GNOME

It’s almost one year later and, despite the acquisition by SmugMug a few months ago and the predictions from some people that it would mean me stopping from using Flickr & maintaining Frogr, here comes the new release of frogr 1.5. Not many changes this time, but some of them hopefully still useful for some people, such as the empty initial state that is now shown when you don’t have any pictures, as requested a while ago already by Nick Richards (thanks Nick!), or the removal of the applications menu from the shell’s top panel (now integrated in the hamburger menu), in line with the “App Menu Retirement” initiative. ...

It’s been a pretty hectic time during the past months for me here at Endless, busy with updating our desktop to the latest stable version of GNOME Shell (3.26, at the time the process started), among other things. And in all this excitement, it seems like I forgot to blog so I think this time I’ll keep it short for once, and simply link to a video I made a couple of months ago, right when I was about to finish the first phase of the process (which ended up taking a bit longer than expected). ...

Another year goes by and, again, I feel the call to make one more release just before 2017 over, so here we are: frogr 1.4 is out! Yes, I know what you’re thinking: “Who uses Flickr in 2017 anyway?". Well, as shocking as this might seem to you, it is apparently not just me who is using this small app, but also another 8,935 users out there issuing an average of 0.22 Queries Per Second every day (19008 queries a day) for the past year, according to the stats provided by Flickr for the API key. ...

After spending a few days in Manchester with other fellow GNOME hackers and colleagues from Endless, I’m finally back at my place in the sunny land of Surrey (England) and I thought it would be nice to write some sort of recap, so here it is: The Conference I arrived in Manchester on Thursday the 27th just on time to go to the pre-registration event where I met the rest of the gang and had some dinner, and that was already a great start. Let's forget about the fact that I lost my badge even before leaving the place, which has to be some type of record (losing the badge before the conference starts, really?), but all in all it was great to meet old friends, as well as some new faces, that evening already. Then the 3 core days of GUADEC started. My first impression was that everything (including the accommodation at the university, which was awesome) was very well organized in general, and the venue make it for a perfect place to organize this type of event, so I was already impressed even before things started. ...

We just released Endless OS 3.2 to the world after a lot of really hard work from everyone here at Endless, including many important changes and fixes that spread pretty much across the whole OS: from the guts and less visible parts of the core system (e.g. a newer Linux kernel, OSTree and Flatpak improvements, updated libraries…) to other more visible parts including a whole rebase of the GNOME components and applications (e.g. mutter, gnome-settings-daemon, nautilus…), newer and improved “Endless apps” and a completely revamped desktop environment. ...

Quick post to let you know that I just released frogr 1.3. This is mostly a small update to incorporate a bunch of updates in translations, a few changes aimed at improving the flatpak version of it (the desktop icon has been broken for a while until a few weeks ago) and to remove some deprecated calls in recent versions of GTK+. Ah! I’ve also officially dropped support for OS X via gtk-osx, as I was systematically failing to update and use (I only use frogr from GNOME these days) since a loooong time ago, and so it did not make sense for me to keep pretending that the mac version is something that is usable and maintained anymore. ...

Of course, just a few hours after releasing frogr 1.1, I’ve noticed that there was actually no good reason to depend on gettext 0.19.8 for the purposes of removing the intltool dependency only, since 0.19.7 would be enough. So, as raising that requirement up to 0.19.8 was causing trouble to package frogr for some distros still in 0.19.7 (e.g. Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), I’ve decided to do a quick new release and frogr 1.2 is now out with that only change. ...

After almost one year, I’ve finally released another small iteration of frogr with a few updates and improvements. Not many things, to be honest, bust just a few as I said: Added support for flatpak: it's now possible to authenticate frogr from inside the sandbox, as well as open pictures/videos in the appropriate viewer, thanks to the OpenURI portal. Updated translations: as it was noted in the past when I released 1.0, several translations were left out incomplete back then. Hopefully the new version will be much better in that regard. Dropped the build dependency on intltool (requires gettext >= 0.19.8). A few bugfixes too and other maintenance tasks, as usual. Besides, another significant difference compared to previous releases is related to the way I'm distributing it: in the past, if you used Ubuntu, you could configure my PPA and install it from there even in fairly old versions of the distro. However, this time that's only possible if you have Ubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak", as that's the one that ships gettext >= 0.19.8, which is required now that I removed all trace of intltool (more info in this post). However, this is also the first time I’m using flatpak to distribute frogr so, regardless of which distribution you have, you can now install and run it as long as you have the org.gnome.Platform/x86_64/3.22 stable runtime installed locally. Not too bad! :-). See more detailed instructions in its web site. ...

Last week I had the chance to attend for 3 days the GNOME Software Hackfest, organized by Richard Hughes and hosted at the brand new Red Hat’s London office. And besides meeting new people and some old friends (which I admit to be one of my favourite aspects about attending these kind of events), and discovering what it’s now my new favourite place for fast-food near London bridge, I happened to learn quite a few new things while working on my particular personal quest: getting Chromium browser to run as an xdg-app. ...

I’ve just released frogr 1.0. I can’t believe it took me 6 years to move from the 0.x series to the 1.0 release, but here it is finally. For good or bad. This release is again a small increment on top of the previous one that fixes a few bugs, should make the UI look a bit more consistent and “modern”, and includes some cleanups at the code level that I’ve been wanting to do for some time, like using G_DECLARE_FINAL_TYPE, which helped me get rid of ~1.7K LoC. ...

