In a course I took that included JavaScript, the professor spent several days teaching us how to control a little robot. He was a majero, and he used his Mac and the Apple application to introduce us to the world of programming and try to make us think like developers. Now there is something similar in GNOME, although it is an unofficial application, that is, from third parties. At the moment he is not even in the circle.
The app is currently in development, and its name is Gameeky. There is more detailed information and even videos at his presentation, but basically it is a program/game in which we will have to create a simple program (sometimes not so simple) so that a character can solve a problem. It also allows you to create simple games. What comes next is the list with news that have taken place in the week that has gone from December 8 to 15.
This week in GNOME
- With Sovereign Tech money:
- Applied libgirepository changes to GLib.
- The notification bundling merge request is almost ready.
- They have started implementing adaptive background sheets/dialogs and using them in Libadwaita.
- Now available libsecret 0.21.2.
- An initial PR is available to implement server-side dbus secret service interfaces in oo7.
- They are working on updating the sync/async APIs for the migration from girepository to GITypeInstance.
- The MR for “GBytes variants for GSocket receive methods” is now ready.
- Work has been done to get support for WebDAV in GNOME Online Accounts, and to port it to OAuth2.0 and GTK4/Libadwaita.
- Work has been done for GNOME online accounts.
- Another layer of protection has been added to the metadata mining sandbox in Tracker Miners. This sandbox is a defense in case a security issue is found in one of the libraries packaged by the distribution that tracker-extract uses to analyze user content. The sandbox now uses Landlock, a security API recently added to Linux, to limit access to the file system, in addition to the existing protections provided by SECCOMP.
- libgirepository in GLib has been significantly remade to use GTypeInstance. More changes are expected before the release of the stable version.
- Paper Clip v4.0 has arrived with:
- Now supports XMP metadata. You can (finally) edit the XMP properties of documents that support it and keep them in sync with ordinary metadata.
- Better thumbnails (again): Thumbnails now use less memory and load faster. This is especially noticeable in large documents, which now use 80-90% less memory.
- The About window now displays debugging information relevant to bug reports.
- A Nautilus Extension for Paper Clip is now available in the Github repository.
- Aviator v0.4.3:
- Updated SVT-AV1 to a custom fork of BlueSwordM with changes from 1.8.0, including speed improvements for presets 1 to 6 that improve encoding speed by 17-53%. This branch presents an adaptive quantization curve that increases deltaq as a function of the variance within the superblocks. This function is not available on the main SVT-AV1.
- SVT-AV1 now features NEON optimization, making encoding up to 8x faster than before on ARM-based platforms.
- Updated to GNOME 45 runtime.
- Minor codebase changes that should make it easier to add an Open GOP switch in the future (currently breaks keyframing).
- Gameeky is an app to learn programming by playing and was presented this week.
- Halftone 0.5.0 improves the mobile experience, moving the sidebar to the bottom on mobile. It also comes with retention options.
- This week Dagger arrived, an app to edit and view Graphviz point files.
- Prompt is a new application terminal which focuses on immutable and container-oriented desktops. It can be considered as a companion terminal to GNOME Builder.
- Planify 4.2 has arrived with this list of new features:
- Icon size update.
- Support for personalized decoration.
- Improved colors in the light theme.
- Sort pending tasks by available project.
- Ability to configure or decrease the size of the sidebar.
- Available setting to change the start day of the week on the calendar.
- Added functionality to select the home page.
- Use the new libadwaita and GNOME 45 widgets.
- Various bug fixes.
- Railway version 2.2.0 has been released. This version includes minor quality of life and user interface improvements. Adds a filter for the supplier list and an indicator for when a trip was last updated. Railway also now saves the window size between restarts, disables some buttons while content loads, and no longer collapses trip legs when updating a trip. Railway can also now be translated with Weblate, and is now available in Dutch, French and German.
And this has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.