Thanks to the design work by Jakub and Calvin, Loupe has now a new animation for switching images via keyboard and buttons. We got repeated feedback that the previous animation can cause dizziness for some people (including me) on larger screens. Therefore we no longer animate the image moving over the complete screen like on smartphones. Instead, in simplified terms, we only animate the image moving a small and fixed amount of pixels over the old image. On touchscreens and with touchpads the image can still be moved directly as before. Thanks to everyone who helped with feedback and testing.
The GTK 4.13.5 release includes not one, but two new renderers. Their names are vulkan and ngl, and we also call them unified renderers, since they are built from the same sources.
The new renderers can handle many corner cases correctly that the current gl renderer does not handle, and they offer advantages such as antialiasing and supersampled gradients.
The ngl renderer does not currently support GLES 2.
The new renderers are still considered experimental, and GTK will only use them if they are explicitly selected using the
GSK_RENDERER environment variable. The default renderer is still the current gl renderer.
As part of this work, the GSK include files have been rearranged. It is no longer necessary to include renderer-specific headers for ngl and vulkan (and doing so will trigger deprecation warnings), and their constructors are always available.
The previously available experimental GdkVulkanContext APIs and the old Vulkan renderer have been removed.
Vulkan support is now enabled by default, and Linux distributions should build GTK with Vulkan. This requires the glslc shader compiler as a new dependency.
Contacts can now import multiple vCard files at once and preview the contacts you’re about to import to avoid any mistakes. Already part of the 46.alpha release, so grab it while it’s hot!
Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, version 2.23.0 is now out! Thanks to the amazing work by Arjan, this version features the following enhancements for our use of GTK:
Move from Gtk.TreeView to Gtk.ColumnView and ListView for our Property Editors
Move from Gtk.FileChooserNative to Gtk.FileDialog
Move from our own custom Gtk.Revealer to Adw.Toast for our in-app notifications
Remove the scary filesystem access warning in FlatHub by using the Filesystem Portal for Flatpak
We also made other feature enhancements:
Support types for parameters
Restore windows in maximized and full-screen state
Fine grained CSS: elements in a presentation item can be changed from CSS (experimental)
Key Rack is an app to view passwords and other secret stored by other apps. With the newly released version 0.3 it not only supports secrets stored in Flatpaks but also global secrets on the host. The new version also bring support for showing binary secrets in hex representation.
This week we have finally released Graphs 1.7.0. It’s been a long process since the summer, but it’s worth the wait. To say this is our biggest release yet would be an understatement, just as reference, at the last release we were at a total of 1474 commits in the repository while this release is at 2653 commits.
These changes may sound somewhat familiar for those who’ve read the beta announcement two weeks ago, but here’s just a few of the major highlights of this release:
A major UI overhaul with a new default theme and new libadwaita widgets from GNOME 45.
A completely revamped style editor with previews for each style
Curve fitting functionality
Touchpad gesture support for navigating the canvas
Many small quality-of-life improvements, such as persistent settings, better equation handling, and streamlined preferences.
These are just the major highlights, but a more complete changelog can be found on GitHub. To install the latest version of Graphs, we recommend you to get it at Flathub! I’d like to thank everyone involved for making this release possible. Particularly my co-developer Christoph Kohnen, as well as Tobias Bernard, and Sophie (she/her) for all the feedback in the GNOME Circle application.
The GUADEC 2024 Call for Participation is now open! This year’s conference will take place in-person Denver, USA from July 19-24 and will be streamed online for remote attendees. We are looking for both remote and in-person submissions, workshop and BoF requests may also be submitted during this call. All submissions are due by Feb 18. https://foundation.gnome.org/2024/01/10/guadec-2024-call-for-participation-opens/
