In our continued effort to help developers improve their GNOME applications we have now updated the online reference documentation section on developer.gnome.org. Here you will find links and tarballs to most of the important libraries used by GNOME today.
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/
The Abiword team did a 1.1.4 development release on their way towards Abiword 2.0. This release is mostly feature complete, but of course some bugfixing remains. Those that haven't tried out the GNOME 2 series of Abiword yet really should. Another treat this week comes from Martin Sevior who mailed the Nautilus mailing-list to say that Abiword can now be embeded into Nautilus. A big kudos to all the hackers involved.
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1020&mode=&order=0
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/nautilus-list/2003-March/msg00210.html
http://www.ph.unimelb.edu.au/~msevior/abiword/nautilus-abiword.png
http://www.linuxrising.com/files/abiword114.png
DevChannel.org published an article this week on developing GNOME applications using gtkmm2. The article was written by Billy O'Connor and gives a nice introduction to this increaseingly popular set of bindings. On a related note so does the March issue of Dr.Dobb's journal have an article on libsigc++ under the title: Generalized Callbacks: C++ and C#
http://tools.devchannel.org/devtools/03/03/21/1834244.shtml?tid=39
Lots of interesting stuff happening with OpenOffice these days. During the OpenOffice.org developers conference in Berlin, Michael Meeks from Ximian did a presentation on the work they have been doing on integrating OpenOffice.org into GNOME 2. Michael put his slides online and the slides contains nice screenshots of a much sweeter looking application. OpenOffice.org also announced their 1.1 beta release with lot of nice fixes and additions.
http://www.gnome.org/~michael/XimianOOo/img0.html
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1023&mode=&order=0&thold=1
With GNOME 2.2 taking care of the basics, developers now turn to the sugar coating. For instance Jason_Hildebrand announced a patch to make gvim an embedable bonobo component. Check out Jason's gnome-vim page and the nice screenshots.
http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/
http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/vim-bonobo-nautilus.png
Many GNOME applications like Dia, Gimp, Gaim and Sodipodi are ported to Windows using the GTK+ windows port. It seems GTK+ is starting to establish itself as a serious contender in the cross-plattform development arena. Of course getting your GTK+ based apps to look integrated under Windows is also important. GTK-Wimp is a theme-engine that gives you that extra level of integration. If you sometimes are forced to use a lesser desktop plattform, like Windows, this might help make it less ackward :)
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1005&mode=&order=0&thold=1
Biswapesh Chattopadhyay, after some questions by Mikael Hallendal, mailed the gnome-devtools list this week with overview of the current situation on the Anjuta front. It seems there are currently 3 parallel development tracks being worked on. Anjuta for GNOME 1, Anjuta for GNOME 2 and Anjuta 2 for GNOME 2. Many of you probably remember the merging of Anjuta and gIDE into Anjuta2 some time back, but it seems the merge never actually happened. Be sure to check out the thread to get the details. Anyway GNOME needs a good IDE so if you can you should join one of these two efforts.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-devtools/2003-March/msg00021.html
Jens Finke have been working hard on improving the eog image viewer. A 2.3 release with tons of fixes and additions was recently made, including a nice image collection view for Nautilus.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-announce-list/2003-March/msg00091.html
http://www.gnome.org/~gman/eog.png
In gnome CVS there is a gnome-themes-extras module that contains SVG based metathemes. It contains the Gorilla metatheme by Jacub 'Jimmac' Steiner, the Nuvola and Lush metathemes by David Vignoni and myself. It also contains parts of a BlueSphere metatheme by Vadim Plessky and myself. Eventually it will also contain the Crystal metatheme by Torsten Rahn. The first release of this metatheme package will occcur shortly after Ximian Desktop 2 is available, but for those who cant wait, here are some shots of some of the themes in action.
http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/images/lush-metatheme.png
http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/images/nuvolanautilus.png
http://librsvg.sourceforge.net/images/tigerandgorilla.png
Lots of little news from the GStreamer camp. Julien Moutte is keeping up his great work on the Gst-player, adding support for the GStreamer visualisation plugins. To test this out I starting mixing the visualization plugins with the GStreamer realtime video effects plugins and the result can be seen in the top link below.
Ross Burton have been working on a nifty ripper application called Sound Juicer, which you can find in GNOME CVS. According to the latest reports it works, so hopefully Ross will make the first release soon.
Thanks to the great work of Martin Schulze, known also for his work on libsigc++, the GStreamer C++ bindings are now in a state where they can be used for simple applications. Martins announcement is link number three.
