A look at new developer features

As the development window for GNOME 3.16 advances, I've been adding a few new developer features, selfishly, so I could use them in my own programs.

Connectivity support for applications

Picking up from where Dan Winship left off, we've merged support for application to detect the network availability, especially the "connected to a network but not to the Internet" case.

In glib/gio now, watch the value of the "connectivity" property in GNetworkMonitor.

Grilo automatic network awareness

This glib/gio feature allows us to show/hide Grilo sources from applications' view if they require Internet and LAN access to work. This should be landing very soon, once we've made the new feature optional based on the presence of the new GLib.

Totem

And finally, this means we'll soon be able to show a nice placeholder when no network connection is available, and there are no channels left.

Grilo Lua resources support

A long-standing request, GResources support has landed for Grilo Lua plugins. When a script is loaded, we'll look for a separate GResource file with ".gresource" as the suffix, and automatically load it. This means you can use a local icon for sources with the URL "resource:///org/gnome/grilo/foo.png". Your favourite Lua sources will soon have icons!

Grilo Opensubtitles plugin

The developers affected by this new feature may be a group of one, but if the group is ever to expand, it's the right place to do it. This new Grilo plugin will fetch the list of available text subtitles for specific videos, given their "hashes", which are now exported by Tracker.

GDK-Pixbuf enhancements

I can point you to the NEWS file for the latest version, but the main gains are that GIF animations won't eat all your memory, DPI metadata support in JPEG, PNG and TIFF formats, and, for image viewers, you can tell whether a TIFF file is multi-page to open it in a more capable viewer.

Batched inserts, and better filters in GOM

Does what it says on the tin. This is useful for populating the database quicker than through piecemeal inserts, it also means you don't need to chain inserts when inserting multiple items.

Mathieu also worked on fixing the priority of filters when building complex queries, as well as supporting more than 2 items in a filter ("foo OR bar OR baz" for example).

Freezing Totem with text subtitles?

Then ask your distribution to backport the patches.

This has been fixed in Fedora about a month ago.

New Totem feature(s)

Totem got a few new features recently, courtesy of new contributors (which is a nice thing to see).

The first one to get committed was the tracker-powered video search sidebar, by Javier Goday. Unfortunately, I don't have any nice screenshots as tracker seems to want to index everything but my videos directory.

The other one is a long standing feature request, with the patch provided by Kamil Pawlowski, adding a menu item to select a text subtitle for video files. This means you can get subtitles for your legally downloaded video files, with the typos free of charge.


Update: Everybody loves screenshots. Here's one for the video search feature: