We use our computers today more and more as our primary worktool and as a tool for keeping in touch with friends, collegues and family. This means more and more information about different people are being stored in varied places on your machine. The question is why not link all this information together to give the user a powerfull tool to ease their communication and interaction tasks? Well Nat Friedman is well underway creating such an informaton hub for the GNOME desktop called Dashboard. Check out Nat's website for how the effort is progressing (still early stage) and when you see other systems start offering this in the future remember who innovates and who immitates :)
http://www.nat.org/dashboard/rewrite.png
http://www.nat.org/2002/november/dashboard-notes.txt
It is fun how things move in circles. Our own Edd Dumbill, well known for his work on the GNOME bluetooth support (which he recently added Dashboard support to) inspired Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly books fame to write an article about making the destop network aware. Jeff Waugh then found this article and sent it in to our desktop-devel list to inspire people to work on making the 'N' part of GNOME more of a reality. Links below to Tim's article and to Edd's blog.
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3422
The GNOME community is a place where tons of things are going on and it is not always easy to keep tabs of everything. To help all you members of gnomania out there get all the news in a one stop shop so have Jeff Waugh put together a little page called 'Planet GNOME'. It is a website that collects GNOME news from a variety of sources, it even includes the blog entries of developers who are kind enough to make their blogs available through RSS on Jeff's request.
http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/planetgnome/
Was recently pointed to a little gem called amSynth by Nick Dowell. Amsynth is a very nice software sythesizer created using the gtkmm bindings, and it is nearing its 1.0 release fast. If you are into making music on your machine you should definetly check it out. Nick is also currently investigating adding midi support to GStreamer to enable GStreamer to be used as the basis for such applications as amSynth. Keep up the wonderfull work Nick!
http://amsynthe.sourceforge.net/amSynth/index.html
Jorn Baayen recently sent out a mail announcing that he will withdraw as Rhythmbox maintainer. Maintership will be taken over by Colin Walters and Benjamin Otte. Of course others are welcome to join too. The current plan is to get fix up the playlist support in current CVS and do a release.
The GNOME 2.4 countdown has started and a 2.3.3 development release was made this week. GNOME 2.4 includes lots of new applications which either replace older applications or add new functionality to the desktop. Things getting adding in GNOME 2.4 are things like the already popular Gnomemeeting videoconferencing application and a video player called Totem using the GStreamer. There are also many nice bugfixes and feature additions in existing modules so be sure to check out the changelog or see the Nautilus improvements article.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1205&mode=&order=0
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1198&mode=&order=0
The options are many for developers who want to develop GNOME applications using Java. There is the latest version of Swing in Java 1.4.2 that can immitate the look of GTK+ and Metacity. There is the GTK+ version of SWT from IBM, used in Eclipse and last but in no way least there is Java-GNOME which just had their 0.8 release which is also their first GNOME and GTK+ 2 release of their bindings. If you want your Java application to easily have great integration the Java-GNOME is probably what you want to go with as the bindings use the actuall GTK+ and GNOME libraries to offer their services.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1204&mode=&order=0&thold=1
Free Software has been around for a while now and many applications have been turned into open source or free software projects. Yet the applications that where started as free software projects and managed to reach a level of completenes and power that make them equal or better than properietary alternatives have a special place in our heart. Due to this it was with great pleasure I saw that one of these applications, Gnumeric, celebrate its 5th birthday this week. Gnumeric not only equals market leader Excel, but in many ways surpass Excel. So a big congratulations to the Gnumeric team for their excelent work so far, and we are really looking forward to your future releases with anticipation.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1196&mode=&order=0&thold=1
The GStreamer team has for quite some time now focused on stability and bugfixes. Things seem to be working pretty well now which has allowed the developers to move on to more fun things. One thing that developers will be happy to hear is that Ronald Bultje has been working hard on cleaning up the mime system used in GStreamer and user will be happy to learn that as part of that he fixed/added plugins to handle quicktime, vp3 and asf video formats. These will be made available in the 0.7 development release which is planned soon, and after some testing we will probably backport them to the 0.6 stable branch.
Another little fun hack being done in relation to GStreamer is done by Jeremy Apoc who is working on a sound-juicer gnome-vfs module so you can rip your cd's from inside your file manager. Screenshot below.
http://apoc.chez.tiscali.fr/soundjuicer-vfs_module.png
Long time GNOME hackers Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult recently left CodeFactory to set up their own software development company. Between them Mikael and Richard is responsible for a lot of great GNOME work like MrProject, Yelp and now latly Gossip, their new Jabber client. So if you are interested in hiring swedens best programmers you should get in touch with Imendio immediatly.
http://www.imendio.com/projects/gossip/
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and Japanese - all the links below.
http://www.gynov.org/gnome-summary/gnome_summary.php4
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/
http://www.gnome.gr.jp/summary/index.html
Currently open: 9446 (In the last week: New: 614, Resolved: 650, Difference: -36)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 868 | 40 | 27 | +13 |
| gtk+: | 606 | 46 | 27 | +19 |
| galeon: | 547 | 55 | 48 | +7 |
| gnome-panel: | 287 | 46 | 92 | -46 |
| gnome-vfs: | 226 | 2 | 9 | -7 |
| control-center: | 194 | 20 | 17 | +3 |
| GIMP: | 155 | 17 | 19 | -2 |
| GnuCash: | 152 | 12 | 9 | +3 |
| balsa: | 130 | 5 | 6 | -1 |
| dia: | 126 | 8 | 5 | +3 |
| sawfish: | 119 | 4 | 4 | 0 |
| metacity: | 115 | 9 | 10 | -1 |
| gnome-applets: | 104 | 11 | 19 | -8 |
| gnome-terminal: | 102 | 5 | 18 | -13 |
| epiphany: | 100 | 57 | 40 | +17 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| kmaraas gnome org: | 125 |
| newren math utah edu: | 56 |
| yaneti declera com: | 42 |
| aldug astrolinux com: | 33 |
| mpeseng tin it: | 21 |
| mark skynet ie: | 18 |
| bill haneman sun com: | 15 |
| finlay moeraki com: | 14 |
| james daa com au: | 12 |
| sven gimp org: | 12 |
| aguelzow taliesin ca: | 11 |
| rbultje ronald bitfreak net: | 10 |
| jens triq net: | 10 |
| chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: | 9 |
| readams hmc edu: | 9 |
Lots of great things happening since the last summary, GUADEC for instance. Lot of fun stuff happening there this year with demonstrations of bluetooth, handhelds running GPE, Real talking about their plan to make a new Real player using GTK2, gigantic rollout of GNOME desktops in Spain and much more. You should have been there :)
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org
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