One really cool feature of Natilus that has yet to be really taken advantage of is the support for SVG vector graphics icons. Vector based icons has the advantage for instance of scaling much better than the current bitmap icons. Well Jacub Steiner has been working on a SVG based theme for Nautilus. While it is still not ready you can have a look at what he is working on by looking at the following screenshots:
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/gorilla1.png
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/gorilla2.png
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/gorilla3.png
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/gorilla4.png
http://jimmac.musichall.cz/screenshots/gorilla5.png
Mike Kestner's Gtk# (Gtk-sharp) was checked into the Mono CVS repository not long ago. Gtk# can currently run simple hello world applications. The binding is nice, as it maps Gtk+ signals to delegates in C#. You can see the Gtk# Hello World program at the top link bellow and join the Gtk-sharp mailinglist at the second.
http://www.go-mono.com/src/HelloWorld.cs
http://lists.ximian.com/mailman/listinfo/gtk-sharp-list
The Gnumeric team announced version 0.71 of the Gnumeric spreadsheet this week. This is a major step forward for Gnumeric since it now for the first time officially includes Graph support including importing Graphs in Excel documents. Gnumeric has for a long time been one of GNOME's top tier killer apps, and with this release the Gnumeric (and Guppi) team once more prove their ability to deliver the best. Congratulations and thanks goes to Jody Goldberg, Almer S. Tigelaar, Morten Welinder, Jon Trowbridge and the rest of the hackers who have contributed to this release.Lins below to the Gnumeric homepage with full release notes and a nice screenshot from Michael Meeks showing Gnumeric 0.71 in action with Graphs and print-preview.
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/gnumeric-bio-savart.png
It is now a year since the current GNOME Foundation board was elected by the individual members of the GNOME community. This means it is time to stage a new election and the board has set the wheels in motion to make this happen. For this and other news check out the GNOME Foundation board minutes. So if you are planning to run for the GNOME Foundation board it is time to start polishing your speechmaking skills and send in some really impressive patches in order to win public admiration :)
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2001-October/msg00007.html
The Ximian hackers are as busy as ever, making three important releases this week. First out was beta 5 of their great groupware tool Evolution with fewer bugs and even more polished features than ever. Evolution is really begining to reach that level of useability that makes it useable even for your grandma. They also released a new beta of the new fantastic looking Control Center including their now Control Center integrated Ximian Setup Tools which in turn adds a X Display configuration to its set of configuration tools to the package and more. Full announcements below:
http://www.ximian.com/devzone/release_notes/evolution/1.0_beta_5.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-October/msg00004.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2001-October/msg00003.html
We got this little status report from the progress of Metacity from its creator Havoc Pennington.
Metacity has moved into CVS, module 'metacity'. I've updated the README, which no one ever reads, but everyone should. I've been working on Alt+Tab, which is pretty cool now. Also, I experimentally confined windows to the screen, an idea from Joel Spolsky. Alex, Owen, and jrb have flamed me daily for adding this feature.
So far I've rejected two crack-smoking feature requests: Telsa refuses to use a WM without focus-follows-mouse, and jrb refuses to use a WM without borderless terminal windows. They are both sadly mistaken.
Owen routed around me, and is maintaining his own Metacity fork with his feature modifications. Don't confuse cheap Metacity imitations with genuine crack-free Metacity.
You can get Metacity at the metacity homepage linked below or from CVS. You need bleeding-edge CVS GTK+. (As you would find out if you read the README!)
Havoc
http://people.redhat.com/~hp/metacity/
Those that know Havoc knows that just creating Metacity as mentioned above would not be enough for him, so Havoc has been hard at work making sure the GNOME 2 plattform will be fully parallel installable with GNOME 1.x. This means that when GNOME 2 alpha 2 comes out you will be able to have it installed and running in parallel with your current GNOME 1.x environment. According to the first mail linked below Havoc has now been able to fix all the needed libraries in order to make this possible. But Havoc hasn't stopped there, he has also created a new library called libwnck which will improve things like the tasklist and the pager in GNOME. For the last task Havoc is requesting a volunteer to step forward to code a new EWMH-native tasklist and pager so click on the second link below to read the details on this task. Anyway big thanks goes to Havoc for his continued effort on GNOME.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-October/msg00079.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-October/msg00087.html
The Abiword tem is continuing to blaze onwards with their 0.9.x release cycle fixing up bugs and polishing features in prepartion for the big 1.0 release. Items in weeks Abiword Weekly news includes continued work on the wmf import and positive feedback on the 0.9.4 build.If you haven't downloaded 0.9.4 yet then you should, it is really a great release (That was also meant as a small hint to the Ximian packagers :) Link below to the AWN #64 issue and the Abiword homepage.
http://www.abisource.com/dev/news/2001/awn64.phtml
Now in the early stages compiling GNOME 2.0 from CVS an tarballs can be a bit challeging with its wide variety of dependencies. Michael Meeks have therefore put togheter a chart showing the different dependencies of GNOME 2. So if you are a developer and want to download and compile GNOME 2 you should take a look at the chart for a quick overview of how things fit togheter.
http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/gnome-2.0-depends.png
Thanks to resourceful volunteers around the globe we got some translations of the GNOME summaries available. So linked below are French translation, Spanish translation and Hungarian translation. If there are other translations available please let us know.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: http://www.gnome.org/applist/listrecent.php3
That was all for this week, stay tuned for more exiting news coming in next week.
Christian