After four weeks of work, glycin now supports compiled-in loaders. The main benefit of this is that glycin should now work on other operating systems like FreeBSD, Windows, or macOS.
Glycin uses Linux exclusive technologies to sandbox image operations. For this, the image processing is happening in a separate, isolated, process. It would be very hard to impossible to replicate this technology for other operating systems. Therefore, glycin now supports building loaders into it directly. This still provides a huge benefit compared to traditional image loaders, since almost all of the code is written in safe Rust. The feature of ‘builtin’ loaders can, in theory, be combined with ‘external’ loaders.
The glycin crate now builds with external loaders for Linux, and automatically uses builtin loaders for all other operating systems. That means that libglycin should work on other operating systems as well. So far, the CI only contains builds cross compiled for x86_64-pc-windows-gnu and tested on Wine. Further testing, feedback, and fixes are very welcome.
Image loaders that are written in C/C++ like for HEIF, AVIF, SVG, and JPEGXL, are currently not supported for being used without sandbox. Since AVIF and JPEGXL already have rust-based implementations, and rsvg might move away from libxml2 in the future, potentially allowing for safe builtin loaders for these formats in the future.
If you want, you can support my work financially on various platforms.
On March 31, we observed Trans Day of Visibility 🏳️⚧️, World Backup Day, and fittingly, the release of Pika Backup 0.8. After two years of work, this release not only brings many small improvements, but also a rework of the code base that dates back to 2018. This will greatly help to keep Pika Backup stable and maintainable for another eight years.
This week I released Embellish v1.0,0.This is a major rewrite of the app from Gjs to Vala, using all the experience I gain from making GTK apps for the past few years. The app now uses view models for the fonts ListBox and a GridView for the Icons. Not only is the app more performant now, the code is much nicer and easier to maintain and hack.
Serigy has reached version 2, evolving into a focused, minimal clipboard manager. The release brings substantial improvements across functionality, performance, and user experience.
The new version introduces automatic expiration of old clipboard items, incognito mode for privacy, and a grid view that brings clarity to your slots. Advanced features are now accessible through context menus and tooltips, while global shortcuts let you summon Serigy instantly from anywhere.
Several bug fixes have improved stability and reliability, and the UI is significantly more responsive. The application now persists window size across sessions, and Wayland clipboard detection has been improved.
Serigy 2 also refines its design. The app now supports Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish (Chile).
Wildcard 0.3.5 released, bringing matching of regex groups, sidebar now shows overall match and group information, and new quick reference dialog showing common regular expression use cases!
You can download the latest release from Flathub!
It works with any IDE marked as such in their desktop entry. That includes IDEs in development containers such as Toolbx if you create a desktop file for it on the host system.
Things have been fairly quiet since the JasonAI takeover, but here comes Fractal 14.beta.
Sending files & location is properly disabled while editing/replying, as it doesn’t work anyway.
Call rooms are identified with a camera icon in the sidebar and show a banner to warn that other users might not read messages in these rooms.
While we still support signing in via SSO, we have dropped support for identity providers, to simplify our code and a have a closer experience to signing in with OAuth 2.0.
Map markers now use a darker variant of the accent color to have a better contrast with the map underneath.
Many small behind the scenes changes, mostly through dependency updates, and we have removed a few of them. Small improvements to the technical docs as well.
As usual, this release includes other improvements, fixes and new translations thanks to all our contributors, and our upstream projects.
As the version implies, there might be a slight risk of regressions, but it should be mostly stable. If all goes well the next step is the release candidate!
We are very excited to see several new contributors opening MRs lately to take care of their pet peeves with Fractal, which will benefit everyone in the end. If you have a little bit of time on your hands, you can try to join them by fixing one of our newcomers issues.
Flood It 2.0 has been released! It now comes with a simple game explanation dialog, the ability to replay recently played board, full translation support, and a Ctrl+1…6 keyboard shortcut for color buttons.
It also contains many under-the-hood improvements, like the transition from Gotk4 to Puregotk, a runtime update to GNOME 50, custom seed support, and much more.
Bouncer 50 was released this week, using the GNOME 50 runtime. It has bug fixes related to NetworkManager restarts, and autostart status. It also includes translations for Italian and Polish. Check it out on Flathub!
GNOME Damned Lies has seen a few UX improvements! For the release of GNOME 50, I added a specific tag for Damned Lies to track the changes and link them to existing GNOME cycles. You can see all the changes I already spoke about like merge request support, background refresh of statistics, etc. (see: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Infrastructure/damned-lies/-/releases/gnome_50).
After that, I am working towards GNOME 50.1. Why follow the GNOME release calendar? Because it provides pace, and pace is important while developing. After more than 3 years fixing technical debt and refactoring, upgrading existing code, you can see the pace of changes has increased a lot. At the beginning of GNOME 50, we had more than 120 open issues in the Damned Lies tracker; it’s down to 76 at the time of writing these lines.
So what’s new this week? I worked a lot on long-standing UX-related issues and can proudly announce a few changes in Damned Lies:
Better consistency in many strings (‘Release’ vs ‘Release Set’, past tense in action history that previously used the infinitive form).
Administrators now see the modules maintained in the site backend.
String freeze notifications now expose the affected versions and are far more stable when detecting string freeze breaks.
You now have anchors in your team pages for each language your team is working on.
i18n coordinators are now identified by a mini badge in their profile, helping any user to reach them more easily.
i18n coordinators can take action in any workflow without being a member of the team they act on.
Users can remove their own accounts.
That’s all for this week! 😃
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!
