One hundred weeks ago, on Friday 16 July 2021, “This Week in GNOME” was launched - the first post was “#1 Scrolling in the Dark”.
Since then TWIG has grown into a vibrant community, and has become a weekly ritual for many people—both for developers who share their work, and for curious readers who want to follow the development of GNOME.
TWIG is not the result of a few individuals, but of a large, diverse, dedicated, motivated, fantastic group of contributors who are all behind the GNOME project!
The picture above shows the various projects people have been working on over the last few years. Since the beginning, over a thousand news submissions have been made to the Matrix room #thisweek:gnome.org. A big thank you to each and every contributor ❤️! Can you recognise your own project in the picture?
In line with the anniversary, we have also set a new record. Never before have there been so many submissions as this week. Let’s celebrate this success together! And now, as usual, to the happenings across the GNOME Project in the week from 09 June to 16 June!
Files was an early adopter of the new AdwOverlaySplitView and AdwToolbarView widgets, featuring updated visual style, courtesy of Chris 🌱️ .
Work on improving file searching experience continues on full steam. When searching from grid, it no longer changes to a list. The goal was to show the location of recursive results, but now the grid view has grown the ability to display the path itself. This avoids the abrupt change of view from grid to list.
Since a week the new nightly version of the Vala Sdk is published and everyone can use it! Its hosted on the GNOME nightly flatpak remote. Its the same as if you use the stable Sdk, except the id is org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.vala-nightly. Currently there is a 22.08 branch, which works with the latest gnome and freedesktop runtime. The nightly Sdk includes the git version of the Vala compiler and the Vala language server updated every day. So if you want to try out new features or need a recent bug fix, use the nightly Sdk! You can read more also on discourse. Great thank you to Jordan Petridis for setting everything up!
If you’re interested in using Typescript for GNOME apps, you can now use the new Typescript SDK Extension. I’ve also published a Typescript Template you can use as a starting point for your apps.
Metronome 1.3.0 has been released! This version fixes a bug with off-beat ticks and allows to change the BPM while playing. We’ve also added tooltips to several buttons. It is available on Flathub.
This week, I also worked on a new release of Flowtime. Flowtime is a productivity app for the time management method with the same name, especially useful for the tasks you love, as other methods like Pomodoro may interrupt you when you are at your most concentrated. Flowtime lets you work all the time you want, to then take a break that lasts a fifth of the time you worked. It has various useful features, which include:
Statistics: Keep track of the time you’ve worked, the time you’ve taken a break and which is you most productive day of the week.
Small View: Reduce the clutter in the Flowtime window by activating a mode that shows just the timer.
Run in the background: Close the window to reduce distractions while your timer is still running, check your progress in GNOME Shell’s background apps panel.
Customizable factor to compute break time: If a fifth of the time you’ve worked does not fit your work flow, you can change it from a half of the time up to a tenth.
New Impression release: 2.0. We decided to drop the major versions to simplify versioning. This release includes visual enhancements, automatic updates of the available drives list, explicit drive selection before flashing, and more translations, making Impression available in a total of 8 languages. Huge thanks to Brage for helping out so much with the app! It’s now available on Flathub
This week I released version 1.0.0 of Photometric Viewer, a utility software for viewing EULUMDAT and IESNA photometric files. Photometric files are used in the lighting industry, CAD and 3D graphics for describing properties and light distributions of lamps and luminaires. The software is available on Snapcraft and Flathub.
This week I’ve released List 44.6. It’s a simple To Do application for your daily tasks. You can add tasks and sub-tasks, edit them, move around and mark as completed. That is pretty much it!
This version includes:
History of deleted tasks
Button to undo deletion
UI and Accessibility improvements
It is available on Flathub
This week, and after a three month hiatus in development, I published the second major release of Paper Clip (formerly PDF Metadata Editor), with various improvements since it was last featured in TWIG, which include:
New icon! Thanks to Brage Fuglseth for the neat icon!
Fix many UI paper cuts to better fit the GNOMEHIG. Thanks to Tobias Bernard for his recommendations!
The main view now has a thumbnail of the document instead of a symbolic icon
The details window has been removed and its contents have been moved to the bottom of the main view
Tube Converter V2023.6.1 is here! This release is packed with new features and fixes that make Tube Converter faster, more customizable, and easier to use.
Continued thanks to @fsobolev and @DaPigGuy who continuously work with me to implement and test all of these features. @soumyaDghosh for managing snap and all other contributors, feature requesters, bug testers, and translators who continue to make Tube Converter the best that it can be :) ❤️
Here’s the full changelog:
Added authentication options when adding a download if needed
Added a Keyring to store credentials that can be used when authenticating
Added the advanced download option to specify a specific timeframe of a media to download
Added the ability to embed chapters in a download
Added the ability to turn on automatically cropping audio thumbnails
Added the ability to specify a comma-separated list of language codes for subtitle downloading
Improved the speed of playlist validation
The “Number Titles” switch’s state will now be remembered and used again for future downloads
The previous “Video Resolution” will be remembered and pre-selected if available for future downloads
Comment, Description, Synopsis and Purl fields will no longer be embedded in metadata
If a download fails and was not stopped, Tube Converter will automatically retry it one more time
Fixed an issue where some websites were not validated
Fixed an issue where the incorrect file extension was sometimes shown for generic downloads
Updated translations (Thanks everyone on Weblate!)
A new version “v0.7.0” for Rnote, a vector-based sketching and handwriting app is out! Notable new features: a focus mode that hides the toolbars for a better experience on devices with lower resolution, inertial touch-scrolling, a dedicated zoom-tool and a lot of other improvements
For the 100th issue of TWIG, we are pleased to announce that Telegrand has been renamed to Paper Plane. In addition, we have now started distributing releases on Flathub Beta.
Among the recent changes are:
The chat history now has a background image, which is animated when new messages arrive, thanks to yuraiz.
A bug was fixed that lead to an application crash if selecting non-existing chats from the contacts window, thank to alissonlauffer.
Avatars of deleted accounts now have a ghost icon set, thanks to karl0d.
The application will now be built with more aggressive compiler options, which should result in a smaller and maybe faster binary.
This week we released version 1.6.0 of Graphs, which spots a number of bugfixes as well as some quality of life changes. Some highlights of this release include:
Full localization support, with full translations available in Dutch, Turkish (thanks to sabriunal) and Swedish
Action dialogs now follow the GNOMEHIG
The behavior of the axes limits have been improved, with fewer unnecessary resets
The axis limits are now persistent when loading saved projects
Regular and advanced import have been merged to offer a single mode to add new data
Graphs now functions properly on high DPI displays with scaled resolutions
And many general bug fixes as well as refactors under the hood
Graphs is now officially available as Snap package as well (thanks soumyaDghosh).
The latest version of Graphs can be found on Flathub or on Snapcraft!
While there is no time schedule, planned features for coming updates include the ability to add objects to the plots themselves, and functionality for data regression using arbitrary equations. If you want to contribute to Graphs or have any issues or feedback, please file a ticket at the Github page.
Thanks to everyone involved in making this release possible. Not the least to my co-developer cmkohnen.
And congratulations to the whole community with the 100th issue of TWIG! Just a few weeks ago we reached another milestone with a total of 1000 submissions.
With our cumulative efforts, there’s no denying the data that the year of the Linux desktop will soon be upon us ;-)
Gradience Team is pleased to announce the first beta release of the upcoming 0.8.0 version after 4+ months (128 days). This release brings the long-awaited feature of GNOME Shell theming 🎉 along with several enhancements:
🔄 Added ability to use JSDelivr instead of GitHub for downloading presets
✨ Added mnemonics to view switchers
⌨️ Added keyboard shortcuts
🖼️ Small tweaks to the icon
🌐 Updated translations
🐛 Bug fixes
A list of blocking issues for the release of version 0.8.0 can be found in the Gradience milestone on GitHub. All contributions are welcome!
The beta version will soon be available on Flathub Beta for testing. Stay tuned!
Dev Toolbox v1.1 has landed on Flathub! This release upgrades the platform to GNOME 44 and introduces many new tools and improvements. Thank you for all the suggestions I received since the last release and for the translators’ work on Weblate.
Here’s a list of everything that has changed:
Upgraded to GNOME 44
Now follows the system theme
Timestamp: ISO8601/RFC3339 output format and timezone support
Ported UIs to blueprint
Improved icon
New tool: JS Formatter
New tool: Certificate Parser
New tool: CSR Generator
New tool: Random Generator
New tool: CRON generator
New tool: chmod calculator
New tool: QR-code generator
New tool: JSON validator
New tool: CSS Formatter
New translations: Czech (@Amereyeu), Spanish (Óscar Fernández Díaz on Weblate and @gallegonovato), Norwegian bokmål (@comradekingu) and Portuguese (@SantosSi)
Thanks to Yuri Konotopov, GNOME extensions website now allows users to delete their account from the account settings page. User account will be deleted in 7 days after the request.
