img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/gtk.png" alt="" align="right" pThis is the fourth development release leading up to GLib 2.20.br / Overview of changes:/p ul liGIO: ul liUse O_NOATIME when sniffing mimetypes/li liAdd a convenience method to check if a GSimpleAsyncResult is valid/li /ul /li /ul pRead the a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-January/msg00006.htmloriginal announcement/a for more info and downloads./p

pWe’ll continue to post meeting minutes online but we (the board) would like a place to discuss what’s happening in a bit more detail./p pSponsors and the Advisory Board/p ul liAdvisory Board Members: ul liSugar Labs joined the GNOME Advisory Board. Walter Bender will be representing them. Check out the a href=http://www.gnome.org/press/releases/2008-12-sugarlabs.html target=_blank title=press releasepress release/a or some of the a href=http://ostatic.com/blog/sugar-labs-joins-the-gnome-foundation target=_blank title=nice articlesnice articles/a written about it. It was also pretty a href=http://search.twitter.com/search?q=sugar+gnome target=_blank title=popular news in Twitterpopular news in Twitter/a./li liCanonical - Rick Spencer, the new engineering manager for the Ubuntu Desktop team, will be representing Canonical on the GNOME Advisory Board./li liStefan Kost will be Nokia’s technical representative to the advisory board. (Rodrigo Novo will be Nokia’s decision-making representative and Carlos Guerreiro has moved on to another project./li /ul /li liOur December meeting was about upstream/downstream relationships. We had a lot of new members of the advisory board attending (Walter Bender, Rick Spencer, Leslie Hawthorne, Robert Love, Stefan Kost) and we were missing a lot of our regular attendees. While we talked some about downstream/upstream relationships, we ended up talking about the GNOME Foundation goals and how others organizations can relate to that./li liThe Advisory Board meets once a month, and while the meetings are by invite only, we are always looking for topics that might be interesting to the advisory board members, either as input to them or things we want their input on and we try to invite all relevant people to the discussion. Please contact Stormy, stormy -at- gnome -dot- org if you have topics you’d like to see discussed!/li li2009 Funding. We haven’t sent out invoices for 2009 yet but we’ve gotten commitments from a number of our members./li /ul pConferences/p ul lia href=http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/index.php/Main_Page target=_blank title=Gran Canaria Desktop SummitGran Canaria Desktop Summit/a. GNOME and KDE had their first in person meeting to discuss the 2009 Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, the co-located GUADEC and Akademy conferences. a href=http://vizzzion.org/ target=_blankSebastian Kügler/a, a href=http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/77 target=_blankWill Stephenson/a, Claudia Rauch, a href=http://blogs.gnome.org/bolsh target=_blankDave Neary/a, a href=http://www.vuntz.net/journal/ target=_blank title=Vincent UntzVincent Untz/a and a href=http://aruiz.typepad.com/siliconisland/2008/12/gran-canaria-de.html target=_blank title=Alberto RuizAlberto Ruiz/a met in Gran Canaria to see the facilities and meet with the local planning team and the local government. (See Dave and Alberto’s blogs for their impressions of the visit.)/li lia href=http://fosdem.org/2009/ target=_blankFOSDEM/a. February 8-9, Brussels. GNOME will have a a href=http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2009/Devroom target=_blankdevroom/a and a a href=http://live.gnome.org/Brussels2009/Stand target=_blankbooth/a this year again. We are still looking for volunteers for the booth. If you are interested, check out the wiki page GNOME presence at FOSDEM or contact a href=http://cfergeau.blogspot.com/2008/12/fosdem.html target=_blankChristophe/a./li lia href=http://www.grancanariadesktopsummit.org/index.php/Main_Page target=_blank title=SCALESCALE/a. There will be a GNOME booth at SCALE, led by Jeff Schroeder. If we get enough interested projects together, we might even have a GNOME Zone./li liGUADLAC is scheduled for March./li liOSiM USA: Approved loose relationship with OSiM as part of GNOME Mobile work. Stormy is speaking about GNOME Mobile at the event./li liFor more info on a href=http://live.gnome.org/GnomeEvents target=_blank title=GNOME eventsGNOME events/a./li /ul pOther/p ul liAnnual report. All is on track with the GNOME annual report. Once again Lucas Rocha is coordinating it. Check out the a href=http://live.gnome.org/FoundationBoard/AnnualReport2008 target=_blank title=wikiwiki/a or contact Lucas if you are interested in helping./li liLegal stuff: ul liAll taxes through 2007 filed, just in time for 2008 taxes./li liAll California nonprofit paper work is up to date./li liDamp;O insurance obtained./li /ul /li liBoard members: ul li Jeff Waugh has stepped down from the board in order to focus on work and other projects./li liDiego Escalante Urrelo will be joining the board as a new member for the remainder of this term./li /ul /li liReimbursements done for LGM travel, Cairo hackfest, and Latin America Tour./li liDVCS Survey: board helped revise text of survey to determine developer preferences between various DVCSs./li /ul

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/commitdigest.png" alt="" align="right" pemThis week.../em 1171 commits, in 146 projects, by 141 happy hackers (and 236 were translation commits)./p ul ligedit got an internal message bus to let its plugins communicate./li liEpiphany updated from its own EphySearchEntry and EphyIconEntry to GtkEntry, it also uses the new “progress in entry” support to draw progress in the location bar./li ligconftool got a new –toggle option, to toggle a boolean key./li ligossip removed libgnomeui and libgnomevfs, and started to use libcanberra-gtk for sound support./li liJonathan Matthew added some basic window management effects to gnome-shell . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=563844 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 563844/a)/li liA new version of a href=http://l10n.gnome.orgl10n.gnome.org/a (damned-lies) went live, merging in the Vertimus translation tool that was already used by some teams. (a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-i18n/2008-December/msg00113.htmlannounce/a)./li liA low disckspace checker has been added to the housekeeping plugin of gnome-settings-daemon . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=557647 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 557647/a)/li lignome-build that was a standalone module but only used by anjuta has been merged in anjuta./li liGtkEntry Caps Lock warning mode switched to using an icon./li liseed got a 0.3 (and 0.3.1) release and Robert Carr sent a a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-January/msg00001.htmlsummary of what happened since 0.1/a./li /ul pspan id=more-94/span/p div class=toplist h3Top projects/h3 table thead tr thProject/th thCommits/th /tr /thead tbody tr td gtk+ /td td 106 /td /tr tr td gedit /td td 69 /td /tr tr td seed /td td 67 /td /tr tr td damned-lies /td td 51 /td /tr tr td evolution /td td 48 /td /tr tr td ooo-build /td td 45 /td /tr tr td gimp /td td 42 /td /tr tr td anjuta /td td 33 /td /tr tr td sawfish /td td 25 /td /tr tr td gegl /td td 24 /td /tr /tbody /table /div div class=toplist h3Top authors/h3 table thead tr thAuthor/th thCommits/th thModules/th /tr /thead tbody tr td Matthias Clasen /td td 103 /td tdgtk+, glib, jhbuild and others/td /tr tr td Jorge Gonzalez Gonzalez /td td 56 /td tdbalsa, damned-lies, gimp and others/td /tr tr td Tim Horton /td td 47 /td tdseed/td /tr tr td Jesse van den Kieboom /td td 43 /td tdgedit, gedit-plugins/td /tr tr td Kohei Yoshida /td td 35 /td tdooo-build/td /tr tr td Christopher Bratusek /td td 35 /td tdsawfish, rep-gtk, librep/td /tr tr td Daniel Nylander /td td 30 /td tdgimp-help-2, damned-lies, gtk+ and others/td /tr tr td Claude Paroz /td td 27 /td tddamned-lies, anjuta, gnome-main-menu and others/td /tr tr td Sven Neumann /td td 27 /td tdgimp, gimp-web, gegl and others/td /tr tr td Andre Klapper /td td 26 /td tdevolution, gnome-packagekit, dasher and others/td /tr /tbody /table /div

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/gtk.png" alt="" align="right" pThis is the first development release leading up to GTK+ 2.16./p pOverview of changes between 2.14.x and 2.15.0:/p ul liGtkFileChooser ul liOptionally shows file sizes/li liMounts volumes when necessary/li liPicks better mime icons/li /ul /li liGtkEntry ul liCan show icons at either side of the entry, which can be made clickable, drag sources, etc/li liCan show progress information/li liPicks the best available placeholder character for invisible entries unless it is explicitly set. See the invisible-char-set property/li liInput methods work again in invisible entries/li liInvisible entries can optionally display a caps-lock warning. This can be turned off with the caps-lock-warning property/li /ul /li liGtkStatusIcon ul liUses an extension of the tray icon spec to negotiate RGBA support./li liThis is also supported by the GNOME panel. For details, see a href=http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-September/009934.html title=http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-September/009934.htmlhttp://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2008-September/009934.html/a/li liSupports scroll events, middle clicks and rich tooltips/li /ul /li liGtkLinkButton ul liRespects user-defined tooltips/li liHas a default url hook/li /ul /li liGtkBuilder ul liCan construct menus/li liCan associate accel groups with windows/li liChild properties can now be translatable, e.g. GtkAssistant::page-title/li /ul /li liGtkOrientable ul liA new interface implemented by all widgets that have horizontal and vertical variants/li liPrinting support/li liPrint-to-file can save to non-local files/li liPage rendering can be deferred to a thread to avoid blocking the mainloop/li /ul /li liGDK ul liGdkKeymap emits a state-changed signal when the Caps Lock state changes/li /ul /li liNewly deprecated functions: ul ligdk_window_get_toplevels(),/li ligtk_font_selection_dialog_get_apply_button(),/li ligtk_status_icon_set_tooltip(),/li