Laszlo (Laca) Peter is a release engineer at Sun Microsystems working on Sun’s Desktop team. Stormy Peters interviewed Laszlo to learn more about how companies working with desktop technologies can work effectively with the upstream GNOME teams.

Jorge Castro takes a deeper look at GNOME Do and explores some of its more advanced features.

hi everyone;

Clutter 0.9.6 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/0.9/

MD5 Checksums:

  e8b92cfb5180935f1aba497948f37166  clutter-0.9.6.tar.gz
  30653168bca6d36a560562e14867b804  clutter-0.9.6.tar.bz2

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

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

To subscribe to the Clutter mailing list, send mail to: clutter+subscribe_at_o-hand.com
The official mailing list archive is: http://lists.o-hand.com/clutter/
API reference: Clutter, COGL

Notes

• This is a development release of Clutter 0.9 leading towards the 1.0 stable cycle. It is the second release candidate for the 1.0.0 release: the Clutter high-level API is to be considered frozen, as well as the COGL low-level API.
• This version is fully API and ABI incompatible with the previous 0.8 releases.
• This version is parallel installable with Clutter 0.8.
• Installing this version will overwrite the files from the installation of a git clone of the current development branch (master).
• Bugs should be reported to: http://bugzilla.o-hand.com

What’s new in Clutter 0.9.6

• Allow the manipulation of the actor’s transformation matrix, so that it is possible to apply additional transformations in a way that is compatible with the transformations already applied by the scene graph.
• Fix a race in the X11 backend that happened between resizing the stage drawable and the call to glViewport().
• Merge the cogl-journal-batching branch; this branch implements batching the geometry of the elements of the scene graph before sending it to OpenGL, thus minimizing the number of state changes and improving the overall performance of Clutter-based applications.
• Add more debugging states for Clutter and COGL, which allow the developer to track the state of the journal; to check the VBO fallback paths; to disable picking for reliable profiling; to disable software-side matrix transformations in favour of the driver/GPU ones.
• Improve the ability to “break out” of COGL by using gl_begin/gl_end semantics; applications that drop into raw GL are, though, ignoring all the caching performed by COGL and might incur in performance issues.
• Fixed the :load-async and :load-data-async properties of Texture by removing the unneeded G_PARAM_CONSTRUCT flag.
• Added an initial migration guide that shows the porting process from older releases of Clutter to the 1.0 API; the first chapter deals with the migration from ClutterEffect to the new implicit animations API.
• Fixed MT-safety for the master clock.

Many thanks to:

  Ole André Vadla Ravnås
  Tim Horton

In this article, Natan Yellin writes about GNOME Zeitgeist, a new user interface for documents and user information in the GNOME desktop currently planned for GNOME 3.0.

Og Maciel provides an overview of using git to help translate GNOME, including setting up git, translating strings, and pushing changes to GNOME.

In this article, Les Harris takes a look at Project Hamster, a recent addition to the GNOME Desktop that helps you track your activities over time.

Epiphany 2.26.3 has been released. It is the last version to support a Gecko back-end. This marks the end of an era.
Also, Xan Lopez has taken over Epiphany maintainership. We wish to thank Christian Persch for all his work through the years!

The GNOME Documentation Team has published their June status report, including:

• June accomplishments
• GNOME 3.0 goals and progress
• July goals

Additionally, the meeting minutes from our meeting this past Sunday are now available.

If you have any questions or feedback, please send us an email on the GNOME Documentation mailing list.

The GStreamer team is proud to announce a new release in the 0.10.x stable series of the GStreamer FFmpeg module.

Check out release notes here, or download tarballs from here.

Short week as I got back from vacation mid-week. (The lab setup went really well. Hopefully people will start to blog on http://www.kidsoncomputers.org.)

Caught up with a ton of email. Only sent out two redundant emails I think.  (That’s emails that I wouldn’t have sent out if I read all my mail before I answered any of it.)

Met with four more members of the Board of Advisors. Sent notes to Board of Directors. Next week I’ll write it up for the Board of Advisors and the GNOME Foundation. I believe their feedback is some good stuff for discussion at GUADEC.

Sent out a mail to some of the team leads (like travel, sys admin, etc) to talk about how we can standardize on reporting. Early consensus is to have standard documents and reporting times and places.

Got press contacts from advisory board members and Desktop Summit sponsors for the press at the Desktop Summit.

