People are always curious about what is happening with Nautilus. This week I interviewed Alexander Larsson and Dave Camp about where Nautilus is sailing. To get the inside scope check on the interview on LinuxOrbit.
Jeff Waugh announced a new development snapshot of the upcoming GNOME 2.2 release. And to make it easy for you to test he also made a new release of Garnome. Check out the announcement on gnomedesktop.org for all the links and details.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=725&mode=&order=0&thold=0
The Abiword team had a fund setup where user could contribute money. This fund had already been used to help core developers attend developers conferences and enable them to extend Abiword. Sadly someone seems to be low enough to even steal the meager funds of a volunteer project like Abiword. Dominic Lachowicz had to report that all of Abiwords money had been stolen from the Abiword PayPal account. What makes matters even worse is the attitude PayPal is showing towards the matter, so if you have a PayPal account today I strongly recommend reconsidering it or at least removing any funds and credit card information you have attached to it. Full details in the mail from Dom.
http://www.abisource.com/mailinglists/abiword-dev/02/Oct/0422.html
With Christopher Blizzard now hacking fulltime on the Gtk2 support in Mozilla, the Galeon team decided to put out the first development release of Galeon2. The build process is still a bit manual with some patching needed, but the Galeon developers have provided good documentation about the needed steps. Go Galeon!
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1232231&forum_id=6200
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/galeon2/
The art.gnome.org team is still hard at work adding new content and improving the infrastructure of the site. This weekend the team added tons of new content to art.gnome.org so be sure to check it out. Thanks both to Roman, Alex and Thomas for their effort on the site, but also a great thanks to all the wonderful artists and theme hackers out there for their incredible work. You make GNOME really shine.
Those of us that read OSNews regularly know that Eugenia writes some though reviews and have no inhibitions about commenting on what she thinks are bad UI design choices. Well Jan Rosczak read one of her articles and decided to try and make her happy. The result is a very nice Gtk+ 2.0 theme which I myself use. For screenshots and the full story check out the lighthouseblue homepage.
http://lighthouseblue.sourceforge.net/
Partly due to GNOME springing out of the Gimp project we have always had some great eyecandy to offer our users. Some of that eyecandy got lost in the transition to GNOME 2 while of course other things where added. But of course what got lost in the transition is something many people have been missing. We have two patches submitted this week to bring back two such pieces of eyecandy, the first is from Ian McKellar who has made a patch for getting panel translucency back. The second is from Alex Duggan who brings back the desktop background image inside the workspace switcher. Links to current patches and example screenshots below. There is also a very cool patch for Acme which makes the acme windows translucent. This patch is made by David Kennedy and shown in screenshot at link number five.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96752
http://www.gnome.org/~roman/Private/Spacy-Shot.png
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96988
http://art.gnome.org/show_screenshot.php?screenshotID=6
http://www.tinytoad.com/dkennedy/acme_transparent.png
James Willcox continues his great work on Nautilus. This week he created a patch to add Mime-type sensitive tabs in the Nautilus properties dialog. The first use for his is adding a a metadata tab for Music, but more uses for this are sure to come. Check out the screenshot, looks great!
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2002-October/msg00105.html
http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~jwillcox/files/screenshots/nautilus-music-properties.png
Many GNOME users chocked this week on seeing the screenshot below. To those who are still missing sleep over it I can say that it is just a mockup made with Gimp magic, so no reason to worry ;) At least not until someone submits a patch.
http://www.themedepot.org/showzoomedframe.php4?id=364
Pier Luigi Fiorini has made the following capplet which lets you override the default colors of your Gtk2 themes. Currently it is a standalone capplet, but after some discussion on the desktop-devel mailing list Pier will turn it into a tab for the Apperance capplet Jonathan Blandford is working on.
http://digilander.libero.it/plfiorini/gnome-color-properties.png
There has for a long time been discussions and prototypes made for the new GNOME fileselector. The layout and number of buttons has been highly debated, but it seems a likely candidate is starting to emerge. Once again it is Bastien Nocera who is providing the goods. Take a look at screenshot below for the first peak.
http://snorp.coreyo.net/~snorp/fileselector-test.png
Christian Marillat and Colin Walters have created the migration scripts needed to move GNOME 2 from experimental into SID. So for all you Debian users out there, you can now get the official GNU Desktop for the official GNU Linux distribution. Announcement linked below.
