When I first started Dev Toolbox, it was just a simple tool I built for myself, a weekend project born out of curiosity and the need for something useful. I never imagined anyone else would care about it, let alone use it regularly. I figured maybe a few developers here and there would find it helpful. But then people started using it. Reporting bugs. Translating it. Opening pull requests. Writing reviews. Sharing it with friends. And suddenly, it wasn’t just my toolbox anymore.
Fast forward to today: over 50k downloads on Flathub and 300 stars on GitHub. I still can’t quite believe it.
To every contributor, translator, tester, reviewer, or curious user who gave it a shot: thank you. You turned a small idea into something real, something useful, and something I’m proud to keep building.
Enough feelings. Let’s talk about what’s new in v1.3.0!
New tool: Color Converter Convert between HEX, RGB, HSL, and other formats. (Thanks @Flachz)
JWT tool improvements You can now encode payloads and verify signatures. (Thanks @Flachz)
Chmod tool upgrade Added support for setuid, setgid, and the sticky bit. (Thanks @Flachz)
Improved search, inside and out
The app now includes extra keywords and metadata, making it easier to discover in app stores and desktops
In-app search now matches tool keywords, not just their names. (Thanks @freeducks-debug)
Now a GNOME search provider You can search and launch Dev Toolbox tools straight from the Overview
Updated translations Many new translatable strings were added this release. Thank you to all translators who chipped in.
On welcome.gnome.org, of all of the listed teams, only Translation and Documentation Teams linked to their wikis instead of their respective Welcome pages. But now this changes for Translation Team! After several months of working on this we finally have our own Welcome page. Now is the best time to make GNOME speak your language!
PyGObject has support for async functions since 3.50. Now the async functions and methods are also discoverable from the GNOME Python API documentation.
As part of the Digital Wellbeing project, sponsored by the GNOME Foundation, there is an initiative to redesign the Parental Controls to bring it on par with modern GNOME apps and implement new features such as Screen Time monitoring, Bedtime Schedule and Web Filtering. Recently the UI for the unlock page was refreshed, the user selector was reworked to be a list rather than a carousel, and navigation was changed to use pages. There’s more to come, see https://blogs.gnome.org/ignapk/2025/07/11/digital-wellbeing-contract/ for more information.
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!
