Bytes, Gnomes & Chozo

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

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