Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

Last Saturday and Sunday I went to the Capitole du Libre 2018 to animate the GNOME booth and help on the Purism one. It was my first time at the Capitole du Libre, and I really enjoyed the event even though I couldn't attend any talk but the closing keynote, which was really interesting as it was a round table with Tristan Nitot and Stéphane Bortzmeyer . The event is about free software and free culture in general, beside GNOME and Purism you could find associations as varied as Nos oignons , Framasoft , OSGeo , Dogmazic , Monnaie Libre Occitanie , Khaganat , ./play.it , 0 A.D. , various distros you already all know and more. I was happy to note that the attending crowed was extremely diverse, ranging from persons barely knowing what free software is to Arnaud Bonatti or persons in their early 10s and already more involved into free culture than I am. I was also happy to recognize persons I already met at the JDLL , either animating booths or visiting the GNOME booth. Th...

I am glad to announce that the tooling I am working on since the beginning of the year is ready to be used! Thanks to new features introduced into libhandy 0.0.3 and 0.0.4 and thanks to a few fixes to Adwaita in GTK+ 3.24.1, you can make GTK+ 3 apps adaptive to work both on the desktop and on the upcoming GNOME-based Librem 5 phone. We are early in the GNOME 3.32 release schedule and the Librem 5 will be released a bit after it, so if you want your apps to work on the Librem 5, now is the best time: use libhandy 0.0.4 and up, use GTK+ 3.24.1 and up and target GNOME 3.32! A few apps like Fractal, Podcasts, Calls and Chatty are already using libhandy's adaptive capabilities, and other apps are working on their adaptive transition like Contacts, Games, Geary and Settings (all are works in progress). libhandy is available in Debian Unstable and Arch's AUR repository, and I wish it would be in Fedora already to let GNOME Settings' CI pass . For the moment, libhandy is a G...

With a new version of GNOME always comes a new version of Games, and this new version comes packed with new features, bug fixes and developer experience improvements. Install Games 3.30 Platforms View and Developers View As part of his GSoC project, Saurabh implemented two new views of your games collection: one filtering games by their developers and another one filtering them by their platforms. To know more, read Saurabh's Segregating views and Description view articles on his blog. To implement this he needed to work a lot on the Grilo front, check his explanations in his Adding self registering keys to lua-factory article. He also started to work on a new page displaying many details about a game like the number of players and a description, it was unfortunately not ready on time for this release but will hopefully land in 3.32. Gamepad Navigation You can now navigate the UI with your gamepads! Select your collection view with the shoulder buttons, browse ...

We are getting midterm of the GNOME 3.30 development cycle and many things already happened in the Games world. I will spare the user facing news for later as today I want to tell you about development features we desperatly needed as maintainers: tests and continuous integration. TL;DR: GLib, Meson, Flatpak and GitLab CI make writing and running tests super easy! 😁 This will allow Games to be more stable and to have more features. The More the Buggier Not only does Games and retro-gtk are slowly becoming bigger and more complex, but to handle many platforms Games has to come flatpaked with Libretro cores. Games and retro-gtk are currently only tested manually and as far as I know, this is also true for the vast majority of the Libretro cores we distribute. That's quite a large number of untested lines of code, it is already impossible to test all of them manually and the test matrix is not going smaller. We are not immune to introducing new bugs or to accidentally reintro...

Last week my employer Purism allowed me to attend the Fractal hackfest in Strasbourg . There we chatted about the future of Fractal and of the messaging applications Purism needs for the Librem 5 . Fractal will have two split: a "vertical" split, separating the frontend of Fractal from its backend so we can have a shared Matrix backend; a "horizontal" split, separating Fractal into two applications communicating with the Matrix backend: one focusing on public rooms where you chat with strangers and most messages are noise for you (this application will be very similar to current Fractal), the other focusing on private conversations with few persons where you want to read everything and which will also support SMS. Also, hackfests are hard. 🍺😶

I started working on making GNOME Web work well on the Librem 5 ; to be sure it fits a phone's screen I want the windows to fit in a 360 points width, which is definitely small. To do so I started with the advices from Tobias Bernard to make Web have two modes that I named normal and narrow . The normal mode is Web as you know it, while the narrow mode moves all buttons from the header bar but the hamburger menu to a new action bar at the bottom, letting the windows reach yet unreachable widths. Web autmatically adapting to small sizes. And now, with device rotation on a tablet. The code is overall ready, I still need to break it into reviewable bits before submitting it upstream. Once this get merged: we want to not show tabs in narrow mode and instead to display a popover listing the available pages, we want to make the search bar shrink rather than to limit the minimum window size, we consider migrating away from the application menu model. ...

In my previous article I shared my plans to help porting existing GTK+ applications to Purism 's upcoming Librem 5 phone without having to fork them. This article will present the GTK+ widget I developed for Purism to make this happen. For more information on what Purism is working on for the Librem 5, please check Nicole Faerber's latest article . C'est pas sorcier The underlying idea is to allow applications to dynamically switch between the two main GNOME application layouts: a row of panels — each panel being the view of an element from the previous one — and a stack of panels. The goal isn't to changes applications using the stack paradigm but the ones using the row one, allowing them to reach smaller sizes and to be usable on constrained sizes while keeping their initial paradigm and design when the screen space is sufficient. The development cost to port the applications to this adaptive design should be as low as possible. To achieve that, I wrote a GT...

As some of you may already know, I recently joined Purism to help developing GTK+ apps for the upcoming Librem 5 phone . Purism and GNOME share a lot of ideas and values, so the GNOME HIG and GNOME apps are what we will focus on primarily: we will do all we can to not fork nor to reinvent the wheel but to help allowing existing GTK+ applications to work on phones. How Fit are Existing GTK+ Apps? Phones are very different from laptops and even tablets: their screen is very small and their main input method is a single thumb on a touchscreen. Luckily, many GNOME applications are touch-friendly and are fit for small screens. Many applications present you a tree of information you can browse and I see two main layouts used by for GNOME applications to let you navigate it. A first kind of layout is found in applications like Documents, I'll call it stack UI : it uses all the available space to display the collection of information sources (in that case, documents), clicking a...