Pinged on the status for a couple of the sponsored parties at the Desktop Summit.

Gave input on agendas for board of advisors, board of directors and AGM meetings at GUADEC.

Still working on getting a meeting room for the advisory board meeting. (Thought I had it all until they told me that the speaker phone and projector were going to add 600 euros to the price!!)

Was very excited about all the progress Paul Cutler and the marketing team have made on mission, goals, wiki pages, etc. Contributed a few ideas to a couple of pages.

Exchanged email with someone who put in a bid to host this year’s GNOME.Asia summit.

Talked to TI who is donating some Zoom 2’s to the GNOME usability team.

Sent 401K plan guy’s answers back to our attorneys for another round of review.

Next week:

• Answer some interview questions for an article around Desktop Summit.
• Write another invitation letter for a Desktop Summit/GUADEC attendee who needs it for visa/work reasons.
• Write a press release! (Watch for it!)
• Fill out Google Grant Adwords application with data from Claus Schwarm.
• Send out summaries of the meetings with Board of Advisor folks.
• Send out agenda for advisory board meeting at GUADEC.
• Make sure sponsored Desktop Summit and GUADEC parties happen.
• Travel to Desktop Summit/GUADEC. (24 hour trip)
• Board of Directors meeting.

Post GUADEC:

• Work on 2009 finances with nonprofit workshop and Jaap’s feedback in mind. Hopefully with the new treasurer.
• Update Friends of GNOME spreadsheet data with the checks we’ve received. (It’s currently Paypal data. We don’t get many checks.)
• Work on the new GNOME Foundation sponsorship plan, like premium sponsorship.
• Work with marketing list to figure out how best to report and act on Friends of GNOME survey data. (John Williams is looking at it now.)

_______________________________________________
foundation-announce mailing list
foundation-announce< at >gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce

Shaun McCance has announced the release of gnome-doc-utils 0.17.2:

I've just released gnome-doc-utils 0.17.2, which includes
all the build magic for Mallard documents.  Using it is
similar to using the DocBook build magic, except:

1) You don't use DOC_MODULE.

2) Set DOC_ID to a system-unique identifier for the document.
This will determine where your document is installed.  For
instance, if "DOC_ID=empathy", then your document will go
into "/usr/share/gnome/help/empathy".

3) Set DOC_PAGES to the list of page files in your document.
Just as with DOC_ENTITIES or DOC_INCLUDES, do not include the
leading "C/".

DOC_ENTITIES, DOC_INCLUDES, DOC_FIGURES, and DOC_LINGUAS work
exactly as for DocBook documents.

We need to work on xml2po some.  Its default operation isn't
producing the best results for Mallard documents.

Those of you working on Mallard documents, please hammer on
this and let me know if you have any problems.

This week… 1811 commits, in 183 projects, by 217 happy hackers (and 226 were translation commits).

• Evince was changed to output straight PDF for printers supporting PDF natively . (GNOME bug 585442)
• Evolution gained an inline view of application/mbox attachments . (GNOME bug 464131)
• A problem with RSA key size that were not a multiple of 8 has been fixed in gnome-keyring . (GNOME bug 576700)
• A new theme, Moblesse, has been added to the experimental GTK+ CSS theme engine.
• Milan Crha fixed several issues and improved the performance of the evolution-data-server CalDAV backend.
• Philippe Rouquier commited a new layout for the Brasero user interface: the medium selector is still inside the main window and on clicking burn a dialog appears to set the session burning options
• In both libgoffice and gnumeric Andreas J. Guelzow improved Open Document Format support (number style output, scientific number output, time and date styles, import of currency symbols, and much more).
• F-Spot Adjust Time dialog, and gnome-session windows, have been ported from libglade to GtkBuilder.
• A Python binding for libbrasero-burn has been added to gnome-python-desktop.
• As explained in his Data about Data weblog post, Alexander Larsson added metadata support in gvfs, and already made Nautilus use it.
• Empathy has been updated to use gnome-session instead of gnome-screensaver to know when the session is idle.
• Benjamin Otte did some research on the GTK+ file chooser performance
  (explained in a tale of waiting message in the
  gtk-devel-list, be sure to also read the followup messages), and pushed a new “filesystemmodel” branch to publicize his work.

The Documentation team is having a team meeting tomorrow, Sunday June 28th at 9:00 p.m. UTC / 5:00 p.m. EST.

