It is likely that many Ubuntu users do not follow our recommendations and use Ubuntu Software, a fork of GNOME Software with which Canonical gives priority to snap packages and prohibits (restricts) the use of flatpaks. Being a fork of the original app, it should also benefit from one of the novelties of this week in GNOME, more specifically that good performance improvements have been made for the app store that other operating systems such as Fedora do use.
As for the rest of the news this week, GNOME has released quite a few apps that have received new features, but they haven't welcomed any into their circle. Below you have what they have published in the TWIG week 82, note that it has been given the title of "Software Performance", referring to GNOME Software.
This week in GNOME
- A new GPathBuf API has arrived in GLib to easily create path files.
- Loupe, the one expect it to become the default image viewer in GNOME, has received many improvements during the last seven days, such as:
- Added a double-tap gesture on touch screens to zoom in and out.
- Added a more natural rubber band effect for zoom gestures when the maximum or minimum zoom level is reached.
- Added some space between images in slider view.
- Fixed some issues with right to left text direction.
- Correction of the swipe gesture on touch screens.
- Shortcuts have been added to the Home and End buttons to go to the first or last image.
- New release of gtk-rs and new releases of Rust bindings for various other GNOME libraries.
- Gaphor 2.16.0 has introduced:
- The model browser now supports multiple selection.
- The graphical user interface has been improved: the name of the diagram appears in the header, the spacing, the background when no diagram is open, and the icons have been improved.
- The editor's CSS editor now supports dark mode and variables.
- It is now easier to add top level packages and diagrams in the model browser.
- Palette was released this week, a simple application that uses gtk4 and libadwaita and that allows you to extract colors from an image and manage them in palettes.
- Also here is Celeste, a file sync app written in GTK that can connect to a wide variety of clouds, including Google Drive, Dropbox, Nextcloud, ownClowd, and WebDAV. Support for more services, such as Microsoft OneDrive and Amazon S3, will be added soon.
- Dino 0.4 has been released. It is a secure and private messaging application that uses the XMPP protocol. With this release they have added support for reactions and replies, and have switched to using GTK4 and libadwaita.
- PDF Metadata Editor is a new application that allows you to edit title, author, keywords, creator, producer and create and modify data in PDF documents. It has arrived this week.
- Design has added gesture input, and other enhancements such as:
- Touch input to pan, pinch to zoom, and double tap to zoom all.
- Fixed tabs not showing.
- Correction of text rotation.
- Improved selection accuracy.
- Correction of incorrect reading of files.
- ARC selection fix.
- Added the ability to save as.
- Management of keyboard shortcuts.
- Gradience 0.4.0 has arrived this week as a preparation build for 0.8.0, the next big release that will add support for GNOME Shell themes and other expected new features. This version introduces changes such as:
- Added CLI interface, useful for creating scripts or for those who prefer terminal tools (CLI guide available here).
- Gradience now prompts the user when switching to other presets, if the current one has unsaved changes.
- When running Gradience from the terminal, error messages are easier to understand thanks to the new logging feature.
- Fixed issue with sorting in the “Browse” tab of the Preset Manager not working in languages other than English.
- Gradience will now internally use hexadecimal color values or RGBA-formatted colors if transparency is used.
- Some other internal improvements and fixes.
- Git.Core 0.3.0 came with:
- Addition of WebKitGtk to the supported libraries.
- Improved runtime behavior if .NET 7 is used instead of .NET 6.
- New test library in C to not depend on the API of other libraries to perform unit tests.
- Support for detailed signals via GObject.Signal.Connect
The GType of a class/interface is now available in the public API. - Additionally, various bugs have been fixed, a new API has been made available, and some code has been cleaned up.
- Denaro v2023.2.0 has included this list of changes:
- Added the ability to add a password to an account (This will encrypt the nmoney file).
- Added the ability to transfer money between accounts with different currencies by providing a conversion rate in the TransferDialog.
- Added the ability to configure how Denaro uses locale separators in amount fields.
- Added the ability to copy individual transactions.
- Added the ability to sort transactions by amount
LC_MONETARY and LC_TIME will now be honored. - Added "Help" button to provide notification when there are 0 transactions imported.
- It is now possible to select recent accounts in the transfers dialog.
- Improved import of qif and ofx files.
- Added “New Window” action to main menu.
- Version 16 of Auto Activities, an extension for GNOME Shell, allows users to choose between showing the activities view or the application grid when there are no windows in the workspaces. Also, the maximum window check delay limit has been raised from 1 to 10 seconds:
- Just Perfection, another extension for GNOME Shell, has released version 23 with improvements such as spacing size overview, among other new features.
And that's been it for this week at GNOME.
Content and images: TWIG.