An early access release of the GNOME Accessiblity Framework was announced by the Foundation. The ATK (Accessibility ToolKit) is a toolkit independent implementation which allows assistive technologies (screen readers etc) to get information about the desktop. This is a general capability that any GUI toolkit could use, in GTK+ 2.0's case the standard widgets have built-in support. So applications written with GTK+ 2.0 will automatically be accessible, though coders can do various things to make their apps more accessible - the GAP (GNOME Accessiblity Project) project has more information. This is an important piece of work predominantly provided by the SUN hackers.
http://www.gnome.org/pr-accessible.html
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gap/
Christian Schaller interviews many of the Sun hackers to find out what they've been up to with GNOME. Topics covered include some of the reasons Sun chose GNOME, usability, accessiblity, testing and how the transition from CDE is planned. This is a wide-ranging interview which really gives you a feel for what this team hopes to achieve working with GNOME.
http://www.linuxpower.org/display.php?id=213
Glade and libglade have been two of the most outstanding successes of GNOME for application developers. Describing the GUI as an XML document allows quick development and freedom to try different designs quickly. Jeff Waugh asks James about the port of libglade to GNOME 2.0.
http://perkypants.org/projects/gnome-2.0-interviews/libglade/
Ximian announced availability of its' commercial version of the GNOME evironment. The Ximian desktop is a packaged version of GNOME provided on CD for either $29.95 or with Staroffice for $49.95. Meanwhile the Ximian hackers are all steam ahead to get Evolution 1.0 ready by October: a competition for anyone helping with bug-hunting was announced.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-6984949.html
http://www.ximian.com/products/ximian_desktop/
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/29/1846223&mode=thread
The GNOME Foundation announced Timothy Ney as Director of the GNOME Foundation. He will be responsible for the administrative side of the Foundation and will also be the main contact point. This is an exciting development, with a full time employee hopefully the Foundations work will progress quickly. Federico also released the proposed policy on gnome.org accounts - comments are sought.
http://www.gnome.org/pr-ney_execdir.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2001-August/msg00027.html
http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2807176,00.html
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2001-August/msg00008.html
Anders Carlsson the new maintainer for the libgnome* libraries sent an update on their status and what's left to be done for the freeze to become solid. There's still lots to be done and a number of tough problems to sort out, but it's down to enough issues that everyone can concentrate on them. Some of the core developers have started considering moving to the GNOME 2.0 platform so that bugs will be more easily discovered such as Nautilus and gide.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-August/msg00405.html
Johan Dahlin released an initial version of Python bindings for Bonobo the GNOME component architecture. There are some basic examples and screenshots on his homepage, hopefully more will come. As bonobo is becoming more important to the development platform more effort is being put into language bindings.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-August/msg00033.html
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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Until next time,
Steve
gnome-summary@gnome.org