Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

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. ...