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Archive for the ‘GNOME’ Category

The Board 0.1.3

April 28, 2011

The Board 0.1.3

Time for a new development snapshot release of The Board! I’ve just uploaded the 0.1.3 tarball. Get it while it’s hot! So, what are user-visible changes?

The main feature of this release is the webcam support in photo elements with Cheese. It’s fun, it’s magic! A couple of useful key shortcuts were added: Ctrl+N to add a new page and Delete key to remove selected elements. An important crasher fix—caused by an update in gobject-introspection—is also included.

I should be updating The Board’s PPA with the new release in the next days. Other distros should have updated packages soon. The sad news is that the webcam support will not be available on Natty as it doesn’t ship Cheese 3.0. Everything else should work fine.

What’s next? I will be working on the implementation of a storage layer based on Tracker and a few important UI improvements. On other news, I’ll be giving a talk about The Board in the next Desktop Summit. Yay!

Moving to Fedora

April 25, 2011

After many years using Ubuntu as my primary distro, I’m now moving to Fedora. I’ve installed F15 Beta on my personal laptop during this long weekend and spent a few hours getting my development environment back together. I have a few reasons for moving to Fedora.

Ubuntu and GNOME 3. Ubuntu now has an uncertain user story for GNOME 3. They will provide a PPA for Natty with GNOME 3 but it pretty much comflicts with the official packages. Not ideal as I just want GNOME 3 out of the box.

GNOME 3 full time. So far, I’ve tried GNOME 3 on the live images and while doing GNOME releases but never used it for longer than a few days. I wanted to start using it full time as soon as possible and Fedora provides exactly that.

Red Hat and upstream. I have always had great respect for the big contributions that the Red Hat guys give to GNOME and other upstream projects. I want to support them in a more concrete way.

Out of comfort zone. I’ve recently decided to do a few things to get me out of my comfort zone. Changing distros is one of them. It’s not a big deal really—at least for me anyway—but it’s a step on a not-so-comfortable direction. I’ll surely learn a few things on the way.

Except for the apparently broken Eclipse in F15—couldn’t get the Android ADT plugin to install—and a few glitches and rough edges here and there, the experience has been quite good so far.

Leaving the Release Team

April 17, 2011

Photo by Frédéric Péters

It’s been some time that I’ve kept my work on the GNOME release team to a minimum by just doing a few development releases. After some consideration, I decided that it’s a good time to leave. The awesome Colin Walters will replace me.

This is the team that set the general plan for the GNOME 3 release and I feel very proud of having been part of it. I especially remember a couple of very long conversations with my evil twin about GNOME 3 and the team discussions during our meetings at GUADEC and FOSDEM…

Leaving the release team means that I now have no official roles in GNOME anymore. I’ve left a few other positions recently—among others that I haven’t really announced. This is actually an explicit decision of mine to gradually free some of my (rare) spare time for other personal projects. You probably know one of them. But there’s probably more coming, stay tuned!

GNOME 3

April 06, 2011

What a day! This is one of those rare special moments. Hard to describe. Tricky to write about. It’s when the result of the hard work of the community is finally made available to everyone! 9 years since our 2.0 release and nearly 3 years of gestation. GNOME 3 is finally here!

GNOME 3 is a new baseline for innovation for the years to come. A new user experience, a clean platform, a gorgeous website, and more. This release brings a strong refreshing feeling to the community and this is simply awesome.

Celebrate my friends! Wherever you are! GNOME 3 is an amazing achievement and we should all be very proud of it!