http://lists.debian.org/debian-gtk-gnome/2002/debian-gtk-gnome-200210/msg00288.html
Sun and Wipro is currently working hard to help out with improving general performance in GNOME2. While GNOME2 is already snappier with what it is natural to compare with including GNOME1 there is always room for improvement. Brian Cameron posted a patch to gnome-vfs this weeks which shaves of around 15% on Nautilus startup time. Very cool Cameron!. Link below to Brian's mail.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-vfs-list/2002-October/msg00031.html
Dennis Cranston has been working hard on cleaning up the GNOME search tool the last few weeks. Many of the changes where human interface guideline related stuff. Improvements include among other things; combined the simple and advanced tabs, removed the menu bar, icon loading using the new freedesktop.org icon theme specification, drag and drop of search results, new rules to search by content, size, and date and of course many bug fixes. The new search tool looks simply wonderful. Screenshots below:
http://www.linuxrising.com/files/gnome-search-tool-simple.png
http://www.linuxrising.com/files/gnome-search-tool-advanced.png
The Gtk# team has turned into liquid lightning recently and new stuff is just storming in. In the new and cool department is the new GConf# bindings by Rachel Hestilow. The interesting bits is that it is possible to do things with GConf# that are not possible with GConf, so check the white paper linked below and a screenshot from Miguel de Icaza himself showing it in action.
http://toxic.magnesium.net/~hestilow/gconfsharp/intro.html
http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/shots/gconf-shot.png
Alp Toker has been working on C# bindings for GStreamer and will be commiting them to Mono CVS very soon. He is also porting his Gtk# based mediaplayer Phonic to use his GStreamer# bindings. Link showing (pre-gst) Phonic in action, but Alp promises a new GStreamer based release is just around the corner. Seems to me Mono and Gtk# is getting there much faster than most anticipated.
http://www.atoker.com/phonic/phonic-0.6.png
Havoc wrote in to gnomedesktop.org last week to make people aware of the great work being done on the Eclipse development tools. Eclipse is a cross plattform set of development tools which has a nice Gtk2 GUI on Unix. It is well featured and definetly something people hacking on GNOME should try out. Check the story on gnomedesktop.org for the details.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=724&mode=&order=0
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/news/index.php4
http://www.gnome-de.org/projekte/listen/#news@gnome-de.org
http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
http://debian-br.cipsga.org.br/resumo-gnome/
http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
|
Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 7675 (In the last week: New: 677, Resolved: 992, Difference: -315)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 862 | 56 | 65 | -9 |
| gtk+: | 541 | 34 | 29 | +5 |
| galeon: | 365 | 88 | 70 | +18 |
| gnome-vfs: | 299 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| GIMP: | 274 | 16 | 19 | -3 |
| gnome-applets: | 189 | 23 | 151 | -128 |
| gnome-panel: | 137 | 56 | 117 | -61 |
| gnome-core: | 111 | 32 | 17 | +15 |
| sawfish: | 104 | 3 | 12 | -9 |
| control-center: | 95 | 13 | 66 | -53 |
| medusa: | 94 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| GnuCash: | 89 | 18 | 9 | +9 |
| libzvt: | 86 | 4 | 2 | +2 |
| dia: | 79 | 12 | 3 | +9 |
| glib: | 78 | 6 | 2 | +4 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| kmaraas@gnome.org: | 178 |
| vincent@vuntz.net: | 105 |
| dkennedy@tinytoad.com: | 100 |
| andrew@sobala.net: | 67 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 61 |
| louie@ximian.com: | 40 |
| bfrantzdale@hmc.edu: | 33 |
| jfleck@inkstain.net: | 23 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 21 |
| hadess@hadess.net: | 20 |
| arvind.samptur@wipro.com: | 19 |
| otaylor@redhat.com: | 18 |
| davef@tetsubo.com: | 16 |
| sven@gimp.org: | 13 |
| hp@redhat.com: | 13 |
Lots of cool stuff happening this week with bugs getting fixed and features added. We are doing the same thing with the summary too, for some reason the bugzilla stats in the summary and the ones on bugzilla.gnome.org are totally different so we are trying to discover why that is. I am also working with our friends at art.gnome.org to see if we can add art.gnome.org section in the summary like we have for recent software. Look for that next week.
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org