ligtk_toolbar_set_orientation()/li /ul /li liChanges that are relevant for theme authors ul liThe GtkMenu::arrow-placement style property allow more space efficient layout of scrolling menus/li liSubmenu arrows can be scaled relative to the font size, with the/li liGtkMenuItem::arrow-scaling style property/li liThemes can set the GtkDialog::content-area-spacing style property to change the spacing between elements of the content area/li liThe GtkEntry::state-hint style property can be used to make GTK+ pass the correct state when drawing the background of entries/li liThe GtkEntry::prelight style property can be used to suppress prelighting of icons in entries on mouse-over/li /ul /li liChanges that are relevant for translators ul liGTK+ has been switched to use the two-argument C_() macro instead of Q_() for messages with context/li /ul /li /ul pRead the a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-January/msg00000.htmloriginal announcement/a for more information including bug fixes and download locations./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pThe speed Metacity renders decorations depends on the theme in use. If you want to time all the themes installed and view them, use:/p ul lifor G in $(locate metacity-theme-1|grep /usr/share/themes|cut -d/ -f5); do metacity-theme-viewer $G; done/li /ul pMean client-side times on my system to draw each frame, in ascending order of speed:/p ul lia href=http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2008/12/29/a-simple-theme-prelude/Prelude (the theme given in the previous post)/a: 1.3ms/li liBright: 1.9ms/li liAtlanta: 2.0ms/li liMist: 2.1ms/li liAgingGorilla: 2.2ms/li liMetabox: 2.2ms/li liSimple: 2.3ms/li liEsco: 2.4ms/li liGlider: 3.7ms/li liCrux: 3.8ms/li liDarkRoom: 3.9ms/li liClearlooksClassic: 4.3ms/li liGlossy: 4.5ms/li liClearlooks: 4.6ms/li liInverted: 4.6ms/li liHuman: 6.0ms/li /ul

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pimg src=http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/metacity/Prelude-screenshot.png align=right /This is in answer to Stuart Langridge’s question about how the XFCE theme a href=http://www.xfce-look.org/content/show.php/prelude-4?content=69300emPrelude/em/a can be ported to Metacity.  a href=http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/metacity/Prelude.xmlHere is a quick attempt at porting it/a; I’ll be referring to that in what follows.  In order to install this theme for yourself, do:/p ul limkdir -p ~/.themes/Prelude/metacity-1/li liwget -O ~/.themes/Prelude/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/metacity/Prelude.xml/li /ul pI’m not talking about SVG here, because that’s still an experimental technology within Metacity, and I’m not talking much about version 2 of the theme format for simplicity./p pWe begin with the metadata, which isn’t unusual enough to explain.  Next comes the geometry, which is the key to the whole business: we only have the one, and it has rounded corners and no title.  We have to mark that there’s no title or Metacity will make space for one even though there’s no instruction to draw it.  If we were making a v2 theme, we could specify the degree of rounding, but v1 only allows you to say whether or not rounding is happening on each corner./p pAfter the geometry we declare some draw_ops.  These are lists of instructions about how to draw each item.  All the draw_ops here are simply coloured rectangles.  One of them, “white”, is to draw the whole background of the window, but the entries for buttons stop slightly short in order to give the impression of gaps between the buttons but to leave the gaps clickable.  We declare the button colours twice in order to have a slightly lit-up version for the prelight./p pI added a blue button for the menu button, but if you wanted you could use “white” there and have the menu button present but invisible.  In v2 you would need to declare three other button colours, which could get confusing./p pNext, we only have one frame_style and it only draws one piece.  The differences between all the possible pieces can get confusing, but here we only wish to draw an enormous white rectangle over the whole window surface, and so we can use the “entire_background” piece and be done with it./p pThen we have a frame_style_set which points in all cases to the one frame_style, and after that we simply declare that each window uses this one frame_style_set.  And there we have it./p pThere are many possible improvements, including dimming the button colours when a window isn’t focussed, and perhaps using the colours from the desktop theme instead of white all the time./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pOpen thread: ask us a question, get an answer./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/commitdigest.png" alt="" align="right" pemThis week.../em 1027 commits, in 147 projects, by 132 happy hackers (and 123 were translation commits)./p ul liAfter support for icons has been added in GTK+ last week (and I forgot to note it), Matthias Clasen added a section in the documentation on porting from SexyIconEntry./li lilibgnome dependency got removed from sound-juicer, libgnome/libgnomeui from gfloppy, and bonobo from the Anjuta toolbar./li liNemiver variable inspector widget now remember history of the variables . