GNOME Summary, February 2-10: Pango, Translation Guide, LeoCAD, FSV, Nautilus, binary locator

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

This is the (somewhat late again, yes I am lame) GNOME Summary for
February 2-10, 2000.

=============================================================
  Table of Contents
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 1)  Pango 
 2)  GNOME Translation Guide
 3)  Plastic-pieces-which-are-not-Legos CAD Program
 4)  3D File Visualizer Prototype
 5)  Nautilus Status Update
 6)  "Newsgroup binary locator"
 7)  Hacking Activity
 8)  New and Updated Software

==============================================================

 1)  Pango 

--------------------------------------------------------------


The Pango web site went live a little while ago, and Owen has been
steadily hacking on Pango itself. Check it out:

 http://www.pango.org

Pango is very important for the future of free X desktops, and is
separate from GTK. It solves at least two important problems:

 - it gives you a sane font API, so you can ask for "Times Bold 14" instead 
   of "-*-*-*-blah-blah-*-I-am-in-X-hell-*-"

 - it handles internationalized text layout, including
   bidirectional rendering, so it will do all the major world
   languages - East and Southeast Asian, Middle Eastern, everything.
   
Basically it is an infrastructure for dealing with and displaying the
full range of languages supported by Unicode, and for dealing with
fonts. Initially Pango will be used for internationalization support
in GTK+, but other projects are encouraged to use it as well.
Hopefully this will become a standard library in the tradition of
gettext.

==============================================================

 2)  GNOME Translation Guide

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Kjartan Maraas, GNOME translator hero, has started a guide for GNOME
translators. Kjartan has been religiously ensuring that almost every
module in CVS has an up-to-date Norwegian translation, every week, all
the time, since the earliest days of GNOME.  So basically the #1 GNOME
Translation Guru will be teaching you to translate. :-) The Guide
isn't on the web yet, but you can get it from CVS as
gnome-docu/gdp/translate-gnome.sgml.

==============================================================

 3)  Plastic-pieces-which-are-not-Legos CAD Program

--------------------------------------------------------------


A cool GTK+ application posted to Gnotices this week; it's a CAD
program that lets you design models with plastic bricks.

  http://leocad.gerf.org/

I think this may have been on Slashdot too, but it deserves
re-mention. Note that the sources are only available from CVS, some
people have been confused about the licensing because the web site
only has binaries.

==============================================================

 4)  3D File Visualizer Prototype

--------------------------------------------------------------


Daniel Richard G. at MIT wrote a small program that uses OpenGL 3D
graphics to visualize your files; mostly useful for finding really big
files to delete. It almost requires 3D acceleration to be fast enough,
but it's pretty cool.

  http://fox.mit.edu/skunk/soft/fsv/

Could be an optional view component in Nautilus someday, if someone
did the necessary maintenance and integration work. For now it's a fun
standalone application.

==============================================================

 5)  Nautilus Status Update

--------------------------------------------------------------


Status report from the Nautilus hackers:

<blockquote>
There is now a mailing list for discussion of Nautilus, the upcoming
GNOME 2.0 graphical shell and file manager. The address is
nautilus-list@lists.eazel.com. To subscribe, send `subscribe
nautilus-list' in the body of a message to majordomo@lists.eazel.com.

Here are some of the things that have happened with Nautilus in the
past week:

* List view now remembers most recent sorting criterion per directory.

* A zoom control has been added to the location bar (but it's not hooked
up to the zoom functionality of the various views yet).

* Icons now use bilinear scaling for higher quality scaled
images.

* A fast DocBook to HTML converter was added to allow on-the-fly
display of DocBook in the help component.

* Zooming in the icon view now shows more information at higher zoom
levels. What information is shown in what order is customizable.

* The appearance of the side panel and the way meta-views display
there is being reworked, but is not done yet. You can get a sneak
preview by defining USE_NEW_TABS when compiling.

* Nautilus can now properly embed Bonobo controls and
subdocuments. For example, the text/plain viewer that comes with
Bonobo now works for displaying text documents in Nautilus.

* The usual bunch of bug fixes.
</blockquote>

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 6)  "Newsgroup binary locator"

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A new app called PIMPPA made its way into the GNOME software map - the
package description was that it helped download binary files from
newsgroups. My first thought was "some guy's porn extractor" - a
thought that turned out to be exactly correct:

  http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Platform/4014/pimppa_snapshot.jpg
  http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Platform/4014/

According to the home page "PIMPPA is a free picture management system
for Linux. It's main point is that when you have fast connections and
really big amounts of stuff come in daily (lets say "hundreds of
files"), it's just not efficient to do things manually by hand
anymore."

Amusing.:-)

==============================================================

 7)  Hacking Activity

--------------------------------------------------------------


Module Score-O-Matic:
 (number of CVS commits per module, since the last summary)

  93 gimp
  79 guppi3
  56 nautilus
  55 dr-genius
  54 gnome-docu
  48 evolution
  35 gnome-db
  34 gnome-core
  28 gnumeric
  27 gnome-applets
  22 gtkhtml
  19 gb
  19 beast
  18 gtranslator
  18 gtk+
  17 gnome-utils
  17 dia
  15 gnome-libs
  14 gnome-iconedit
  12 libgtop
  11 gtk--
  10 achtung

User Score-O-Matic:
 (number of CVS commits per user, since the last summary)

  79 trow
  78 jirka
  39 neo
  32 timj
  28 dcm
  26 rodrigo
  26 dmueth
  25 mmeeks
  23 martin
  23 ettore
  21 rasta
  19 kmaraas
  19 jrb
  18 sopwith
  18 owen
  17 iholmes
  16 spapadim
  15 mitch
  15 jpr
  14 miguel
  14 kenelson
  14 aaronl
  13 sullivan
  13 birger

==============================================================

 8)  New and Updated Software

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See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more
information about any of these packages.

Pan - Usenet client 
Gnofract - fractal generator
RheinTurm - clock
GNOME ReadNews - Usenet client
Floyd - VRML browser
gnome-iconedit - Icon editor
graham - small document organizer
gob - GTK Object builder 
Xwhois - whois frontend
Nightfall - interactive astronomy
gnofin - personal financial application
gnetview - network management environment
GtkSimpleFont - GTK interface for SimpleFont
gnome-napster - Napster client
GNOME finger - finger client
seti_applet - applet monitors your seti@home client
BMUD - MUD client
GtkExText - enhanced text widget
Gtk-FMRadio - radio tuner
Finder - Mac-style finder bar
RadioActive - video4linux radio frontend
Just Another GTK Tetris - tetris clone

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Until next week - 

Havoc