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 :)

Week-end hacks

Last week, I picked up a Kobo Mini e-reader from my local FNAC store for (less than) 40€ and loaded it up with books from the latest Humble eBook Bundle. As generic document icons aren't really that great to recognise the books, I wrote a small thumbnailer for it, which is now available in GNOME git.

Some DRM-free e-books.

The release is available on the GNOME FTP site, and somebody packaging it up for Fedora would be greatly appreciated.

The other week-end hack was a way to run a program with user-defined DNS servers, rather than relying on the system's /etc/resolv.conf file. It only supports IPv4, but it was good enough to run a few command-line utilities with those specific DNS servers.