To: gnome-announce-list@gnome.org, gnome-list@gnome.org Subject: GNOME Summary, February 2-10: Pango, Translation Guide, LeoCAD, FSV, Nautilus, binary locator From: Havoc Pennington <hp@redhat.com> Date: 11 Feb 2000 03:50:46 -0500 This is the (somewhat late again, yes I am lame) GNOME Summary for February 2-10, 2000. ============================================================= Table of Contents ------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- 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> ============================================================== 6) "Newsgroup binary locator" -------------------------------------------------------------- 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 -------------------------------------------------------------- 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 =========================================================================== Until next week - Havoc