The meeting will be held in the #docs channel on GIMPnet IRC.

The agenda can be found here on our wiki page.

See you there!

Dear Foundation Members,
Dear Dave,

We have received your challenge and accepted it as an issue.

We have used the counting method "Random Transfer STV with
Droop-Static-Whole threshold" which might produce different results if
you change the order of the ballots. Although we ran the counting
several times to check whether it produces different results, we did
not see any: We have not changed the order of the ballots, or, to be
more precise, the voting software did not change the order and thus
the results were perfectly reproducible for all of us.

We do, however, accept the fact that if you counted manually, you
could gather a different result. This is the reason why we decided to
use the deterministic "Fractional Transfer STV".
Thus we will not declare the preliminary result announced on
2009-06-24 as valid. Instead, we will announce new preliminary results
using Fractional STV soon, if there are no further objections. These
results can then be challenged.

As you stated that you wanted to have that method used, we assume that
this resolves your challenge. Is that correct?

We'd like to thank you for the challenge.
At your service,

The GNOME Foundation Membership and Elections Committee

Alex Larsson of Nautilus and GIO fame, and hacker extraordinaire has really outdone himself, this time.

Alex has been working for a while on the client-side window branch of GTK+, and apart from smooth and flicker-less resizing, simplified backends and transparency support even without the XComposite extension on every supported platform, this branch also allows embedding GTK+ widgets inside other toolkits — toolkits like Clutter.

so, here’s a screencap from Alex showing what it’s going to be possible in the near future:

Clutter Gtk integration from Alexander Larsson on Vimeo.

very exciting times ahead!

ouch: long time, no report. sorry about that. we’ve been incredibly busy — and not just with Clutter: the Moblin 2.0 netbook user interface, written using Clutter, has been released and everyone is incredibly excited about it.

what happened since week 7, then? well:

• Clutter 0.9.2 has been released
• Clutter 0.9.4 has been released
• performance optimizations all over the board
• clean up of the whole API, with the removal of deprecated and unused entry points
• ClutterFixed and ClutterUnit have been removed, replaced by CoglFixed and ClutterUnits
• simplified the internals of ClutterAnimation and made it much more generic; increased the convenience of clutter_actor_animate()
• ClutterText supports ellipsis after wrapping, to cover the whole assigned area; it also supports double and triple click selection of words and lines, respectively
• event processing, advancing of timelines, layouting and repainting are now handled by the master clock, which uses the sync-to-vblank (if available) to compress all the operations into discrete packets and removes the potential for starving the main loop with animations and event handling
• ClutterTimeline is now completely time based — the speed and current frame properties have been removed since it’s all a function of time
• all the API entry points and structures dealing with size and position are now using floating point for pixels with precision; this reduces the amount of type casting and unifies the API
• COGL handles blend modes and texture combining using a string-based notation that should greatly simplify the life of developers

and much, much more.

also, Clutter-GTK+ 0.9.2 has been released and Clutter-GStreamer has a new maintainer that already fixed long-standing bugs and added new cool features, like the ability to do colorspace conversion using shaders.

hi everyone;

Clutter 0.9.4 is now available for download at:

  http://www.clutter-project.org/sources/clutter/0.9/

MD5 Checksums:

  912974d177f748b5dbf2b9c7fd39a57c  clutter-0.9.4.tar.gz
  f2bddf6ceabd7294996463a1e9637b3f  clutter-0.9.4.tar.bz2

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

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

To subscribe to the Clutter mailing list, send mail to: clutter+subscribe_at_o-hand.com
The official mailing list archive is: http://lists.o-hand.com/clutter/
API reference: Clutter, COGL

Notes

• This is a development release of Clutter 0.9 leading towards the 1.0 stable cycle. It is the first release candidate for the 1.0.0 release: the Clutter high-level API is to be considered frozen, though there might be last minutes additions to the COGL low-level API to accommodate the performance improvements done in the cogl-journal-batching branch that is going to be merged next week.
• This version is fully API and ABI incompatible with the previous 0.8 releases.
• This version is parallel installable with Clutter 0.8.
• Installing this version will overwrite the files from the installation of a git clone of the current development branch (master).
• Bugs should be reported to: http://bugzilla.o-hand.com

