Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

I am moving this blog to greener lands: https://fediverse.blog/~/AdrienPlazas . The existing articles will remain here on Blogger, and new articles will land on the fediverse.blog Plume instance.

This year again I attended GUADEC, now for the sixth time in a row. It was a great GUADEC, as usual, thanks to the organizers and the attendees for making it as enjoyable as it was! Friday 🎮 I attended Christian's talk about designing multi-process apps, it sparked the interest of Alexander Mikhaylenko who rapidly started playing with these concepts, as we plan since a long time to run Libretro cores in a subprocess in GNOME Games . Lubosz presented his work on the VR Linux desktop. Even better, he demoed it, and the next day it was possible to test it in the corridor! So I did, and it was pretty amusing. I had the pleasure to meet Andrei Lisita and watch his lightning talk about adding advanced savestates support to GNOME Games. It is the first time an intern working on Games attends GUADEC, but sadly this time it's his mentor (Alexander Mikhaylenko) who couldn't attend. One day maybe, an intern and a mentor for GNOME Games will meet. 😛 Games is a newcomer fri...

libhandy 0.0.10 just got released, and it comes with a few new adaptive widgets for your GTK app. You can get this new version here . The View Switcher GNOME applications typically use a GtkStackSwitcher to switch between their views. This design works fine on a desktop, but not so well on really narrow devices like mobile phones, so Tobias Bernard designed a more modern and adaptive replacement — now available in libhandy as the HdyViewSwitcher . In many ways, the HdyViewSwitcher functions very similarly to a GtkStackSwitcher : you assign it a GtkStack containing your application's pages, and it will display a row of side-by-side, homogeneously-sized buttons, each representing a page. It differs in that it can display both the title and the icon of your pages, and that the layout of the buttons automatically adapts to a narrower version, depending on the available width. We have also added a view switcher bar, designed to be used at he bottom of the window: HdyView...

FOSDEM 2019 This year was my second time at FOSDEM and it was both exhausting and a lot of fun! I went from Montpellier to Brussels in TGV, via the direct line connecting the two cities. I love high speed trains, they are comfy, you can bring lots of baggage, you are not probed, you can see the countryside, they typically connect the center of cities, and they even have Wi-Fi and power plugs! 🤯 Thanks to that, I have been able to bring the booth box that was sitting at my house since Capitole du Libre 2018 for free! In a tramway in Montpellier, with the GNOME booth box, Librem 5 devkits, and my stuff. I spent the vast majority of my time helping on the GNOME booth, I helped a tiny bit on the GNOME newcomers workshop where I add the chance to meet Jorge Creixell, which resulted into a merge request , and I played a bit with a Librem 5 devkit. Oh, and in two FOSDEMs I managed to attend zero talks. The most important thing for me has been hanging out with colleagues and frie...

Libhandy 0.0.7 just got released! I didn't blog about this mobile and adaptive oriented GTK widget library since the release of its 0.0.4 version three months ago , so let's catch up on what has been added since. List Rows A common pattern in GNOME applications is lists , which are typically implemented via GtkListBox . More specific patterns arose, where rows have a title at the start, an optional subtitle below it, actions at the end and an icon or some other widget like a radio button as a prefix. These rows can also be expanded to reveal nested rows or anything else that fits the need. So far every application using these patterns implemented the rows by hand for each and every row. It made using these a bit cumbersome and it led to inconsistencies in sizing, even inside a single application. To make these patterns easier to use, we implemented HdyActionRow , HdyComboRow and HdyExpanderRow . HdyActionRow The action row is a simple and flexible row, it lets...