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=536259 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 536259/a)/li liEvince got its printing system reworked, making the GUI responsive during printing, with progress information . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482770 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 482770/a)/li liThe system log viewer in gnome-utils has a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-December/msg00175.htmlbeen rewritten/a by Cosimo Cecchi./li liMetacity got the “Maximize” shortcut to act as “Restore” for maximised windows./li liEpiphany/gecko got some Gecko 1.9.1 fixes, and Epiphany/webkit can now open new links in new tabs thanks to the new Policy Decision system in WebKit./li liThe new GNOME Volume Control got a few alert sounds (bark, drip, glass and sonar)./li liRhythmbox switched to a normal GtkTooltip, rather than a custom arrangement of widgets in a SexyTooltip/li /ul pspan id=more-91/span/p div class=toplist h3Top projects/h3 table thead tr thProject/th thCommits/th /tr /thead tbody tr td gnome-utils /td td 155 /td /tr tr td gedit /td td 64 /td /tr tr td ooo-build /td td 42 /td /tr tr td rygel /td td 40 /td /tr tr td seed /td td 39 /td /tr tr td gtk+ /td td 33 /td /tr tr td gnome-scan /td td 33 /td /tr tr td tasque /td td 27 /td /tr tr td gthumb /td td 24 /td /tr tr td gnomemm /td td 24 /td /tr /tbody /table /div div class=toplist h3Top authors/h3 table thead tr thAuthor/th thCommits/th thModules/th /tr /thead tbody tr td Cosimo Cecchi /td td 150 /td tdgnome-utils, gfloppy/td /tr tr td Jorge Gonzalez Gonzalez /td td 46 /td tdgnome-utils, library-web, ekiga and others/td /tr tr td Ignacio Casal Quinteiro /td td 44 /td tdgedit, evolution/td /tr tr td Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) /td td 40 /td tdrygel/td /tr tr td Étienne Bersac /td td 34 /td tdgnome-scan, vala/td /tr tr td Tim Horton /td td 31 /td tdseed/td /tr tr td Sanford Armstrong /td td 24 /td tdtasque, tomboy/td /tr tr td Matthias Clasen /td td 23 /td tdgtk+/td /tr tr td Michael J. Chudobiak /td td 23 /td tdgthumb/td /tr tr td Leonardo Ferreira Fontenelle /td td 21 /td tdgtksourceview, gtranslator, gnome-panel and others/td /tr /tbody /table /div

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pa href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/kozzmen/348254544/ title=Die mosquito by kozzmen, on Flickrimg src=http://farm1.static.flickr.com/154/348254544_0d56e5333f.jpg align=right height=375 alt=Die mosquito width=500 //a/p p style=text-align: right;a href=http://marnanel.org/metacity/metacity-08-12-27a.mp3Listen to this./a/p pHere are two ideas with which I broadly agree:/p ol liA theme format is less useful without a program to edit the theme files.  Having to modify XML by hand is not a prospect which most people relish./li liIf there’s to be a third version of the Metacity theme format, it would be helpful if it was based around SVG, since theme files describe vector graphics and SVG has become a standard for such files.  It must not however sacrifice the ability of our current format to prevent themes making the computer unusable./li /ol pBack in August, I added simple SVG support to a href=http://bzr-playground.gnome.org/~tthurman/metacity/vectacity/filesa branch of Metacity/a that I named “a href=http://live.gnome.org/Metacity/VectacityVectacity/a“.  My project was shelved because of more urgent business elsewhere, but Iain has also done some work in this area./p pIn order to play around with the Vectacity format, I have since built a very simple version of an editor.  However, I have run into a theoretical problem for which I seek your insight, gentle reader./p pThere are certain problems which a theme file has to solve which are not faced by ordinary vector graphics.  One of them, which is easily answered, is the question of how to add the buttons which are currently in use to the titlebar, when this is not known in advance.  Another simple question is how to represent colours from the desktop theme.  A more serious problem is that the width and height of the window is not known in advance either, and nor is the width of the window’s title.  Metacity currently solves this problem using a simple expression language in which these variables can appear as terms./p pHowever we solve this problem in Vectacity, it’s not a problem to modify the coordinates of elements according to the size of the window: the SVG in each theme file is going to have to go through a cleaner anyway before it hits the screen.  Some possible solutions include:/p ul listrongreuse. /strongUse the existing expression language: codelt;rect x=3 y=10 width={w-3} height={h-3}/gt;/code;.  This is how Vectacity currently works.  But this means we’re using the SVG namespace but including invalid SVG./li listrongvectacity:expr. /strongMark the attributes which need recalculating, but leave precalculated values in the file: codelt;rect x=3 y=10 width=997 height=997 vectacity:expr=width:w-3; height: h-3/gt;/code./li listrongstretchyspace. /strongSubvert the concept of Cartesian coordinates by entering emstretchyspace/em.  