Sumana Harihareswara provides a novice’s introduction to Telepathy, covering its goals, a guide to its architecture, platforms that use it, its future, and how to dive in.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya introduces GNOME Shell and its design goals.

As the GNOME Project gears up to kick off a new Outreach Program for Women (OPW), Marina Zhurakhinskaya and Hanna Wallach look back at the Women’s Summer Outreach Program (WSOP) from 2006. Marina follows up with the participants to see what they learned and how OPW can benefit from past experience.

For many people, Telepathy is just an incredibly complex specification for implementing instant messaging clients. The truth is though, Telepathy is so much more. Telepathy allows programs on the desktop to use what we think of as Communications as a Service.

Cathy Malmrose gives a glimpse into a project where seven year old girls build desktops with Ubuntu for their grandparents.

This week… 1637 commits, in 179 projects, by 248 happy hackers (and 285 were translation commits).

• In the camel-gobject branch of Evolution, Matthew Barnes replaced Camel’s homegrown type system with GObject.
• Brasero got Tracker support in its search pane . (GNOME bug 465660)
• Simon van der Linden added a method to compare GIBaseInfo objects (GNOME bug 590527)
• Pitivi got preliminary support for video mixing.
• Brian Cameron added back Include, Exclude, and IncludeAll configuration options to GDM, to select which users should be visible; the option had been removd in the 2.22 rewrite. (GNOME 557553)
• Florian Müllner improved the GNOME Shell to switch from the overview to the confirmation dialog some applications display before closing, when an application is closed from the overview . (GNOME bug 602532).
• Also in the GNOME Shell, to support a message tray, Dan Winship added a notification daemon service.
• After doing a first serie of commands two weeks ago, Xavier Claessens added support for the /nick command to Empathy . (GNOME bug 602066)
• Evince has been modified to display files attached to PDF documents (it requires poppler from git master ). (GNOME bug 601839)
• The GNOME Icon Theme got special icons for XDF folders (documents, download, music, pictures…).

Top projects

Project	Commits
gtk+	150
tracker	85
hamster-applet	82
evolution	56
empathy	56
banshee	50
totem	46
gnumeric	34
nautilus-actions	33
pitivi	29

Top authors

Author	Commits	Modules
Matej Urbančič	87	gnome-system-tools, file-roller, gnome-control-center and others
Christian Dywan	75	gtk+, glib
Toms Bauģis	73	hamster-applet
Javier Jardón	61	gtk+, glib, gtk-web and others
Bastien Nocera	48	totem, gnome-bluetooth, nautilus-sendto and others
Matthew Barnes	48	evolution, evolution-data-server, gnomeweb-wml and others
Guillaume Desmottes	35	empathy
Jorge González	34	evolution, libgda, empathy and others
Morten Welinder	31	gnumeric, goffice, libgsf
Pierre Wieser	31	nautilus-actions

Not as much detail as normal as I’m covering a much longer time frame … I’ll be returning to weekly updates now.

Marketing hackfest. Helped plan and attended the first ever GNOME Marketing hackfest. It went well and we will be doing more. Thanks to Paul Cutler for putting it together. Thanks to the travel committee for getting everyone there. Thanks to Novell and Google for sponsoring it. Thanks very much to all the people that showed up to work hard on GNOME marketing!

GNOME Journal. Added a bunch of ideas for GNOME Journal articles. (Now we just need people to write them! Feel free to add ideas or write articles.) Recruited authors for the Women in GNOME Journal edition. Interviewed a woman GNOME advisory board member for it. Helped edit a couple of articles.

Published the GNOME Q3 report. Thanks to all the teams who submitted updates!

Attended the first OSS Watch advisory board meeting via phone. Will attend the first in person one in a couple of weeks.

Agustín Benito put me in touch with La Laguna College and we exchanged a couple of emails. They are interested in helping recruit more women to free software.

Forwarded several journalist requests to the appropriate people – most went to the release team with questions about GNOME 3.0.

