Our friends on the Abiword team has made their landmark 1.0 release for GNOME. The official release announcement is not out yet however due to waiting for windows binaries to get made (yeah, you know how it is with windows allways trailing a long way behind us :). Anyway this release is the result of a couple of years of hard work. Abiword started out as a commercially funded project, but today all development is done by volunteers. Hard work is already begun on the 1.2 release which will feature things such a support for embedding other GNOME Office applications, tables, text frames, floating images and more. A heartfelt thanks to the Abiword community for they effort so far, Abiword is really great.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=15518&release_id=25198
The hardworking Mike Kestner has made the first official release of his Gtk+ for the C Sharp programming language. According to C# hackers I talked to these bindings are really well designed and programmed. So if you if you want to try out the newest programming language to join the GNOME family this is your chance. With the Mono compiler now working on Linux you can even try it out without windows.
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/gtk-sharp-list/2002-April/000048.html
http://gtk-sharp.sourceforge.net/
There has been a lot of discussions on what constitutes a good UI over the last months, with many UI design related efforts being done in the GNOME community. Havoc Pennington, has written an interesting article based on some claims that have been made lately that good UI design and free software don't fit togheter. Check out the link below and find out what Havoc has to say on the issue.
http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html
The supercharged support for non-western languages in GNOME 2 has been widely talked about as a great step forward, but how do you actually use it? Archit Baweja has made a nice how-to explaining how you get Devanagari support working in gedit2. This how-to will probably work well for any other languages you have fonts for as well.
http://symonds.net/~bighead/gnome/gnome-devnag-howto/
http://symonds.net/~bighead/gnome/gnome-devnag-howto/figures/gnome-hindi.png
One of the great aspects of GUADEC is the fact that is brings togheter a lot of the GNOME hackers working on the various applications and libraries for some face to face discussions. One group that got to talk togheter during GUADEC was the people hacking on GNOME Office applications. The result was a renewed commitment to making these applications integrate more with eachother like a true office suite. After GUADEC the discussion has continued on the gnome-office mailing list and code is starting to trickle in to CVS. So if you want to get involved with the GNOME Office effort this is a good a time as any. Check the link below to read the archive or subscribe to the list and join in.
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-office-list
Sun's well know accessibility expert Bill Haneman has started working on a new module in gnome-cvs called java-access-bridge. This module will make sure that Java applications running under GNOME will integrate their accessibilty support with GNOME's. This will mean that disabled users will be able to use java applications with the same ease as they use native Gnome 2 applications.
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=java-access-bridge
The CSUN 2002 conference was held at the end of last month and there was a lot of talks and presentations of the different developments in the Accessibility on Linux and Unix. Summaries and notes from that conference are now available online. Check out link below for more information and links to more info.
http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/1017380627/index_html
The GStreamer team held talks with the developers of MAS(the new Media/Sound server from x.org). The result of these talks is that GStreamer will have support for the MAS server very soon (like we already do for esd, jack and artsd) and that there probably will be further co-operation. If things work out the GStreamer team will probably push for MAS becoming the default soundserver for GNOME for the 2.2 release. Links below to the GStreamer and MAS homepages. In the related new area, GStreamer and Rhythmbox have had new releases lately.
http://mediaapplicationserver.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/rhythmbox
Christopher Blizzard is making progress on his work on porting the gtkmozembed(the mozilla rendering engine widget used by Galeon amongst others.) widget to gtk2. He has even put up some patches recently with the latest advances for the more adventuring of you.
http://people.redhat.com/blizzard/mozilla/gtk2_embedding/2002-04-11/
We will also this week have a bug squashing event in #bugs on irc.gnome.org also this thursday between 2PM-2AM GMT aka (9AM-9PM EST). So if you want GNOME 2 to be bug free this is your chance to help make it so.
Always wanted to create real applications that will run using native widgets both under Windows and GNOME using Javascript? Well then IBM have the solution for you. They have now made the first public release of their SashXB tool which lets you do exactly that. Anyone who have watched GNOME CVS stastistics have probably noticed the heavy development this have seen for the last year and know IBM invite you to check out the result so be sure to do so.