What’s new in Clutter 0.9.4

• Set the layout height in ClutterText, so that wrapping and ellipsization work correctly to fill all the allocated area.
• Remove all the units-based API from ClutterActor, and migrate all the positional and dimensional accessors to use floating point values when dealing with pixels. All the properties dealing with pixels now take a floating point value as well. This change does have repercussions on functions with variadic arguments like clutter_actor_animate(), g_object_new(), g_object_set() and g_object_get().
• Add the ability to track whether an actor is going to be painted or not, using the “mapped” flag. This also allows Clutter to be more strict in the handling of the scenegraph, ensuring correctness and avoiding wasting resources on nodes that won’t be painted.
• Add debugging facilities for COGL, similar to those of Clutter; through them is also possible to have an on screen debugging mode that shows the boundaries of each rectangle sent to the GPU.
• Rework “units” into real logical distance units that can be converted between millimeters, typographic points and ems, into pixels.
• Simplify the Animation class to avoid redundancy and the possibility of it going out of sync with the Timeline and Alpha instances it uses.
• Move every operation into a single “master clock” source that advances the timelines, dispatches events and redraws the stages in a predictable sequence, thus avoiding unneeded redraws. The default is to follow the sync-to-vblank cycle, if it is supported by the drivers.
• Cache the glyphs geometry into a vertex buffer object to avoid resubmitting too much information to the GPU.
• Rework the behaviour of ClutterModel when a filter is applied.
• Allow submitting premultiplied texture data; this removes the need for unpremultiplying data in CairoTexture.
• Add a simple API for submitting blending and texture combining modes through a string description.
• Move Timelines to pure time-based objects.
• The Input devices API has been cleaned up. Currently, the X11 support for XInput 1.x is disabled by default, and Clutter must be configured with –enable-xinput in order to enable it; XInput 1.x is going to be replaced by XInput2, which is a far better API. Support for XInput2 will be added during the 1.x cycle.
• Lots of performance improvements.
• Removal of all the deprecated API.
• Removal of all the fixed point entry points.
• Lots of documentation fixes - the coverage is now 99% of the exported 1600 symbols for Clutter and 80%+ of the 300 exported symbols for COGL.
• Generate the GObject Introspection data for both Clutter and COGL at build time.
• Build environment fixes.

Many thanks to:

    Owen W. Taylor
    Thomas Wood
    Havoc Pennington
    Bastian Winkler
    Chris Lord
    Garry Bodsworth
    Rob Bradford
    Johan Bilien
    Jonas Bonn
    Raymond Liu
    Damien Lespiau
    Dan Winship
    Marc-André Lureau
    Robert Staudinger
    Tommi Komulainen

The GNOME Docs Project has two meetings coming up this week.

Wednesday, June 24th at 7:00 p.m. UTC: Community Meeting

Have a question for the docs team? This is the place to ask any question you might have, such as:

• What was (and what was discussed) at the Writing Open Source conference members of the doc team recently attended?
• What is Project Mallard and why is it important?
• What is the difference between topic based and task based documentation?
• How can I get involved?
• I submitted a bug in Bugzilla, why isn’t it fixed?
• How can we make docs sexy?

This is the place to come.  Look for Paul Cutler, Milo Casagrande and Phil Bull in the #docs IRC channel on GIMPnet.

Sunday, June 28th, 9:00 p.m. UTC: GNOME Docs Project steering meeting

This meeting will discuss the project structure, roadmap for the documentation team and it’s tools including Yelp and gnome-doc-utils, GNOME 3.0 planning and more.

All are welcome to attend, though the meeting will be moderated, and the formal agenda will be posted to the wiki (as well as the minutes after the meeting) in the next few days.

_______________________________________________
foundation-announce mailing list
foundation-announce< at >gnome.org
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-announce

This is a development release leading up to GTK+ 2.18.

Overview of Changes from GTK+ 2.17.1

• GtkInfoBar: A new widget to show a transient ‘message area’ inside a content pane. The API is similar to GtkDialog and supports theming for different message types (warnings, errors, etc)
• GtkFileChooser:
  • Improve path bar by ellipsizing long names and preventing vertical size changes
  • Backup files are now hidden by default
  • GTK+ remembers the file chooser sorting state now
• GtkButtonBox: Implements the GtkOrientable interface now.
• Printing: GTK+ supports printing an application-defined ’selection’ now, in addition to usual page ranges.
• Changes that are relevant for theme authors:
  • The new GtkInfoBar widget uses symbolic colors for theming its background color depending on the message type. By default, it uses the same background color as tooltips. This can be turned off with style property.
  • The GTK+ file chooser (as well as nautilus and other users of GIO icon information) can now show different icons for xdg user dirs. The icon names are folder-documents, folder-download, folder-music, folder-pictures, folder-publicshare, folder-templates, folder-videos, with an automatic fallback to the standard folder icon.