Played around with several different views and methods of looking at my goals. Trying to find a better way to align goals to individual task items and to visualize how we are doing on larger goals. Plan to work on this further.

Got sponsors for hackfests (like the marketing one) and the Boston Summit. Wrote up a sponsorship agreement at the request of one of the sponsors. I plan to tweak it a bit make a sponsorship agreement that we can use for all GNOME events.

Attended free software women’s group meeting.

Let the Teaching Open Source mailing list group that GNOME has people willing to speak about GNOME in their classes. Set Willie Walker up with RPI.

Talked to most of the advisory board members about raising advisory board fees for next year both at an advisory board meeting and one on one. Touched base with them in general.

Talked to Clay Johnson from the Sunlight Foundation. Got some interesting insights into fundraising and volunteers. I hope to interview him later about fundraising and post on my blog. He’s planning the Great American Hackathon to develop free and open source applications for open government.

Sent information to Claudia to help her wrap up finances for the Desktop Summit. We are just waiting on one sponsor to pay us so we can close the books.

Spent 30 hours travelling to Vietnam. But it’s been worth it! I’m currently attending the 2nd annual GNOME Asia Summit! They have an awesome team of volunteers. They recruited business and international trade students to help interpret for all of the foreign speakers. They are all very enthusiastic and having a great time! I’ve had a chance so far to speak to a city government official, local companies using and developing open source and lots of enthusiastic students!

Banshee 1.5.2, aka 1.6 beta 3, was released with several new features and many fixes, including an iTunes importer, improved accessibility, reading/writing of playcounts and ratings, and more supported devices. Get it now!

The GStreamer team is pleased to announce new releases of the Good and Bad Plugins modules in the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series.

Check out release notes for gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-bad or download tarballs for gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-bad

This week… 1612 commits, in 180 projects, by 213 happy hackers (and 293 were translation commits).

• Banshee was migrated to the Last.fm 2.0 API . (GNOME bug 541227)
• A general search feature has been added to Rygel, including Tracker.
• The GtkNotebook widget got an “action area”, to be used for things like having a single close tab button to the right of all tabs. Johannes Schmid wrote about it in his weblog: GtkNotebook action widgets . (GNOME bug 116650)
• Totem gained an on-screen display when in fullscreen mode, Bastien Nocero announced it in A little OSD . (GNOME bug 600985)
• Simon van der Linden added the possibility to import wrappers from pygi to pygobject.
• The GNOME Shell got presence items added to the status menu . (GNOME bug 601458)
• Behdad Esfahbod reverted a commit to vte, as not clearing the alternate screen caused issues with less.
• Basic Mac OS X integration (menu, dock, bundle) has been pushed to gedit.
• Empathy was fixed to ask for password when joining a protected room (GNOME bug 579341)
• The View Properties dialog of Gnumeric was converted to be instant-apply.
• William Walker added provisional support for GNOME Shell magnifier service to Orca.

The meeting minutes for the October 29th board meeting is now public.
Refer here:

      http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic/Minutes/20091029

Other past board meetings are archived here:

     http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic/Minutes

The Meeting Minutes and the IRC log from our meeting this past Sunday have been posted.

We discussed which documents are being worked on for the 2.30 cycle, incorporating accessibility documentation in to user documentation, and planning GNOME Games documentation updates.

The GNOME Games planning is interesting in that with Mallard and our vision of topic based support is how user help should be built into games.  We brainstormed the following topics that should be in each games’ help file:

• Gameplay (Introduction)
• Basic Gameplay and winning scenario
• Strategy
• Multiple pages if necessary
• Multiplayer
• Tips and Tricks

Note the topics: “Strategy”, “Basic Gameplay”, “Multiplayer” and “Tips and Tricks”.  This is what topic based help is all about!  Rather than writing help focused on how to start a game and the basic controls, we aim to provide users with the winning conditions for the games and the strategies behind them.