In stretchyspace there are 1001 coordinates; addresses below 0 and above 1000 are undefined.  Addresses between 0 and 300 are translated with respect to the left or top, addresses between 700 and 1000 with respect to the right or bottom, and addresses between 301 and 699 are as close to the centre as the address is close to 500: codelt;rect x=3 y=10 width=997 height=997/gt;/code./li /ul pStretchyspace neatly keeps us SVG-compliant, but it’s a much less powerful representation than the existing system.  It’s true that the power of the existing system is rarely used to anywhere near its full extent, but there are existing behaviours which stretchyspace cannot represent.  In particular, titlebar decoration often places non-text graphics with respect to the length of the title:/p pimg src=http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/metacity/layers.png alt=Examples of the same titlebar shown in three themes height=132 width=230 /br / emFig. 1: Same titlebar, three themes./em/p pThe first line, for emCrux/em, shows a graphic which has been pushed to the right by the length of the titlebar text.  The second, emAtlanta/em, shows the window icon which is centred along with the titlebar text.  The third, emHuman/em, involves printing many copies of the titlebar text; this can be simulated in SVG using styling, but the other two are more of a problem, since they involve non-text participating in text flow.   If we’re using an expression language, this can be handled using coordinate substitution, but if we’re using something like stretchyspace, it will need to be handled in the SVG itself.  Non-text elements appearing in text flow emmay/em be possible in SVG1.2, but I don’t know how to do it in SVG1.1.  (Is there a way?  Do you know?)  For this reason, stretchyspace is not a useful answer for the representation of relative coordinates./p pAnother question we need to consider is whether external SVG editors should be usable.  There are many fine SVG editors around, such as a href=http://inkscape.orgInkscape/a.  Allowing the use of one of these, with a tool which extracted SVG data and spawned an external editor, would permit people all the power of an existing application and save us the trouble of writing a new one./p pIf we emare/em to use an external editor, though, we must consider how relative coordinates may be represented whilst within it.  One obvious conclusion is that we could use stretchyspace coordinates, but the same problems with title placement exist in this case as well; they could perhaps be worked around, hackily, since the title field in a saved SVG has a known length.  Other possibilities include using using the strongvectacity:expr/strong field and copying its value into and then out of the description field of the relevant object, at a severe cost to usability./p pIf we are emnot/em to use an external editor, the value of using SVG at all becomes a little reduced./p pemPhoto by kozzmen, cc-by-nc-nd./em/p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pimg src=http://www.gnome.org/~tthurman/pics/metacity/pubs/20031012-008t.jpg align=right height=150 width=200 /bWhat is it ?/b/p ul li Metacity is a simple compositing window manager that integrates nicely with GNOME 2./li /ul pbWhat’s changed ?/b/p ul li The maximisation key is a toggle. (Thomas ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343824 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 343824/a)/li li “Unmaximise” is now called “restore”. (Thomas ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343824 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 343824/a)/li li New thread handling call for gconf (Frederic ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565517 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 565517/a)/li li Add screenshot commands back which had been removed (Yanko ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565343 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 565343/a)/li li move_to_corner_se keybinding fixed (Thomas)/li li Windows on other workspaces which attempt to present themselves are marked as needing attention (Colin ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482354 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 482354/a)/li li End the grab op when the user clicks the titlebar (Thomas ) (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=401028 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 401028/a)/li /ul piTranslations:/i/p ul li Jorge González (a href=http://svn.gnome.org/viewvc/metacity/trunk/po/es.poes/a)/li /ul pbWhere can I get it ?