Papers can now be used to draw freehand annotations on PDF documents (ink), as well as add text to them! These features were merged this week and are now available in GNOME nightly, more details in this blog post.
As usual, a few GTK developers are meeting up before FOSDEM for the planning hackfest; we are discussing the current state of the project, and also where do we want to go in the next 6-12 months:
the new SVG rendering code
accessibility
icons and other assets
platform support, especially Windows and Android
various improvements in the GLib code
the state of various dependencies, like gdk-pixbuf and accesskit
whether to introduce unstable API as an opt in for experimentation, before finalising it
Matthias just released a new GTK 4.21 developers snapshot, in time for GNOME 50’s beta release. This release brings various changes:
the state saving and restoring API has been made private; we have received feedback by early adopters, and we are going to need to go back to the drawing board in order to address some issues related to its use
GSK shaders are now autogenerated
GTK does not depend on librsvg any more, and implements its own SVG renderer, including various filters
After a quite long hiatus, I continued writing on the gtk4-rs book. This time we introduce the build system Meson. This sets the stage for more interesting features like internationalization: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/meson.html
Mahjongg 49.1 has been released, and is available on Flathub. This release mainly focuses on usability improvements, and includes the following changes:
Implement pause menu with ‘Resume’ and ‘Quit’ buttons
Add Escape keyboard shortcut to pause game
Pause game when main window is obscured
Pause game when dialogs and menus are visible
Don’t allow pausing completed games
Don’t show confirmation dialog for layout change after completing game
Fix text entry not always receiving focus in Scores dialog
We are announcing an important update to Carburetor, our tool for easily setting up a Tor proxy. This release focuses on crucial improvements for users in Iran, where Tor remains one of the few reliable ways to stay connected.
Following the massacre of protesters by Iran state which reportedly led to the killing of more than 60,000 individuals in a couple of days (this includes shooting injured people into the head on the hospital beds), the Internet and all other means of communications such as SMS and landlines suffered a total shutdown. After dozen of days, network access is now very fragile and heavily restricted there.
In response, this update adds support for Snowflake bridges with AMP cache rendezvous, which have proven more reliable under current conditions. To use them, ensure these two bridges are included in your inventory:
We’ve also removed the previous 90 seconds connection timeout, as establishing a connection now often takes much longer due to extreme throttling and filtering, sometimes more than 10 minutes.
Additionally, dependencies like Tor and pluggable transports have been updated to ensure better stability and security.
I’ve just released a new version of Bouncer. Launching Bouncer now opens a dashboard to show the status of required components and configurations. Longtime users may not notice, but this will be especially helpful for new users trying to get Bouncer up and running. You can get Bouncer from Flathub!
Alpaca 9 is out, now users can now implement character cards to make role-play scenarios with their AI models, this update also brings changes to how Alpaca integrates Ollama instances, simplifying the process of running local AI even more. Check out the release discussion for more information -> https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca/discussions/1088
GStreamer 1.28.0 has been released! This is a major new feature release, with lots of exciting new features and other improvements. Some highlights:
GTK4 is now shipped with the GStreamer binaries on macOS and Windows alongside the gtk4paintablesink video sink
vulkan plugin now supports AV1, VP9, HEVC-10 decoding and H264 encoding
glupload now has a udmabuf uploader to more efficiently share video buffers, leading to better perf when using, say, a software decoder and waylandsink or gtk4paintablesink
waylandsink has improved handling for HDR10 metadata
New AMDHIP plugin and integration library
Analytics (AI/ML) plugin suite has gained numerous new features
New plugins for transcription, translation and speech synthesis, etc
Enhanced RTMP/FLV support with HEVC support and multi-track audio
New vmaf element for perceptual video quality assessment using Netflix’s VMAF framework
New source element to render a Qt6 QML scene
New GIF decoder element with looping support
Improved support for iOS and Android
And many, many more new features alongside the usual bug fixes
Pipeline 3.2.0 was released. This release updates the underlying video player, Clapper, to the latest version. This in particular allows specifying options passed to yt-dlp for video playback, including cookies files or extractor arguments. Besides that, it also adds some new keyboard shortcuts for toggling fullscreen and the sidebar, and fixes quite a few bugs.
One important note: Shortly before the release of this version, YouTube decided to break yt-dlp. We are working on updating the yt-dlp version, but as a temporary workaround, you can add the following string to the yt-dlp extraction arguments configurable in the preferences: youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless.
Just Perfection extension is now ported to GNOME Shell 50 and available on EGO. This update brings bug fixes and new features, including toggles for backlight and DND button visibility.
Malika is now halfway through her Outreachy internship about signatures in Papers and has made great progress! She just published a blog post about her experience so far, you can read it here.
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!
