Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 08 to July 15.
I am pleased to announce that TWIG is having its first anniversary! 52 weeks ago, 52 TWIG issues later, or to put it simply - one year ago I launched TWIG!
The first issue was published on July 16, 2021, and was named “#1 Scrolling in the Dark”.
After discussing the concept with some other GNOME contributors, we had to search for “news” in order to have enough material for the first issue.
Now, one year later, it gives me great pleasure to announce that we have set a new record for news on the anniversary. There has never been that many news as this week in the whole year!
I am cautiously optimistic, and claim the concept has now become established in the GNOME community, and is being used by more and more projects to quickly and easily announce news.
What do you think about TWIG? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? Criticism? Compliments? Let us know! You can contact us in our Matrix #thisweek:gnome.org room anytime!
But now to the actual news - Next year is sure to be at least as exciting!
This year the event is hybrid: some of us are lucky enough to be able to make it to Guadalajara, but for those who aren’t, the talks will be broadcasted online as well.
Register on https://guadec.org to get all the details on how to join the event remotely.
Nautilus now uses AdwFlap for the sidebar. At small sizes the sidebar automatically hides, and a button to show it appears. The sidebar can also be shown and hidden with a swipe on touchscreens.
GTK 4.7.1 has been released! This is a new development snapshot towards the 4.8 release, which will be available in GNOME 43. A few of the latest changes:
a new text widget, GtkInscription, which can be used inside list views and wherever you want the text to respond to the UI layout instead of the other way around
performance improvements for GtkListView, with culling of out of view rows
Thanks to the massive amounts of work of Christian Hergert, Builder was ported to GTK4 and libadwaita. This port was merged this week, and the first unstable release with it (43.alpha0) was published. This version of Builder has a different app-id, org.gnome.Builder.Devel, and therefore needs to be manually installed. Some of the highlights include:
New tabbed editor which uses traditional tabs instead of Builder’s document stack
A new status bar at the bottom with contextual information, such as the git branch, language syntax options, and others
Dark and light styles
Improved flow for creating new projects
Support for many other run options when running applications with Valgrind
Deeper integration with the Sysprof profiler
Run applications with specific accessibility settings, such as high contrast
Reorganizable panels thanks to libpanel
More powerful shortcuts management
Command editor to add custom run commands to the pipeline
… and a lot more. Many previously available features are still in the works, and anyone interested can help pushing Builder to the finish line by picking any task at the GTK4 port checklist.
Thanks again to Christian Hergert for this exciting and impressive work on Builder!
GLib has ported from libpcre to libpcre2, which is a huge amount of work done by Aleksei Rybalkin. It shouldn’t cause any behaviour changes for GRegex users, though.
In GJS 1.73.1, Nasah Kuma landed a more intelligent output display for the interactive interpreter, which pretty-prints objects’ properties and values based on their type. This improvement also applies to the log() and logError() functions.
Also in GJS 1.73.1, thanks to Sergio Costas, DBus proxy classes now include methods named with the suffix Async, which perform async calls to DBus APIs and return Promises. This is in addition to the existing suffixes Sync (for blocking calls) and Remote (for async calls with callbacks.)
Another improvement from GJS 1.73.1 from Sonny Piers is an override for Gio.ActionMap.prototype.add_action_entries(). Previously this method wouldn’t work because it required an array of Gio.ActionEntry objects, which are not possible to construct in GJS. Now it can be used with an array of plain objects. (e.g. this.add_action_entries([{name: 'open', activate() { ... }}]);
Version 2.11.0 of Gaphor, the simple modeling tool, is out! It adds support for adding elements to diagrams using double click, union types, SysML Enumerations as ValueTypes, and numerous bug fixes. We also greatly improved compatibility with GTK4, and we expect the next release will shift it to be the default version of GTK.
The first version of the word guessing game Blurble was released this week! Blurble is a GTK clone of Wordle written in Vala and made with localization in mind.
Bottles 2022.7.14 was released! We introduce a new Wine runner called Soda, which will be supported by the Bottles team. The aforementioned runner is based on Valve’s Wine, with the inclusion of patches from Proton, TKG and GE.
We also bring in new installers UI to make the installation process prettier and more fun.