Our next meeting will be November 29th.  See you there!

This week… 2027 commits, in 180 projects, by 252 happy hackers (and 403 were translation commits).

• Totem got (on-disk) buffering support for downloads, Bastien Nocera blogged about it: No more stuttering.
• The gvfs webdav backend has been changed to remember cookies while it’s running.
• Carlos Garnocho made the SPARQL API of Tracker fully asynchronous.
• Postr (the GNOME Flickr Uploader) has been improved to allow direct editing of title and description, when double clicking (or pressing the Return key) on the photo . (GNOME bug 562162)
• Xavier Claessens added support for some IRC slash commands to Empathy, the currently supported commands are /clear, /topic, /join, /query and /msg . (GNOME bug 573407)
• Also in Empathy Guillaume Desmottes added the display of an error message when codec negotation fails . (GNOME bug 581789)
• The GNOME screensaver got a D-Bus method to show a message on the locked screen, to be used for notification of auto logout.
• In GNOME Shell Dan Winship started a message-tray branch, with some minimal Telepathy support, it has a notification popup for messages and avatar icons.
• Brasero got gobject introspection support for its libraries . (GNOME bug 589073)
• libsoup has been fixed to not change HEAD to GET on 303 redirect.
• A new Google Translate plugin has been added to Kupfer (the command tool inspired by Quicksilver).

¹: actually this commit count is wrong as the same branch is created and deleted several times, to get rebased, changing the commit identifiers along the way.

A note of caution: Using Gtk2Hs together with the -threaded ghc is currently not supported. The reason is that GHC’s garbage collector might free Xlib or Win32 objects using an OS thread different to the one that is used to execute all other Gtk+ functions. The result will be a program that occasionally fails with an Xlib error or a crash on Windows. We are working on fixing this.

The GNOME Documentation Team will be having a meeting this Sunday, November 8th at 18:00 UTC in #docs on GIMPNet IRC.

This meeting is a working session focused on GNOME 2.30 planning, including a discussion of what documents are a priority for the 2.30 cycle and what topics are the focus of a new and re-written GNOME User Guide.  (Don’t call it a user guide!)

More information is available on the Docs team wiki.

See you there!

Future directions. Here’s where Cowbell is going next:

1. The existing functionality is going to be moved into a library called libcowbell.  Very little will be changed at this point from what we already have.  (But there will be some extra tests.)
2. A release of the metacity-cowbell branch will be made that can use libcowbell.
3. A release of real Metacity will be made that can use either libcowbell or conventional themes.
4. Development of libcowbell can continue.  (I expect pseudoclasses to be among the first things added.)

More more cowbell. Iain has pointed out an existing GNOME-based project called cowbell.  I hope the fact that this project will be libcowbell will be enough to avoid confusion.

Feedback on feedback. Screwtape has reviewed the existing cowbell documentation in a web page here.  Here is my feedback on the feedback:

