GTK+ widget templates now in Javascript

Let's get the features in early!

If you're working on a Javascript application for GNOME, you'll be interested to know that you can now write GTK+ widget templates in gjs.

Many thanks to Giovanni for writing the original patches. And now to a small example:

const MyComplexGtkSubclass = new Lang.Class({
    Name: 'MyComplexGtkSubclass',
    Extends: Gtk.Grid,
    Template: 'resource:///org/gnome/myapp/widget.xml',
    Children: ['label-child'],

    _init: function(params) {
        this.parent(params);

        this._internalLabel = this.get_template_child(MyComplexGtkSubclass,
                                                      'label-child');
    }   
});

And now you just need to create your widget:

let content = new MyComplexGtkSubclass();
content._internalLabel.set_label("My updated label");

You'll need gjs from git master to use this feature. And if you see anything that breaks, don't hesitate to file a bug against gjs in the GNOME Bugzilla.

On fêtera la sortie de GNOME 3.14 mardi soir à Lyon

In French, for a change :)

Mardi soir, le 23 septembre, quelques-uns d'entre nous se retrouveront vers 18h30 au Smoking Dog pour quelques boissons, et poursuivront avec un dîner indien prés du métro St-Jean.

N'hésitez pas à vous inscrire sur le Wiki, que vous soyez utilisateurs de GNOME, développeurs ou simplement des amis du logiciel libre.

À mardi!

Fresh software from the 3.14 menu

Here is a small recap of the GNOME 3.14 features I worked on. Some are already well publicised, through blogs:

• Brought maturity to GOM. It's now usable for real applications (including a number of grilo plugins), and will be gaining features for the more demanding uses soon (such as batched writes), along with gjs support.
• Made the default firewall experience on Fedora better (and made Sharing better on every NetworkManager-using Linux distribution, by the same token).
• Automatic rotation for Windows 8 certified devices. This will still need more work to be integrated into systemd/udev or GNOME.
• Worked on architecturing the Sharing functionality between applications which will be required for sandboxed applications.
• A bit last minute, but Totem now works on Wayland, triggering more bugs in the stack.

And obviously loads of bug fixes, and patch reviews. And I do mean loads :)

To look forward to

If all goes according to plan, I'll be able to merge the aforementioned automatic rotation support into systemd/udev. The kernel API is pretty bad, which makes the user-space code look bad...

The first parts of ebooks support in gnome-documents have already been written, scheduled for 3.16.

And my favourites

Note: With links that will open up like a Christmas present when GNOME 3.14 is released.

There are a lot of big, new features in GNOME 3.14. The Adwaita rewrite made it possible to polish the theme greatly. The captive portals support is very useful, the travelling you will enjoy this (I certainly have!).

But my favourite new feature has to be the gestures support in gnome-shell. I'll make good use of that :)

And now for some hardware (Onda v975w)

Prodded by Adam Williamson's fedlet work, and by my inability to getting an Android phone to display anything, I bought an x86 tablet.

At first, I was more interested in buying a brand-name one, such as the Dell Venue 8 Pro Adam has, or the Lenovo Miix 2 that Benjamin Tissoires doesn't seem to get enough time to hack on. But all those tablets are around 300€ at most retailers around, and have a smaller 7 or 8-inch screen.

So I bought a "not exported out of China" tablet, the 10" Onda v975w. The prospect of getting a no-name tablet scared me a little. Would it be as "good" (read bad) as a PadMini or an Action Pad?

Vrrrroooom.

Well, the hardware's pretty decent, and feels rather solid. There's a small amount of light leakage on the side of the touchscreen, but not something too noticeable. I wish it had a button on the bezel to mimick the Windows button on some other tablets, but the edge gestures should replace it nicely.

The screen is pretty gorgeous and its high DPI triggers the eponymous mode in GNOME.

With help of various folks (Larry Finger, and the aforementioned Benjamin and Adam), I got the tablet to a state where I could use it to replace my force-obsoleted iPad 1 to read comic books.

I've put up a wiki page with the status of hardware/kernel support. It's doesn't contain all my notes just yet (sound is working, touchscreen will work very very soon, and various "basic" features are being worked on).

I'll be putting up the fixed-up Wi-Fi driver and more instructions about installation on the Wiki page.

And if you want to make the jump, the tablets are available at $150 plus postage from Aliexpress.

Update: On Google+ and in comments of this blog, it was pointed out that the seller on Aliexpress was trying to scam people. All my apologies, I just selected the cheapest from this website. I personally bought it on Amazon.fr using NewTec24 FR as the vendor.

A follow up to yesterday's Videos new for 3.14

The more astute (or Wayland testing) amongst you will recognise mutter running a nested Wayland compositor. Yes, it means that Videos will work natively under Wayland.

Got to love indie films

It's not perfect, as I'm still seeing hangs within the Intel driver for a number of operations, but basic playback works, and the playback is actually within the same window and correctly hidden when in the overview ;)

Videos 3.14 features

We've added a few, but nonetheless interesting features to Videos in GNOME 3.14.

Auto-rotation of videos

If you capture videos in portrait orientation on your phone, we are now able to rotate them automatically in the movie player, as well as in the thumbnails.

Better streaming

You can now seek anywhere inside streamed videos, even if we didn't download all the way to that point. That's particularly useful for long videos, or slow servers (or a combination of both).

Thumbnails generation

Finally, videos without thumbnails in your videos directory will have thumbnails automatically generated, without having to browse them in Files. This makes the first experience of videos more pleasing to the eye.

What's next?

We'll work on integrating Victor Toso's work on grilo plugins, to show information about the film or TV series on your computer, such as grouping episodes of a series together, showing genres, covers and synopsis for films.

With a bit of luck, we should also be able to provide you with more video content as well, through partners.