27 bugs fixed in this release!

See the original announcement for more info and downloads.

This is the a development release leading up to GLib 2.22.

Overview of Changes from GLib 2.21.1

• GIO:
  • g_socket_speaks_ipv4 is a new function to check if a socket can speak IPv4.
  • g_socket_listener_add_address gained a new effective_address out parameter.
  • GIO now returns special icons for XDG user directories, by the name folder-music, folder-documents, etc.
  • GIO gained support for starting/stopping of drives, which can be used in connection with external hard disk enclosures, disk arrays, iSCSI devices, etc. See g_file_start/stop_mountable.
• GLib:
  • g_reload_user_special_dirs_cache is a new function to force GLib to reload the XDG user directory mapping from disk.

22 bugs fixed in this release!

See the original announcement for more info and downloads.

This week… 2062 commits, in 182 projects, by 247 happy hackers (and 281 were translation commits).

• In the “content-sniffing” branch, Gustavo Noronha Silva started to implement content sniffing in libsoup, including the HTML5 algorithm that sniffs content served as “text/plain” by web servers.
• Hubert Figuiere fixed a bug when printing date/tome values with 0 micro-second, making gnote timestamps compatible with tomboy . (GNOME bug 581844)
• File Roller gained support for lzip and xz compression formats (GNOME bug 579467, GNOME bug 582237).
• The “Palimpset” Disk Utility now uses the new GtkInfoBar to show job progress, there are two screenshots available ((1) and (2)).
• Stefan Walter started working on a DBus API to gnome-keyring secrets, it is currently developed in the “dbus-api” branch.
• Shaun McCance merged Mallard support into both Yelp and gnome-doc-utils.
• GTK+ gained support for special icons for XDG user dirs, this will allow themes to provide different icons for the Documents, Downloads, Music… folders . (GNOME bug 541276)
• Paul Cutler applied a serie of patches to GNOME User Docs (both User Guide and Accessibility Guide), fixing typos and updating them to match the current desktop reality.
• Rhythmbox command line control program (rhythmbox-client) got support for song rating . (GNOME bug 583108)
• Support for touchpad parameters has been added to gnome-settings-daemon (GNOME bug 578444), it still needs a matching patch to be applied in the control center to have a new Touchpad tab in the Mouse Preferences (GNOME bug 154029)

I’ve just released Yelp 2.27.1, Now With More Ducks. This coincides with gnome-doc-utils 0.17.1, Also Now With More Ducks.  This marks the first release with Mallard support built in.  And this marks the end of the boring part of the release announcement.

This is a huge shift in how we approach, plan, write, and generally work with documentation.  The entire community needs to be aware of what’s happening and how it affects them.  Fellow hackers, please skip to the bottom for information on how this affects you.

Mallard is a new[1] documentation format that is geared towards topic-oriented help.  While you could, in theory, just convert all of your DocBook documentation to Mallard, what you would end up with is a document that is the worst of both worlds.  Writing topic-based help requires a new way of thinking about how we present information to our readers.

Mallard is uniquely designed from the ground up to support downstream modification and plugin-based help systems with little to no patching.  The dynamic organization structure of Mallard was designed with our help in mind, addressing the challenges we face as an upstream provider.

If you’re interested in writing, editing, reviewing, or otherwise contributing to our documentation, please get in touch with our team.  You can email use at  gnome-doc-list@gnome.org or join us in the #docs channel on irc.gnome.org.  Also, check out our brand new project blog:  http://blogs.gnome.org/docs/

We will be holding regular community meetings.  Stay tuned for more details.

If you are a maintainer or active developer, know that we are coming for your documentation.  It might not be today, but it’s on our radar.  If you or someone on your team handles your documentation independently of our team, we still want to be in contact to help them produce better help.  Writing is not a one-person task.

We hope that developers will be cooperative with our team as we try to provide them with better help files to make their software better for their users.

We also hope that more people from the greater community, including our downstream  communities, will get involved with our team.  We are doing some truly exciting things right now, and we’d love to share the excitement.

Fearlessly,
Shaun

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