• §3: I did start out by showing the structure as pseudo-XML, but people commented as if the window borders were the result of rendering that XML (as if it were XUL, or something similar), so I think it may be misleading.
• §3: I dithered over using the ID or a class for this sort of thing for quite a while.  In the end I went with a class because we use classes for buttons (since they may repeat) and it seemed as well to use the same design for areas, and because you may have more than one content area visible at once, even if they are on separate windows.  But I may have been wrong, and I invite opposing opinions.
• §3: buttongroup: I really like this idea.  But AFAIK libccss doesn’t yet support last-child etc (see next…)
• §3.1: I want our CSS support to be up to level 3 wherever possible.  However, we are constrained partly by what libccss is currently capable of.  Of course we can patch libccss too!  Backgrounds and Borders is largely supported by libccss, though.
• §3.2: Unpainted areas are transparent (though if the frame is opaque, you’ll just see the frame through them).
• §3.3: font-size is important; what should the interaction be between the font size set in Metacity gconf and the font size in the theme?  Just use the theme font size for scaling as in v2?
• §3.3: button heights: I think I didn’t explain myself properly here.  You can (should) set height and width on buttons.  But these only serve to establish an aspect ratio.  The height is always calculated from the titlebar height at present.  Perhaps this is overly confusing.
• §3.5: :focus pseudoclass: perhaps this should be set on all elements in a focused window.  Or perhaps just the frame and we can use the descendant selector.
• §3.5: :disabled — hadn’t thought of this, good idea.  TMTOWTDI.
• §3.5: I’m not sure libccss supports :not() (but maybe it does!)  If so, yes, we should use it.  It’s far better to work the way people expect us to work.
• §3.7: I hope we support SVG too.  It would be extra nice if it could be styled with the same CSS somehow.
• §3.8: I really want mm and em as well as px.  I’m not certain libccss knows how to do this, but I will check.
• §4: Nobody’s really tried to put Dublin Core data in CSS before, and I’m probably not doing it the best way.  I worry that including a required custom XML file will be slipping back into using custom formats, though.  Maybe we should use an @rule.  Or specially-formatted comments.  Or maybe we should give up on the whole required metadata idea.
• §4: I like the idea of specifying alternative stylesheets, though metadata in the stylesheets themselves could also do this.
• §6.1: yes, we really need a default stylesheet.  I’m not sure what should go into it.  I will think about this and include it in the first libcowbell release.
• §6.2: okay, we’ll avoid data: URLs.
• §6.2: let’s implement the single file doctrine by allowing any file in ~/.themes/ThemeName/cowbell/ThemeName.tar to be treated as if it was in ~/.themes/ThemeName/cowbell/.  I think we can get that in the first libcowbell release too.
• §6.5: I really like Firebug.  Are you thinking we could use Firebug itself, or just copy its UI?
• §6.11: Maybe we could also modify hue/saturation/value directly in the URL thus: url(’file:fred.png?hue=#f00′)?
• §6.13: I was thinking of themes which, say, repeat a pattern an integral number of times on the otherwise empty part of the titlebar, scaled to fit; this wouldn’t be possible using border-images, but would work fine with filler.  On the other hand, perhaps this is overkill.

Feedback from everyone reading this, on the above and on the original document, is very welcome.

Maybe we need to take over a little piece of live.gnome.org to hash all this out.  Or maybe we need a mailing list.  I’ll wikify all this tonight and then post about it here.

Photo © Honza Soukup, cc-by.

This week… 1906 commits, in 181 projects, by 237 happy hackers (and 363 were translation commits).

• A full screen mode has been added to emerillon (GNOME bug 599764).
• John Wendell fixed several memory leaks in Vinagre and gtk-vnc.
• A new “Document License” tab has been added to Evince, it can display license information embedded in PDF files (GNOME bug 349173)
• In GNOME Games, gnometris got renamed to quadrapassel (due to trademark concerns), and same-gnome to swell-foop (due to “GNOME” in the old name).
• Support for group profiles has been added to Sabayon, thanks to Scott Balneaves.
• GTK+ was updated to use standard Mac shortcuts on Mac OS X (Cmd-X, Cmd-C, etc .). (GNOME bug 530351)
• Ignacio Casal Quinteiro ported gedit to GSettings, in the appropriately named gsettings branch of gedit; this is still a work in progress.
• Thomas Thurman added a first theme using CSS to the cowbell branch of metacity, the theme is named Sunshine.
• Peter Bloomfield marked important items in the balsa toolbars, so they work better with the new “text besides icons” default.
• Andreas J. Guelzow added ODF compability function “SHEETS” to Gnumeric.
• Matthew Barnes started porting Evolution from libglade to GtkBuilder.
• Finally usage of libgnomevfs has been removed from gnome-pilot.

¹: actually this commit count is wrong as the same branch is created and deleted several times, to get rebased, changing the commit identifiers along the way.