And last but not least, the long awaited 0.6.1 release is now underway with patches getting merged over to the 0.6 branch in preparation for the release as we speak.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-multimedia/2003-March/msg00006.html
http://cvs.gnome.org/bonsai/rview.cgi?cvsroot=/cvs/gnome&dir=sound-juicer
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=1901591&forum_id=5947
After seeing Aleksey Sanin high on the activity chart for some weeks I thought it was a good opportunity to give some spotlight to the great collection of XML related libraries available to GNOME developers. There is of course the library that started it all, libxml developed by Daniel Veillard, probably the best library available anywhere for speedy and efficient handling of XML. Also from Daniel is libxslt. XSLT is a declarative language that allows you to translate your XML into arbitrary text output using a stylesheet.
Then there is librsvg which is being maintained by Dominic Lachowicz, which handles the rendering of SVG images, the XML format defining vector graphics.
Paolo Casarini is also still maintaining and developing gdome2, which implements level 2 Document Object Model from w3c.
A recent addition to the family is libcroco, a CSS2 parsing library developed by Dodji Seketeli and Gaël Chamoulaud.
And last but not least is Aleksey Sanin's xmlsec which implements the XML Signature Syntax and Processing and XML Encryption Syntax and Processing standards.
I hope I haven't left anyone out of this list that should have been here :) I think the GNOME development platform shows a width and variety that should satisfy most of your XML related development needs. A huge thanks to all the developers involved in making this happen.
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libcroco
http://www.aleksey.com/xmlsec/
In a previous summary I managed to claim that the support in Java/Swing for GTK+ look and feel would arrive in Java 1.5. This turns out to be factually wrong. Scott Violet from Sun mailed me to say that the GTK+ support will arrive already in Java 1.4.2. All I can say is YAY!
Ross Burton sent of a request for a new GNOME Games maintainer recently. Well the post did not go unfilled for long. Callum McKenzie stepped up to the plate and will soon take over as the GNOME Games maintainer. A big thanks goes to Ross for his work so far on GNOME games and to Callum McKenzie for taking on the job. There are other modules in GNOME like gnome-utils and control-center where new maintainers are being sought, being a maintainer of one of these core modules is both a good learning experience and great fun. I suggest that if you want to get into GNOME development then taking aim at one of these modules is a good way to do so. I would also like to remind people of the gnome-love mailing list, where many of the more experienced hackers are standing by to help new people get started on hacking gnome.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/games-list/2003-March/msg00001.html
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love
We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish - 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/
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
| Most active modules: | Most active hackers:
|
Currently open: 8705 (In the last week: New: 581, Resolved: 501, Difference: +80)
Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests):
| Module | Open Bugs | New/Opened in last week | Resolved in last week | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nautilus: | 766 | 31 | 25 | +6 |
| gtk+: | 587 | 21 | 11 | +10 |
| galeon: | 477 | 92 | 55 | +37 |
| gnome-vfs: | 253 | 3 | 4 | -1 |
| gnome-panel: | 236 | 53 | 37 | +16 |
| GIMP: | 197 | 25 | 18 | +7 |
| control-center: | 164 | 14 | 7 | +7 |
| gnome-applets: | 151 | 11 | 7 | +4 |
| GnuCash: | 127 | 5 | 5 | 0 |
| gnome-terminal: | 110 | 26 | 21 | +5 |
| sawfish: | 105 | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| libzvt: | 93 | 1 | 0 | +1 |
| balsa: | 92 | 14 | 53 | -39 |
| medusa: | 92 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| metacity: | 91 | 12 | 5 | +7 |
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs:
| Bug Hunter | Bugs Resolved/Closed |
|---|---|
| newren@math.utah.edu: | 83 |
| pawsa@theochem.kth.se: | 50 |
| daniel@veillard.com: | 50 |
| yaneti@declera.com: | 43 |
| andrew@sobala.net: | 25 |
| dkennedy@tinytoad.com: | 17 |
| charles@rebelbase.com: | 14 |
| jpr@ximian.com: | 12 |
| bordoley@msu.edu: | 12 |
| sven@gimp.org: | 11 |
| damon@gnome.org: | 11 |
| jfleck@inkstain.net: | 10 |
| calum.benson@sun.com: | 8 |
| mitch@gimp.org: | 8 |
| dave@ximian.com: | 7 |
Lots of cool developments these days, one thing that didn't get its own story but do deserve mention is the huge amount of polishing that is going into Nautilus these days. Latest release fixed the issues with icons not being properly scaled in the list view which has been high on my annoyance list for a long time. Thanks for fixing it!
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller
gnome-summary@gnome.org
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