GNOME 3.10 is coming!

The new release is coming! As has been the case for the past couple of releases, I've mostly been shepherding great work by other contributors, and I'll detail my limited contributions beyond mere bug fixing.

Wayland support

I've done some work on enabling clutter-gtk applications to be able to run on  Wayland though the harder work of implementing sub-surfaces is still pending.

Giovanni has done incredible work on mutter to start moving some of the X11 dependent code inside the compositor, which should allow you to run a (cut down) Wayland session using gnome-shell.

This also means that Thomas Wood's redesigned Displays panel has Wayland support. A perfect storm of changes for one of the only panels that received little attention since the GNOME 2.x days.

The new displays panel with a TV that claims to be oh so small

Date & Time redesign

Zeeshan, through his work on Geoclue2, and Kalev, through his Summer of Code project, have completely redesigned the Date & Time panel. Aside from being easier to setup, it means that we can finally implement the automatic timezone switching depending on your location.

The new Date & Time panel

BlueZ 5 support

GNOME is the first major desktop to ship with BlueZ 5 support, thanks to work by Gustavo Padovan and Emilio Pozuelo Monfort.

The older version was not supported anymore, and the new version allows us to support things like "Just Works" pairing, better support of audio devices (though the PulseAudio 5.x release to support this is only coming shortly after GNOME 3.10) and a much better architecture for a more stable operation.

GNOME 3.12 should see a redesigned Bluetooth panel, to match current best practices on other platforms (such as merging the management and pairing wizard UIs into one).

Bluetooth devices in use

Miscellaneous

Intuos 4 OLEDs

OLED support for Wacom Intuos 4 tablets (as seen above, thanks Przemo), media keys support for MPRIS applications such as Spotify (thanks to Michael Wood and Lars Uebernickel), updated UI for the Universal Access panel (the ever present Matthias Clasen), support for many more fingerprint readers in libfprint (thanks Vasily Khoruzhick).

Redesigned Universal Access panel

And to my contributions

More work on Videos. Totem 3.10 is still based on the same interface as in GNOME 3.8, but some work has been on the master branch towards the new UI, with some of the features getting backported. We have:

• new session management for when Totem crashes
• support for chapters within files (such as Matroska videos)
• Wayland bug fixes in GTK+, clutter and the combined clutter-gtk
• a completed GDBus port
• Working overlaid controls (though their behaviour isn't quite up to scratch)
• Remote files support in Grilo, including support for Recent files
• Started work on merging the various sidebars within the main view (which included landing GtkSearchBar in GTK+)
• libquvi 0.9 support

On top of which you'll find the usual mix of bug fixes, small features, itch scratching, and swamp-draining in finger-pointing fests.

I also spent quite a bit of time on a side project that didn't come to fruition at this time, but I hope to be able to post some details soon.

Settings news

GNOME 3.7.3 just got released earlier today, and includes some great new work. I won't be posting screenshots, because some of the UIs aren't final, and we'll be iterating until 3.8 is released (and it's my birthday ;).

Cleaning up

We've cleaned up gnome-settings-daemon plug-ins, and gnome-control-center panels, as well as removing the support code for GNOME Fallback, saving us around 10k lines of code.

gnome-control-center (now "Settings" in the UI) is faster to start, and gnome-settings-daemon require less code to write additional plug-ins.

New panels

3 new panels got added:

• Search panel, to control the search output in gnome-shell, as well as control which directories and file types Tracker should index.
• Notifications, to manage the notifications that will show up on your desktop. The filtering is done in gnome-shell itself, and would allow you to only show specific notifications in the lock screen for example. See Giovanni's post if your application uses notifications.
• Privacy, which still requires quite a bit of work, would be the go-to place to ensure your identity isn't leaked on the network, or visible on your system. You can see how some of the features in the two aforementioned panels will also affect your privacy.

With the above panels merged, we're left with the re-design of the Power panel, which should mean the end of the "Screen & Brightness" panel (half of the settings went to the Privacy panel, the other half will go to the Power panel).