/b/p ul lia href=http://download.gnome.org/sources/metacity/2.25/metacity-2.25.89.tar.bz21d083549efdcdc6aad4eaada1c3ff86a/a bz2/li lia href=http://download.gnome.org/sources/metacity/2.25/metacity-2.25.89.tar.gzbc33e1b609914cf60ce7aff549df2538/a gz/li /ul pbPhoto:/b Lower Red Lion, St Albans. Photo by Gary Houston, public domain./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/gnome-scan.png" alt="" align="right" pHi,/p pFinally, there won’t be 0.7.1 for Christmas. Sorry :). Actually, SVN is pretty close to 0.7.1, i just don’t have the time. And would like to improve debugging output before releasing.This will be hard to get 0.8 in time with 2.26, but i’m working on it :). a href=http://cia.vc/stats/project/GNOME/gnome-scanGNOME Scan SVN is very active/a these weeks./p pCurrent status is quite good. Dialog, option and job has been mostly rewritten. GSane backend has increased image format support, handle mass acquisition and i just commited paper-size support. Overall architecture is better. The software actually allow to do basic scan : put your paper on top right corner, select papersize and trigger scan. That’s pretty minimal : no preview, no custom area, etc./p pI’m thinking of a way for application to add prerequisite : default value, constraint (range or enum) and maybe other things. I have some preliminary code. GNOME Scan 0.6 allow default value but wasn’t designed too. GnomeScanOptionManager will have a lot of job compared to it’s predecessor GnomeScanSettings./p pTomorrow, i’ll leave for Roma for a week :). So trunk should be quite silent. However, Philipp has some time to dive into 0.6 branch, fix some bug and maybe release a 0.6.2 :). Thanks Philipp for you help on 0.6 img src=http://blogs.gnome.org/gnome-scan/wp-content/mu-plugins/tango-smilies/tango/face-smile-big.png alt=:D height=16 class=wp-smiley width=16 / /p pHappy new year!/p pÉtienne./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" p align=righta href=http://marnanel.org/metacity/metacity-08-12-23a.mp3Listen to this./a/p ul liThe patch in a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=482354 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 482354/a (the one about windows which present to other workspaces, which almost every distro has included) was finally committed./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83892 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 83892/a, double-click to close, is still being argued over; your chronicler would like to hear some usability experts discuss the reasons given for its inclusion./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565241 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 565241/a is a small change to emAtlanta/em, the default theme./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=160311 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 160311/a, requesting the ability to change border sizes independently of the theme, has finally gained a patch which may well be included./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=345233 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 345233/a has the rather pleasant idea that “Take a screenshot” should be added to the window menu./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=323824 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 323824/a is a request for the default maximisation keybinding to be a toggle, which seems reasonable./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=564343 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 564343/a, a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/298463 class=bug-link bug-link-launchpadLaunchpad bug 298463/a, and others have said there’s a problem with the print screen button on some distributions.  Still trying to track this one down./li li a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=565409 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 565409/a believes there should be an option for alt-Tab to display all windows on all workspaces all the time.  What do you think?/li /ul pWe’re not doing the “around the blogs” section this time because they’re mostly repeats of what’s gone before./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pa href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/mundane_joy/2148310522/ title=Fire Notifier by The Joy Of The Mundane, on Flickrimg src=http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2377/2148310522_575c9e2622.jpg align=right height=500 alt=Fire Notifier width=375 //a/p p align=righta href=http://marnanel.org/metacity/metacity-08-12-22b.mp3Listen to this./a/p p a href=https://launchpad.net/bugs/124326 class=bug-link bug-link-launchpadLaunchpad bug 124326/a requests a new titlebar button which minimises an application emto the notification area/em rather than ordinary minimisation. Mostly this is currently done with the close button on the apps which support it, but some people feel it would be cleaner if these two functions were distinct. This action has been given the name “iconification” by some, but since this is the name the X specification gives to what we now call minimisation, I propose the ugly word “notifisation”./p pThere are four problems with this idea./p ol liAdding new titlebar buttons is always problematic for a href=http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2008/12/22/extra-buttons/reasons given earlier/a./li liThe EWMH specification is going to have to include a way to tell which apps may be notifised, and a way for the WM to tell an app to notifise itself.  This is going to require arguing out on wm-spec-list.  In itself, this is not a major obstacle, but it’s important to be aware of./li liIt is unclear what the real difference between minimisation and notifisation is in practice.  And if there is one, why shouldn’t all apps be notifisable?/li liUsing the notification area for things other than ephemeral notifications– that is, using it as a cheap way to make panel applets– is contrary to the Human Interface Guidelines.  Perhaps the HIG is wrong, but then we need careful thought before we give the practice a stamp of approval by enshrining it in the EWMH.  Besides, there is talk of a href=http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/253enforcing notification ephemerality/a./li /ol