First of all, let me be clear: no, I’m not trying to leave Emacs again, already got over that stage. Emacs is and will be my main editor for the foreseeable future, as it’s clear to me that there’s no other editor I feel more comfortable with, which is why I spent some time cleaning up my .emacs.d and making it more “manageable”. But as much as like Emacs as my main “weapon”, I sometimes appreciate the advantages of using a different kind of beast for specific purposes. And, believe me or not, in the past 2 years I learned to love Eclipse/CDT as the best work-mate I know when I need some extra help to get deep inside of the two monster C++ projects that WebKit and Chromium are. And yes, I know Eclipse is resource hungry, slow, bloated… and whatnot; but I’m lucky enough to have fast SSDs and lots of RAM in my laptop & desktop machines, so that’s not really a big concern anymore for me (even though I reckon that indexing chromium in the laptop takes “quite some time”), so let’s move on :-) ...

Last weekend I visited my former office to attend the GStreamer hackfest 2015, along with other ~30 hackers from all over the world. This was my very first GStreamer hackfest ever and it was definitely a great experience, although at the beginning I was really not convinced to attend since, after all, why bother attending an event about something I have no clue about? But the answer turned out to be easy in the end, once I actually thought a bit about it: it would be a good opportunity both to learn more about the project and to meet people in real life (old friends included), making the most of it happening 15min away from my house. So, I went there. ...

So, after neglecting my responsibilities with this project for way too long, I finally released frogr 0.11 now, making the most that I'm now enjoying some kind of "parenting vacation" for a few days. Still, do not expect this new release to be fully loaded of new features and vast improvements, as it’s more like another incremental update that adds a couple of nice new things and fixes a bunch of problems I was really unhappy about (e.g. general slowness, crashes). ...

I know I haven’t blogged for a while, and definitely not as much as I would like, but that was partially because I was quite busy during my last days in Samsung (left on the 25th of July), where I wanted to make sure I did not leave any loose end before departure, and that everything was properly handed over to the right people there. But that was one month ago… so what did I do since then? Many many things, and most of them away from a keyboard, at least until the past week. Main highlights: ...

Quick post to let the world know that I’ve just released a new version of frogr right now, in order to address a few issues present in the previous version. Mainly: Deprecation of non-SSL end points for the Flickr API (see these two posts for more info). From now on, frogr will use SSL-only API calls. Address issues with frogr's AppData file. Apparently, the AppData file was neither valid (according to appdata-validate) nor being installed properly, preventing frogr from showing up nicely in the GNOME Software app. Allow disabling video uploads at configuration time (enabled by default), instead of making the decision depending on the detected platform. This will hopefully make life easier for packagers of other platforms (e.g. MacPorts). Removed libsoup-gnome code once and for all (API deprecated a while ago). Other things: updated translations and fixed a few minor bugs. As usual, feel free to check the website of the project in case you want to know more about frogr, how to get it or how to contribute to it.

So, after a bit more than one year without releasing any version of frogr, I finally managed to get some “spare” time to put all the pieces together and ship the ninth version of it, which I believe/hope is going to be a quite solid one. In all honesty, though, this version does not come with many new features as the previous ones, yet some changes and fixes that I believe were quite necessary, and therefore should help improving the user experience in some subtle ways. ...

As many other WebKitGTK+ hackers (30 in total), I flew last Saturday to A Coruña to attend the 5th edition of the WebKitGTK+ Hackfest, hosted once again by Igalia at their premises and where people from several different affiliations gathered together to try to give our beloved port a boost. As for me, I flew there to work mainly on accessibility related issues, making the most of the fact that both Joanie (Orca maintainer) and Piñeiro (ATK maintainer) would be there too, so it should be possible to make things happen faster, specially discussion-wise. ...

As I mentioned in my previous post before GUADEC, I’ve been putting some effort lately on trying to improve the accessibility layer of WebKitGTK+, as part of my work here at Samsung, and one of the main things I’ve worked on was the removal of the dependency we had on Pango and GAIL to implement the atk_text_get_text_*_offset() family of functions for the different text boundaries. And finally, I’m really happy to say that such a task is complete once and for all, meaning that now those functions should work as well or as bad on WebKit2GTK+ as they do in WebKitGTK+, so the weird behaviour described in bug 73433 is no longer an issue. You can check I’m not lying by just taking a look to the commit that removed both all trace of Pango and GAIL in the code, as well as and the one that removed the GAIL dependency from the build system. And if you want more detail, just feel free to check the whole dependency tree in WebKit’s bugzilla. ...

One year again GUADEC is approaching and, also again, I’m very happy to say that I’ll be there as well this time, even if I have to recognize it was not on my plans for this year, at least not initially. And the reason why it was not initially in my plans was mainly because I’ve been already through quite some changes during these past months year, and my family just came over to the UK two months ago. This means that, even I already arrived by the beginning of the year, we just started to settle here as a family a few weeks ago. So in that context, I didn’t feel like leaving them alone for one week already now, it definitely would look like a “wrong management of priorities” to me. ...

It turns out I’m writing this post at 6:00 AM in the morning from a hotel instead of doing it at a more reasonable time from my comfy home or a nice cafeteria. That’s already quite a new thing by itself, and the reason for that is not that I became crazy or something, but the fact that I’m completely jet-lagged in California right now in order to attend my second WebKit Contributors Meeting (my first time was in 2011), this time as part of the Samsung team in the UK R&D center, together with my mate Anton Obzhirov. ...