GNOME Summary Feb 21-29 (Development roadmap, TurboLinux, Perl/GTK mailing list, Gnomba, Dia, Project of the Week, Nautilus Update)

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

This is the GNOME Summary for February 21-29, 2000.

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  Table of Contents
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 1)  Development Roadmap
 2)  TurboLinux ships GNOME as default
 3)  Perl/GTK+ Mailing List
 4)  Gnomba release
 5)  Dia release
 6)  Project of the Week
 7)  Nautilus Update
 8)  Hacking Activity
 9)  New and Updated Software

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 1)  Development Roadmap

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We have a plan for development over the next year or so - but its
success depends on the GNOME developers, translators, and
documentation authors. If you're involved in GNOME development, take a
moment to read the roadmap and create a micro-roadmap for your package
that fits in to the Master Plan.

Check it out here:

  http://developer.gnome.org/status/roadmap.html

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 2)  TurboLinux ships GNOME as default

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I guess this has been out for a while, but I just found out about it.
TurboLinux 6.0 Workstation now has GNOME as its default desktop, replacing
their old AfterStep-based desktop.

  http://www.turbolinux.com/product/workstation.html

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 3)  Perl/GTK+ Mailing List

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For a long time, Perl/GTK questions have been a significant percentage
of postings on gtk-list; now there's a dedicated list for discussion
of the Perl bindings for GTK+, and programming questions for users of
Perl/GTK+. Read the announce here:

  http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-announce-list/2000-February/0039.shtml

There are quite a few GTK+ and GNOME applications now written in
various scripting languages. For most GUIs, a scripting language is
absolutely the best choice.

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 4)  Gnomba release

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GNOME Samba share browser:

  http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/951594942/index_html

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 5)  Dia release

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New release of the Dia diagram editor:

  http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/951793818/index_html

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 6)  Project of the Week

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Miguel wrote in with a nice project idea: modify gnome-print to have a
PDF backend in addition to the PostScript backend. Then all GNOME apps
will automatically be able to export to PDF format. Sounds like a
pretty nice project, and it shouldn't be too hard to implement, just a
matter of getting a reference to the PDF format, then copying the
PostScript backend using PDF instead of PostScript. Basically you just
have to implement a virtual table with functions like draw_line(),
etc. If you're interested, check 'gnome-print' out of CVS and have a
look.

Miguel says that someone already has a direct-to-PCL backend going; I
think I was supposed to post that as the Project of the Week last
week, but it got lost somewhere in my mail folders... anyway, it's
nice to be able to use printers without having to pipe PostScript to
GhostScript for translation into native-printer-bitmap.

We'll also be able to support antialiasing and alpha transparency by
bypassing PostScript. Of course PostScript will continue to be
supported so don't send any of that "but PostScript is the standard
blah blah blah" email we always get. ;-)

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 7)  Nautilus Update

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by Maciej Stachowiak
screenshots by Richard Hesitlow

Everyone's probably heard some of the publicity about Eazel by now. Us
Eazel folks and the rest of the Nautilus team have been undistracted
by the press flurry and are hacking harder than ever. We're hoping to
be able to do a nice demo at GUADEC. In the meantime, here are some of
the changes since the last summary, and of course, screenshots.

* Revised the index tab UI - changed shape and color, and made them
pre-light. 
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/newtab.jpg

* Revised the notes UI a bit - made the text box bigger, and light
yellow. 
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/notes.jpg
	
* Added a delete item to the right-click menu, and soon after a
confirm dialog after a unfortunate filesystem accident. 

  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/delete-dlg.jpg	

* Improved error messages when files can't be displayed.
	
* Added View a Text as an option for HTML pages. But html viewing is
kind of broken in general right now, so we can't screenshot this.

* If you install EOG, nautilus can now view nearly any kind of image
file in place. Right now the behavior with respect to scaling is a bit
off; we're working on
that. 

  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/eog.jpg

* Implemented the Nautilus::ViewWindow Bonobo object and defined but
did not yet implement Nautilus::Application. These will be useful
later for remote control or scripting of Nautilus.

* When you have multiple items selected, the right-click menu will now
apply to all the items and will, for instance, say "Open in (n) new
windows" where (n) is the number of items, and will open the
appropriate number of
windows. 
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/selections.jpg

* Added icon themability. Now you can choose from the Eazel icon
theme, done by Susan Kare, or classic gnome-style icons. 
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/eazel.jpg
	
* The start of a text file is now shown inside the icon at higher zoom
levels. This only works with the Eazel icon theme for
now.
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/text.jpg

* Added gnome-look icons at many different sizes, thanks to Kenneth
Christiansen who did a beautiful job on them. The icons look much
nicer now at higher zoom levels.
  http://nautilus.eazel.com/screenshots/feb-28-2000/zoom.jpg

* Building should not require munging with gnome.m4 any more.

* Improved the status string shown when items are selected - Nautilus
now shows the number of selected directories, with a count of the
items the directories contain, and the number of other items selected,
with total size of these items.

* As usual, numerous internal reorganizations and bug fixes.

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 8)  Hacking Activity

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

 100 gnome-core
  92 gnome-applets
  74 gnome-db
  69 evolution
  60 guppi3
  56 gnumeric
  56 gimp
  49 nautilus
  41 gtkhtml
  40 libgtop
  37 gnome-libs
  34 pybliographer
  29 gtk+
  29 glade--
  27 gnome-pilot
  25 tktext-port
  22 gnome-utils
  20 gnome-guile
  19 gb
  18 gtk--
  18 gnome-vfs
  17 control-center

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

 101 martin
  62 rodrigo
  60 trow
  48 ettore
  42 jirka
  38 fredgo
  35 hp
  30 mmeeks
  30 jberkman
  29 christof
  28 neo
  27 sopwith
  26 arios
  25 cgabriel
  22 eskil
  22 danw
  21 jrb
  20 peterh
  18 miguel
  17 kmaraas
  17 jamesh
  17 ahyden
  16 zucchi
  16 tonyt
  15 mitch
  15 federico
  15 dcm

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 9)  New and Updated Software

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Glade-- - C++ output for Glade
gnome-db - database library for GNOME
Atomix - mind game
dia - tool for creating diagrams
Wsnitch - http proxy
MemoPanel - applet for keeping notes 
seti_applet - monitor SETI@Home clients
BBsol - French BBS client
GNet - simple glib-style network library
PMail - email client written in Python
Guppi - data visualization, statistics, plots
Gnucash - Personal finances
gob - GtkObject creation language
gcrontab - crontab editor
GCO - GNOME Comics Organizer
CodeCommander - code editor
grecord - sound recorder
gFTP - ftp client
gdu - show disk usage
Bluefish - HTML editor
GNOME Toaster - CD creation suite
gRhythm - teach EKG strips
gno3dtet - 3D tetris game
galway - web editor
Gnomba - GUI Samba browser
gsysinfo - system monitor for GNOME panel
GtkExText - enhanced text widget
irssi - IRC client
Emma - money management
gnetview - network management environment
pasmon - passive network monitor
bloksi - sliding pieces puzzle
zapping - video4linux TV viewer
bug-buddy - graphical bug report wizard
GnomePM - portfolio manager
Floyd - VRML browser, OpenGL scene graph library
groach - like xroach
GNOME Chinese Checkers - chinese checkers game
Pan - Usenet newsreader for GNOME
Oregano - SPICE circuit simulator frontend
Electric Ears - sound player/editor
gb - VB implementation
gtraffic - car game
Gaspell - frontend to aspell spell checker
FMaps - Remote sensing app
GDVD - DVD player
Gnofract 4D - fractals

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


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Until next week - 

Havoc