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...

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...

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...

SUSE Hack Week 0x10 finished on previous Friday, during it I wanted to support hardware rendering in retro-gtk . This project had two sides, the first one was to allow the Libretro cores to draw their video with OpenGL, the second one was to render their video using OpenGL to allow filtering it via shaders. It was unrealistic to do both sides of this project in one week and, being at the time a complete beginner when it comes to OpenGL, I didn't plan to succeed any of these projects but just to learn a lot. The week before the Hack Week, I took some time to study GtkGLArea and to implement a skeleton for the RetroGLDisplay widget, which was similar to RetroCairoDisplay but was drawing nothing. The GTK+ part of the project being ready, I was able to focus on the OpenGL part during the Hack Week. Friday The first day I looked for OpenGL tutorials and I managed to implement an "Hello, triangle" tutorial . I played a bit more with it and got the triangle blinking...

What are spinners A spinner is a widget in charge of displaying some indefinite amount of activity via a spinning circle-ish image. They use de "spinner" style class and are visible when the "active" state flag is set. Turning a widget into a spinner Turning a widget into a spinner is pretty simple, just add the "spinner" style class to the widget's style context! But now your widget is probably invisible, and that's normal: as said just before, spinners are drawn only if they have the "active" state flag on, just set your widget's state flags and you're done! Now, depending on the widget you make spin you may have very different results. If your widget is a GtkImage, it will start spinning as if it was a spinner itself, funky results (and vomit) guaranteed! All the other widgets I tested (GtkLabel, GtkBox, …) don't change (they are visible and they don't spin). If you want to render a spinner on an...