Under the shell of the developer

So, it's 3.7.92 time! Release notes are almost out, and if everything goes according to the plan, we'll be releasing our next stable version on March 27th.

As a member of the shell team, the big news is another successful round of Every Detail Matters. Go and see for yourself the eco-friendliness of that page: almost every line is green.
Among the many bugs, I'd like to highlight one, that has probably bugged each of you since 3.0: OSDs and global keybindings (screenshots, volume, input source, brightness) work in the overview, the screen lock and when a modal dialog is up.
Many thanks to Florian Müllner for implementing it!
About the rest, suffice to say that we tried to fix all the small annoyances and inconsistencies in the shell. And the release notes already include a very nice screenshot of them, so I won't steal the surprise until we're out.

Then on, the features side, it deserves a mention that we have a new application view, with frequently used apps and custom folders. I like it!

Going back to what I did, I already blogged on the most noticeable feature I worked on this cycle, notification filtering. But the awesome GNOME folks started patching all applications in this universe, so the panel looks a lot better now:

Then, it was a slow February, all exams out, I started hacking on Gjs. The result is an application framework that I will propose for 3.8. You can see a demo (which doubles as a template) at https://github.com/gcampax/gtk-js-app
But I needed a real application to validate what I was writing, and so GNOME Weather was born - again. And people started saw there was activity, I got a bugzilla product, and bam, magically I had patches from everywhere. Now say, isn't free software the best?
But wait no more, here is Weather 3.7.92 in all its glory.

Once again, thanks to Paolo Borelli, Cosimo Cecchi and William Jon McCann for all the help and code, and thanks to all flickr artists that, by choosing a free license, contributed to the success of this app.

So, what are you waiting for? Go grab GNOME 3.7.92!
Tarballs are at the usual location, and so are jhbuild and ostree. And I'm told the build server offers pre-built VM images, if you're into that.

Playing chase

Sometimes, you notice that writing an OS is like playing chase: sometimes you open the latest MS system, and go "Uhm... Where did I see that before?", and sometimes you proudly show the results of hours of work, and what you get is "Heh, everyone else did that ages ago!"

This is one of the latter moments. I hereby present you with the latest creation from the department of "It was about time!": Gnome Weather.

As you may guess, it is an app showing weather conditions for you location (like Win 8 does by default). It is still rough on the edges, as you may notice from the very pixelated icon, but it is there.
And I can't tell how much I love GNOME: I uploaded this four hours ago, and I already got Galician and Polish translations! People, you're simply great.

But this is not the only thing I've been working on lately. You may remember a find the difference Google+ post a while ago. For those of you who didn't care, and for those of you that still don't, what I wanted to highlight there were the finally fixed volume key handling, the headphone icon in the status bar, the modal dialogs in the overview and the new panel for configuring notifications.

Besides the global keybinding thing, which will be solved by Florian in a different way, all those things and many others are happening in GNOME 3.8.

So yeah, this was really because I was a long time since my last post, and because I felt particularly proud of what I achieved. Nothing special maybe, but I hope you enjoyed.


GNOME 3.8 is going to be the best winter release ever!

PS: to Jasper, re the linked post above: you really made my day with your comment :)
PS2: no it wasn't a modified background, it was the One And Only, except that noone ever sees that one in particular because it goes from midnight to 6 am...

Final report for Summer of Code 2012

As the final evaluation approaches, it's time to sum up the project. It has been an amazing summer, but like all good things it has to come to an end at some point.

So, most of the work is already in master, for gnome-shell and gdm, so if you're run Fedora 18, this is what you'll get around Tuesday:

If you wanted to see the actual code changes, you could look at the git log for js/ui/unlockDialog.js and js/ui/screenShield.js, or commits with the tag ScreenShield. They're 43 here, so forgive me if I don't mention them explicitly.
However, this is what is waiting to be merged, spread around bugzilla (in particular 681143):

It's mostly similar, except for some minor issues that were promptly identified by the designers during the BOF session at GUADEC.

Wrapping up, I'd like to thank you my mentor, Marina, who has done a fantastic job of supporting me despite more important personal matters. I'd like to thank also the gdm and gnome-shell developer teams (in particular Ray and Jasper), as well as the whole design team, who is doing the best damage possible to the GNOME community. :D

Soft pencils down

So we've come to this: the Google Summer of Code 2012 is almost over, and all projects are expected to be in the final refinement phase.
Personally, I think that software is never finished, especially when it comes to free software, but I'd say that the original plans for the summer where respected.
If you saw Matthias's post you probably know that the lock screen is included in 3.5.5, and thus is making into the unstable distribution.
There are still some minor issues, but I'm slowly addressing each one of them, and I'm sure the 3.6.0 release will not have you disappointed. As usual, if you want to follow the advancements closely, bugzilla is your friend.
And of course, we have features planned for 3.8 too, ranging from the PIN support (which was dropped as not ready) to the new Notifications panel.

In other words, GNOME 3.6 will rock, and so will 3.8, up to 3.12 - I mean, GNOME OS 4.0!

PS: speaking of GNOME OS, if you want to try GNOME Core 3.6, you can use OSTree, right now and without affecting your usual system.

Halfway through GUADEC

Unbelievable, I made to end of the first part of GUADEC without mental or physical injury.
No I'm kidding, so far it has been awesome, with plenty of interesting talks around GNOME technologies, it's history, community and vision for the future. Not to mention talking to all GNOME hackers, both of tech stuff and random small talk :)
Outside of the conferences, we had the Intern Games (an awesome idea by Diego), and we won them! :D

So a big thanks to the GNOME foundation for sponsorship!

if you're reading this, consider donating to GNOME!

A Coruña UX Hackfest

This Is Just Cool.
I've never been to an hackfest before, but I must say it's amazing, finally meeting and getting to know the people behind GNOME personally. I mean, we did have our amount of tech discussion, some of it got quite heated, but in the end we reached a constructive conclusion on every point, which is not at all bad. Talking with designers face to face makes it very clear that yeah, they know what their doing!

The plan was to deal with file management and in the overview search (first day), and initial setup experience (second day, that is, today). We completely redesigned Nautilus toolbar and menus (again!) and we streamlined the Gtk file chooser, integrating content selection across the OS. Because what is clear, we want to build an OS, top-down, and we will get there, at some point.

Right now is blogging break (or gnome memes break really), so I'd like to take advantage of it to thank the companies the sponsored the event:

Also, I got a Red Hat sticker, that looks just so better than the Windows 7 logo next to it. I'm hoping to get one from Igalia too!

Halfway there! (GSoC "weekly" report)

So here we are, at the Midterm Evaluation checkpoint.
I must say I'm satisfied with how the project ended up so far. I would consider it feature complete now, and code review has begun, both in gdm (with Ray Strode churning through the long patchset and turning the old code base into something quite nice) and in gnome-shell (thanks to my mentor Marina and to the never stopping Jasper).
Also, compared to the last update, I finished the planned features, of which the most prominent is the PIN authentication, that is a touch friendly replacement for passwords, only meant for local logins. Obligatory screenshot:

This final part, while implemented and working here, may not be ready for 3.6, as it is a bit unstable, and the required configuration bits are not there yet.

My plan now? First of all, rebasing all this on the new libgdm (which will require some work to get a testing environment). Then I hope to land this right after 3.5.4, and showcase it at the GUADEC. Because, just in case I forgot:

I will be speaking during the Lightning Talks session, so if you are interestered, don't miss them!