Our GNOME artists are working feverently on making cool artwork for the soon to be published art.gnome.org website. The website will feature artwork you can use to make your GNOME desktop even cooler. To keep you warm while the finishing touches are made on the new website here are two little previews, made by well known blender artist Petr Vlk
GConf is one of the central components of the GNOME 2 desktop and development system. To help developers find information and learn more about this essential library Havoc Pennington has created a GConf website for your browsing pleasure. So developers read the docs and get with the instant apply GNOME 2.0 groove
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gconf/
You all know that CodeFactory is a Swedish company paying some hackers to code on GNOME. You also know that two of these people are Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult. But what you don't know is that they have just published a tutorial to help you use the power of GConf and gnome-vfs in your own GNOME applications. So if you want to join the ranks of the elite GNOME hackers of the world be sure to read this.
http://people.codefactory.se/~micke/articles/gconf-gnomevfs-intro.html
Maintainer of bonobo, at-poke and contributor on a lot of other cool stuff like Nautilus, GStreamer and at-spi, Michael Meeks just got married. Congratulations to Michael and his lovely wife Julia. P.S. don't stay to long away on your honeymoon, we need you back hacking on GNOME :)
GUADEC 3 was successfully completed early this month. 300 hackers from all over the world got togheter in Sevilla. Talks, meetings, discussions, beer sessions where held and everyone had a great time. Lot of great talks and of course during a conference like this the after hours activities are almost as important as the official sessions, for instance our Irish hackers for instance demonstrated their great interest in foreign cultures by studying the irish bar in Sevilla every night :). A lot of pictures where taken and we link to some of them below, but watch out for pictures of dutch fingers and bork bork. Also the GUADEC papers will soon be available from guadec.org.
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/guadec3/
http://algol.prosalg.no/~docpi/php/gallery/albums.php
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/guadec-list/2002-April/msg00106.html
http://www.gnomemeeting.org/~damien/gallery/
http://es.photos.yahoo.com/azugaldia
http://www.maths.tcd.ie/~gfoster/GUADEC3/index.html
As always we have 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:
|
Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 7185 (In the last week: New: 756, Resolved: 933, Difference: -177)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 1071 | 64 | 146 | -82 |
| gtk+: | 480 | 38 | 13 | +25 |
| gnome-core: | 306 | 64 | 59 | +5 |
| gnome-applets: | 270 | 25 | 21 | +4 |
| gnome-vfs: | 252 | 3 | 2 | +1 |
| control-center: | 204 | 30 | 33 | -3 |
| sawfish: | 201 | 9 | 14 | -5 |
| galeon: | 195 | 130 | 111 | +19 |
| GIMP: | 190 | 23 | 6 | +17 |
| gnome-pilot: | 129 | 8 | 60 | -52 |
| medusa: | 125 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| gmc: | 121 | 4 | 0 | +4 |
| gnome-utils: | 119 | 8 | 13 | -5 |
| balsa: | 107 | 11 | 3 | +8 |
| dia: | 91 | 9 | 1 | +8 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| heath@pointedstick.net: | 274 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 92 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 67 |
| louie@ximian.com: | 57 |
| mark@skynet.ie: | 34 |
| daniel@veillard.com: | 32 |
| jfleck@inkstain.net: | 28 |
| charles@rebelbase.com: | 23 |
| shane.oconnor@ireland.sun.com: | 22 |
| andersca@gnu.org: | 22 |
| jody@gnome.org: | 18 |
| jacob@ximian.com: | 16 |
| kfv101@psu.edu: | 16 |
| michael@ximian.com: | 14 |
| hadess@hadess.net: | 13 |
Been some time now since the last Summary. I blame this in GUADEC and my co-conspirator on these summaries being MIA. Hope to get the summaries out more frequently again now that I am back home in Norway again. A lot of cool stuff has happened in the last month, and more is to come. Look out for the fourth GNOME 2 beta release coming to a server near you soon :)
Christian
gnome-summary@gnome.org