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" p style=text-align: right;a href=http://marnanel.org/metacity/metacity-08-12-22a.mp3Listen to this./a/p pSometimes, as in a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=562650 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 562650/a, people ask for extra buttons on the titlebar to go along with the standard set.  On the face of it, if you may bind a keystroke to some action, there is no reason why you should not be allowed to add it to the titlebar.  The problem is, though, that somehow it must be drawn with a recognisable icon.  This has led to the current policy that all themes must declare all possible buttons, and that no buttons are allowed outside that set./p pVersion 1 of the theme standard required all themes to declare how to draw emmenu, minimize, maximize, unmaximize/em (restore), and emclose/em.  Version 2 allowed the addition of span class=paraemspan class=literalshade/span, span class=literalabove/span/em (”always on top”) span class=literaland emstick/em (”on all workspaces”).  If you’re looking to add one of those functions, as a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=562650 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 562650/a actually is, the solution is to switch to a theme which has a copy in version 2; unfortunately, there aren’t many which have adopted this version.  emBright/em and emCrux/em both support it, though:/span/span/p p/pcentera href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/marnanel/263262455/ title=metacity-theme-2 by marnanel, on Flickrimg src=http://farm1.static.flickr.com/91/263262455_08a635720b_o.png alt=metacity-theme-2 height=167 width=273 //a/centerp/p pBut requiring a theme to contain all permitted buttons restricts the number of buttons which can reasonably be permitted.  In the future, how can we permit strongany/strong buttons to be added?  We could require emunknown/em as a button type, which would certainly solve the problem of not being able to draw a button, but the user who was faced with two or three buttons bearing question marks might object.  Or we could allow buttons we didn’t know to be decorated with text saying, for example, “ttstick/tt“,  which would work but wouldn’t be beautiful./p pAlternatively, we could require all possible buttons to be declared in the base theme, emAtlanta/em, and simply allow fallback.  This is reminiscent of the way fonts work: a font may contain any Unicode character, but most fonts don’t attempt to cover the whole range.  This means that people wanting to write any language which includes characters outside the ASCII range would often run into holes in their words– so the system will use a glyph from another font as a substitute.  This often leads to ugly rendering, though, even for names from a language as common and well-known as French:/p p/pdiv style=width: 510px; id=attachment_211 class=wp-caption aligncenterimg src=http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/files/2008/12/dantes.png title=He was Edmond Dant(oops!)s... and he was my father. height=35 width=500 alt=He was Edmond Dant(oops!)s... and he was my father. class=size-full wp-image-211 /p class=wp-caption-textHe was Edmond Dant(oops!)s... and he was my father./p/divSimilar results would no doubt be common with a similar system for buttons.p/p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/commitdigest.png" alt="" align="right" pemThis week.../em 1540 commits, in 182 projects, by 162 happy hackers (and 229 were translation commits)./p ul liMost important, ORBit2 stopped calling g_thread_init() to accomodate the sensitiveness of Microsoft Windows and will display a warning if it was not previously called, this will need changes in a lot of places . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=547885 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 547885/a)/li liJürg Billeter fixed lots of bugs in vala, applied patches, and generally enhanced things (notably the D-Bus server was rewritten to directly use libdbus, without dbus-glib marshalling) and released 0.5.3./li liVala-related, Stefan Walter removed last vala traces from seahorse./li liThe libgnomeui dependency was removed from the brightness and inhibit applets, NetworkManager OpenVPN and PPTP support, and libgnome usage was removed from the dictionary applet./li liAlexander Larsson a href=http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2008-December/msg00139.htmlmerged eel into nautilus/a and eel usage was consequently removed from nautilus-cd-burner and brasero./li liEmpathy got autocompletion of contact names in its “new message” dialog box . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=552296 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 552296/a)/li liPatrick Welche updated Dasher from gnome-vfs to gvfs./li lig_timeout_add_seconds replaced g_timeout_add in several new places: in nautilus-sendto, gnome-power-manager, gedit, gnome-games, seahorse./li liThe AAC profile, as defined in gnome-media, and used by applications such as Sound Juicer and gnome-sound-recoreder, switched to LC-AAC profile . (a href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=498617 class=bug-link bug-link-gnomeGNOME bug 498617/a)/li pspan id=more-88/span/p div class=toplist h3Top projects/h3 table thead tr thProject/th thCommits/th /tr /thead tbody tr td vala /td td 90 /td /tr tr td seed /td td 85 /td /tr tr td ooo-build /td td 56 /td /tr tr td gnome-scan /td td 54 /td /tr tr td gnomemm /td td 52 /td /tr tr td evolution /td td 45 /td /tr tr td empathy /td td 38 /td /tr tr td tracker /td td 35 /td /tr tr td anjuta /td td 33 /td /tr tr td rygel /td td 33 /td /tr /tbody /table /div div class=toplist h3Top authors/h3 table thead tr thAuthor/th thCommits/th thModules/th /tr /thead tbody tr td Jürg Billeter /td td 91 /td tdvala, gtksourceview/td /tr tr td Robert Carr /td td 66 /td tdseed, gir-repository/td /tr tr td Jorge Gonzalez Gonzalez /td td 64 /td tdekiga, gnome-media, evolution and others/td /tr tr td Étienne Bersac /td td 56 /td tdgnome-scan, gegl/td /tr tr td Bastien Nocera /td td 53 /td tdnautilus-cd-burner, totem, gnome-media and others/td /tr tr td Matej UrbanÄiÄ /td td 45 /td tdvino, eog, libgweather and others/td /tr tr td Xavier Claessens /td td 37 /td tdempathy/td /tr tr td Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) /td td 35 /td tdrygel, jhbuild/td /tr tr td Murray Cumming /td td 31 /td tdgnomemm, glom, libgda and others/td /tr tr td Gabor Keleman /td td 31 /td tdgimp, network-manager-openconnect, damned-lies and others/td /tr /tbody /table /div /ul

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/gnome-scan.png" alt="" align="right" pHi,/p pFinally i got acquisition back. There was a huge work on option before getting acquisition. Then i hit some limitation of GEGL. GEGL assume that resource is available before the pipeline is launched. This is the case with files (like in Gimp or scan from file) but not from scanner (nor any network image acquisition protocol). This mean that finally GNOME Scan handle both case : using directly a GeglOp as source or acquire and then process GEGL pipeline. We might also hit another limitation for GEGL for sink : GEGL may ask the sink to process one sub-area of the image. That’s pretty annoying for OCR./p pSo this mean that instead of fully migrating to GEGL operation, GNOME Scan strongallow/strong to use a unified GEGL pipeline, but allow as well to implement processing outside a GEGL operation./p pAnyway, i write a struct similar to a GEGL operation to handle all the data translation between SANE and GEGL so that the code keeps files light and code readable. Maximum file lenght is 436 lines for generic option handling, and this file is almost finished. Compare with old gsane-scanner.c with its 1236 lines or gsane-meta-params.c with 833 lines or the worst : gnome-scan-dialog.c was 1438 lines !/p pEven vala generated C files are not that long. That’s a one of the goal of 0.8 : refactor in order to be more maintainable and contributable img src=http://blogs.gnome.org/gnome-scan/wp-content/mu-plugins/tango-smilies/tango/face-smile.png alt=:) height=16 class=wp-smiley width=16 / /p pDevelopment took some times and i’m searching a flat for the next month. So i may postpone 0.7.1 for 2009. I may even postpone 0.8 for 2.28 if i can’t get feature parity in time for feature freeze. Philip and I are maintaining 0.6 series. It is a quite stable series with a fairly good support for SANE backend diversity and i don’t want to provide a less stable release. Patches welcome, especially to maintain 0.6, there is a dedicated branch GNOME_SCAN_0_6./p pRegards,/p pÉtienne./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pFor everyone complaining about having to use gconf-editor to turn compositing on:/p ol liHit alt-f2/li liType ttmetacity -c/tt/li liHit return/li /ol pTHAT IS ALL./p

img src="http://planet.gnome.org/heads/logos/metacity.png" alt="" align="right" pa href=http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=83892#c65Someone wants to know how to apply Bugzilla patch 124290 under Ubuntu./a/p pttsudo apt-get build-dep metacitybr / apt-get source metacitybr / cd metacity-2.24.0br / wget -O - http://bugzilla.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=124290 | patch -p1br / ./configurebr / makebr / sudo make install/tt/p p(I would include the output but it’d be in Welsh.)/p

img src="http://gnomedesktop.org/themes/footnotes/footnotes.png" alt="" align="right" p This is the third in a series of interviews about open source multimedia, the previous interviews were about a href=http://gnomedesktop.org/node/4067Jokosher/a and a href=http: