks, Workbench gained 11 new GNOME Platform demos and examples. More on the way.
A huge thanks to all the contributors!
Library examples and demos have 3 functions
Showcase the capabilities of the platform
Teach how to use the APIs, patterns, and widgets
Provide functional snippets ready to use
The plan for now is to focus on a wide set of UI / JavaScript entries. In the long run, we want to support more languages into Workbench and port the examples.
Share Preview has a new “logs” feature. The app will now give better hints about errors, missing metadata, and limits set by social platforms like image size.
This new feature has added a lot of new strings. Everyone is welcome to contribute or update translations for their language on Weblate.
After the release of Pika Backup 0.5, Fina has taken care of many outstanding smaller and more significant issues. Pika Backup now also uses the new background status for apps that will be available with GNOME Shell 44. That way, you can always check what Pika Backup is doing in the background.
Some of the other changes that happened:
Fix compact is not run after pruning
Fix potential crash after deleting archives
Fix spurious ‘Pika Backup crashed’ messages
Change secret service error messages to include specific instructions how to resolve the issue
Change to explain checkpoint creation when aborting backups
Change to restart backup after SSH connection timeout
Change reconnection to be abortable and count down seconds remaining
I released Dev Toolbox! If you are tired of using random websites for conversions or simple checks during your coding, give it a try. Simple to use with local processing. Includes encoders and decoders, formatters for various languages, image converters, text and hash generators, and much more. Available on Flathub: https://beta.flathub.org/apps/me.iepure.devtoolbox
This week we released owlkettle 2.2.0, a declarative GUI framework based on GTK. Owlkettle is a library for the Nim programming language. One major focus for this release was improving the documentation. There are 15 new examples as well as a new document explaining how owlkettle works internally. We also improved the support for libadwaita by adding bindings for the EntryRow, ComboRow, ExpanderRow, WindowSurface, Flap and SplitButton widgets. Other improvements include support for multithreading and sending notifications. You can find a short tutorial for getting started with owlkettle here.
This week I released Chromatic, a simple tuner app written in Rust. Chromatic detects the frequency of audio input, converts it to the correct musical note and octave, and displays the cents error. Cents are displayed on an analog gauge to make tuning more visually intuitive. Requires PulseAudio or PipeWire.
Flare 0.7.0-beta.1 was released. It does not provide any big new features, but updates many dependencies which lead to pretty big changes in the codebase. To check everything is working as expected, this beta was released for anyone to try out if they want. Note that due to changes in the storage, a relink will be required at the first start of the application.
Furthermore, Flare has gained experimental support for integrating with feedbackd to provide vibration or audio feedback on message receive.
After a longer time I started working on Blurble again and the app has moved a few steps closer to version 1.0.0:
Keyboard navigation has been improved. The currently active cell is highlighted and it is possible to navigate the UI using the Tab key.
The buttons on the keyboard are now also colored. For better playability are now keyboard buttons also colored based on if and where the character is in the word.
The app has been redesigned. A welcome page, help and nicer game result information have been added.
Extension download count is now available to the public on extensions.gnome.org.
Currently, Argos extension (not developed since 3.32) holding the records for more than 13.8M downloads following by Dash to Dock extension with 6.2M downloads.
My name is Melissa Wu and I am a Project Coordinator with the GNOME Foundation. I’m in charge of special projects, fundraising and assist Caroline Henriksen with marketing and branding and Kristi Progri with events and conferences. I’m also the resident travel coordinator for hotels and other conference travel.
Right now I have two focuses – Raising sponsorships for GUADEC 2023 in Riga, Lativa (https://events.gnome.org/event/101/) and organizing our volunteers. I need help with both!! If you are interested, please feel free to reach out to me directly. This is a great time to learn something new or share your talents with us!
This week I am preparing for SCaLE where I will manning the booth for the next three days – fundraising, selling shirts, and sharing what’s new with GNOME. If you are in the area, come see us at the booth or stop by our GNOME Beers event on Sat (March 11) at 6pm at Craft by Smoke and Fire (30 W. Green Street. Pasadena, CA)
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!