New backend features

First, users of Wacom tablets, you'll be happy to know there's now a button you can press to see, in an OSD, the current configuration of your tablet buttons. This feature has been long in the making, but the results are great. There's coverage for every tablet known to libwacom, and support for touchrings, touchstrips and modeswitch buttons. Select the button you want to use for the help in the Settings panel.

Secondly, we now support the draft "Idle Inhibition" specification from Freedesktop.org.

We also have some unfinished features.

The remote-display plugin will disable animations in the desktop when using the desktop over VNC or Spice.

And the cursor plugin will hide the mouse cursor until first used, or when using a touchscreen, similarly to what Windows 8 supports (it's the only system other than ours that supports both cursor pointers and touchscreens).

Those 2 plugins should hopefully be working by the time of the GNOME 3.8 release.

Until next time.

Wacom tablets in GNOME 3.4 (part #2)

Since the last report, "mapping" has been the order of the day. We now have support for:

Display mapping

Not as pretty as mocked up, but it's functional. We hope to have the nicer version done for the next development cycle.

and

Button mapping

The button mapping will show you the actual keys, with translated names, for your device, instead of every possible combination of buttons which end up doing nothing.

We've also made a big number of layout changes and fixes, which means that the main window isn't as awkward as it used to be.

There are a number of features that unfortunately didn't make the cut, mostly due to the lack of support from the X.org drivers. Mode switching currently doesn't advertise the current mode by changing the LED, and the OLEDs that show the bindings for each key stand empty.

Wacom tablets in GNOME 3.4

Working from designs.


The cool stuff first

Cosimo Cecchi presents the updated Wacom settings

Go to YouTube directly if you can't see the video here.

A new arrival

As mentioned by Cosimo, we have a new library to help us implement the settings you saw: libwacom.

libwacom is there to give us metadata about tablets, whether or not they are connected to your system, the list of styli it supports, as well as information about the styli themselves. As you can see from the UI, it's pretty important that we know:

• whether the tablet is builtin (so we know whether you can calibrate it)
• which form factor it has
• the list of styli it supports
• for each stylus, its full name, the number of buttons, what it looks like

In the past, all this information was only available within the drivers (as comments), exported in different ways (sysfs attributes), non-machine readable in public documentation, or, worst of all, hidden in Wacom's internal drivers for OS X or Windows.

So if you have a Wacom tablet, send us a definition file for your tablet, so you can configure it with the impression that the software actually knows about your device.

Where's that configuration again

After knowing what each tablet had to offer, we had to have a way to match the definitions to XInput devices, assign settings per-tablet, and importantly, switch stylus configuration when the user switches stylus. This is done using the new GsdWacomDevice and GsdWacomStylus objects, shared between gnome-settings-daemon (which will apply the configuration) and gnome-control-center (which will set the configuration).

This also means we have a few debugging applications, such as list-wacom in gnome-settings-daemon, to show you the attached GsdWacomDevices, or test-wacom in gnome-control-center, to test display of particular tablets if you don't own them (this is the place where I spend a lot of time).

What's next

Peter Hutterer, my input buddy at Red Hat, who made the original Wacom panel for GNOME 3.2, and the first version of libwacom, is currently spending a lot of time on Multi-Touch, and fixing bugs I report in the Wacom driver.

Jason Gerecke, from Wacom, who did most of the initial work on calibration support, is working on the related display-mapping. This will allow choosing whether a tablet's working area is the whole desktop, or a single monitor when in multiple monitors are used.

For my part, after fixing the layout bugs that so annoy me in the settings panel, I'll be starting work on tablet button mapping. I look forward to making the LEDs on the tablet match up with the selected keyboard shortcut!

Many thanks to Cosimo and Monty for helping out with presenting the work, and doing the video.

Hardware enablement

Patches flying, and the results are nearly there.

Driver for the Apple Infra-red Receiver should soon be upstream (and a patch not to break LIRC setups), along with support for the Intuos 4 wireless tablet.

Ross merged patches in Gypsy which should allow for crappy serial GPSes to work, as well as the one on the Nokia N810 (and N900?), and the (even) crappy(er) ones that require a closed-source daemon and write to a FIFO.