I believe the best direction in the immediate future for Cowbell is as follows:

1. Fix the :hover and :active pseudoclasses.
2. Add support for v2 themes back in.
3. Provide a patch for Mutter.
4. Port some more themes, such as Crux.

Anyone wishing to advocate for anything else on the future directions list to come sooner is welcome to make their point, however.

Please let me know if you’re testing Cowbell, or if you’re interested in it. whether or not you’re working on new themes.  I’d like to keep the Cowbell community cohesive.

Photo © Eva the Weaver, cc-by-nc-sa.

In order to demonstrate Cowbell more adequately, I asked Firinel to help design a new and simple theme. The result was Sunshine.

In order to test Cowbell, you will need to download Sunshine.  Then follow the instructions in the README to unpack it into your ~/.themes directory.  The tarball also includes a copy of Crux, so that you can share GConf settings between desktop Metacity and Metacity-with-Cowbell running in a Xephyr window.

I hope this new CSS theme is the first of many.

I’m happy to announce the first experimental version of Metacity with support for CSS window borders (”Cowbell”).  This work was largely supported by Collabora Ltd.

You can:

• download the tarball;
• read the documentation (it’s not as boring as you might imagine);
• review the source history.

This diagram should explain everything, perhaps.

I would especially like to hear from:

• theme artists, to let me know whether it’s adequately powerful;
• anyone else interested in hacking on this with me;
• the GTK client-side decoration people, so that we can harmonise the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about CSS and can offer insights into the suitability of the way we represent things;
• people who know a lot about the Dublin Core and can offer insights into whether our metadata system uses it appropriately;
• maintainers of other window managers (especially Mutter), so we can talk about including CSS support in other window managers;
• everyone else, to suggest which of the directions for future development are most interesting.

I think it may perhaps be helpful to set up a Cowbell mailing list, so that we can compare notes on implementations.  For example, I haven’t written down anywhere how to place an image to the right of the title, which is commonly needed (you use border-image).

Photo © Craft*ology, cc-by-nc.

The meeting minutes for the October 15th board meeting is now public.
Refer here:

     http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic/Minutes/20091015

Other past board meetings are archived here:

    http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoardPublic/Minutes

This week… 1781 commits, in 178 projects, by 250 happy hackers (and 298 were translation commits).

• A fullscreen mode has been added to xchat-gnome (GNOME bug 445638).
• Jonh Wendell added the ability to use JPEG compression (thus lossy encoding) to vinagre . (GNOME bug 573272)
• Evince has been changed to always use a different process for every document.
• Eog got support for animated images, it plays animated images as supported by GdkPixbufAnimation (GNOME bug 335093).
• gnome-pilot was ported to GtkBuilder, and removed most of its usage of libgnomeui.
• Empathy removed its applets (megaphone, nothere) and Python bindings of libempathy and libempathy-gtk, on the premise they were unused and applications should use telepathy-glib, and a future telepathy-gtk, via gobject-introspection.
• Colin Walters updated the GNOME Shell to use a stable ordering for well-known icons in the notification area (volume, battery, network… ;). (GNOME bug 598313)
• Brasero got changed to no longer store some settings with GConf anymore (like window size or position of widgets) but to save and load them using GKeyFile instead.
• Thomas Thurman worked quite a lot on the “cowbell” metacity branch, to allow styling of window borders using CSS, he also posted a status update.
• Ray Strode made DeviceKit-power optional in gdm.
• GNOME Disk Utility got handling of LUKS volumes.
• Martyn Rucell updated the Totem tracker plugin to the new (0.7) tracker API.
• Paolo Bacchilega added PackageKit support to File Roller, so it will now prompt for new packages when opening archives that require an uninstalled tool.

hi everyone;

less than 3 months after the 1.0.0 release here’s a new development snapshot for Clutter.

Clutter 1.1.2 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/1.1/
  http://download.gnome.org/sources/clutter/1.1/

MD5 Checksums:

  20d37870ed0db4aaf8404d78b89b0d71 clutter-1.1.2.tar.bz2
  dc4cc91e721be887d5469ec7edde8f8c clutter-1.1.2.tar.gz

Clutter is an open source software library for creating fast, visually rich, portable and animated graphical user interfaces. Clutter is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License version 2.1.

Requirements

Clutter currently requires:

• GLib >= 2.16.0
• Cairo >= 1.6
• Pango >= 1.20
• OpenGL >= 1.4, OpenGL|ES 1.1 or OpenGL|ES 2.0
• GLX, SDL, WGL, Quartz or an EGL Implementation

Depending on the platform and the configuration options Clutter also depends on:

• GDK-Pixbuf >= 2.0
• JSON-GLib >= 0.8

Notes

• This is the first developers snapshot of the 1.1 cycle
• This version is API and ABI compatible with the current stable release of Clutter
• Installing the contents of this release will overwrite the files from the installation of the current stable release of Clutter
• Bugs should be reported here

What’s new in Clutter 1.1.2

• Add ClutterLayoutManager, an abstract proxy class for easily writing layout management policies; also add ClutterLayoutMeta, a class for storing layout properties.
• Add ClutterBox, a generic container actor that relies on a ClutterLayoutManager instance to manage the layout of its children.
• Add the following layout managers:
  • ClutterFixedLayout — a layout manager implementing the policy used by ClutterGroup
  • ClutterBinLayout — a layout manager for packing actors as layers inside the same area, with per-actor alignment
  • ClutterFlowLayout — a layout manager arranging actors as a reflowing grid
  • ClutterBoxLayout — a layout manager arranging actors as a single line
• Remove the requirement for the backend-specific implementation of ClutterStage to be a ClutterActor: a Stage implementation must only implement the ClutterStageWindow interface. This cleans up the backend code.
• COGL source tree clean up and rationalization; COGL now knows the platform, and not only the driver (GL or GLES) so we can migrate part of the low-level backend code from Clutter to COGL where it makes sense.
• Remove code duplication across whole COGL.
• The GLES 2.0 driver for COGL, and the EGLX backend for Clutter have been fixed and confirmed working.
• Add “dump-pick-buffer” to CLUTTER_DEBUG: this debug options dumps the contents of each pick() buffer into a PNG file, for debugging purposes.
• Allow interpolating intervals of ClutterUnits for animating unit-based properties.
• Increase strictness and correctness of the ClutterUnits grammar parser.
• Add GValue transformation functions for ClutterPath to and from a string.
• Fix word movement in ClutterText; implement GObject getter for :use-markup; emit notification for :position; decouple the :text property from the :use-markup property.
• Do not queue redraws or relayouts on actors currently being destroyed.
• Support #rrggbb and #rgb notations for ClutterColor.
• Multiple bug fixes.
• Provide _NET_WM_PID on the X11 stage implementation.
• Documentation and Introspection annotation fixes.
• Add test units for the ClutterActor size requesition.
• Build fixes.
• Use AM_SILENT_RULES if Automake 1.11 is detected, and fall back to Shave on older Automake versions.

Many thanks to:

  Robert Bragg, Damien Lespiau, Neil Roberts, Thomas Wood,
  Owen W. Taylor, Øyvind Kolås, Götz Waschk, Zhou Jiangwei,
  Colin Walters, Jonas Bonn, Joshua Lock, Jussi Kukkonen,
  Samuel Degrande, Vladimir Nadvornik, Xu Li

Have fun with Clutter!

Hot on the heels of Wednesday's release of the Bad Plugins module 0.10.15 is an update that fixes several problems - including possible deadlocks when starting DVDs.

Check out release notes for gst-plugins-bad or download the tarball gst-plugins-bad

The GStreamer team is pleased to present new releases of the Bad and Ugly Plugins modules in the 0.10 GStreamer stable release series.

Check out release notes for gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly or download tarballs for gst-plugins-bad and gst-plugins-ugly