GNOME Summary for 2003-07-01 - 2003-07-06

From: Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller <Uraeus linuxrising org>
To: gnome-announce-list gnome org, gnome-list gnome org, editor lwn net, editors linuxtoday com
Subject: GNOME Summary for 2003-07-01 - 2003-07-06
Date: 08 Jul 2003 00:35:32 +0200
This is the GNOME Summary for 2003-07-01 - 2003-07-06
    
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Table of Contents
--------------------------------------------------------------

1. Nat Friedman offers desktop information integration
2. The Network in GNOME
3. Keeping up with the GNOME community
4. Making da Music
5. Change of Rhythmbox maintainership
6. GNOME Development release 2.3.3
7. Java GNOME 0.8
8. Gnumeric turned 5
9. GStreamer new media formats
10. New GNOME company Imendio started
11. Translated GNOME summaries
12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
13. New and Updated Software

==============================================================
1. Nat Friedman offers desktop information integration
--------------------------------------------------------------

We use our computers today more and more as our primary worktool and as
a tool for keeping in touch with friends, collegues and family. This
means more and more information about different people are being stored
in varied places on your machine. The question is why not link all this
information together to give the user a powerfull tool to ease their
communication and interaction tasks? Well Nat Friedman is well underway
creating such an informaton hub for the GNOME desktop called Dashboard.
Check out Nat's website for how the effort is progressing (still early
stage) and when you see other systems start offering this in the future
remember who innovates and who immitates :) 

        http://www.nat.org/dashboard/
        http://www.nat.org/dashboard/rewrite.png
        http://www.nat.org/2002/november/dashboard-notes.txt

==============================================================
2. The Network in GNOME
--------------------------------------------------------------

It is fun how things move in circles. Our own Edd Dumbill, well known
for his work on the GNOME bluetooth support (which he recently added
Dashboard support to) inspired Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly books fame to
write an article about making the destop network aware. Jeff Waugh then
found this article and sent it in to our desktop-devel list to inspire
people to work on making the 'N' part of GNOME more of a reality. Links
below to Tim's article and to Edd's blog. 

        http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/3422
        http://usefulinc.com/edd/blog

==============================================================
3. Keeping up with the GNOME community
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GNOME community is a place where tons of things are going on and it
is not always easy to keep tabs of everything. To help all you members
of gnomania out there get all the news in a one stop shop so have Jeff
Waugh put together a little page called 'Planet GNOME'. It is a website
that collects GNOME news from a variety of sources, it even includes the
blog entries of developers who are kind enough to make their blogs
available through RSS on Jeff's request. 

        http://www.gnome.org/~jdub/planetgnome/

==============================================================
4. Making da Music
--------------------------------------------------------------

Was recently pointed to a little gem called amSynth by Nick Dowell.
Amsynth is a very nice software sythesizer created using the gtkmm
bindings, and it is nearing its 1.0 release fast. If you are into making
music on your machine you should definetly check it out. Nick is also
currently investigating adding midi support to GStreamer to enable
GStreamer to be used as the basis for such applications as amSynth. Keep
up the wonderfull work Nick! 

        http://amsynthe.sourceforge.net/amSynth/index.html

==============================================================
5. Change of Rhythmbox maintainership
--------------------------------------------------------------

Jorn Baayen recently sent out a mail announcing that he will withdraw as
Rhythmbox maintainer. Maintership will be taken over by Colin Walters
and Benjamin Otte. Of course others are welcome to join too. The current
plan is to get fix up the playlist support in current CVS and do a
release. 

        http://www.rhythmbox.net

==============================================================
6. GNOME Development release 2.3.3
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GNOME 2.4 countdown has started and a 2.3.3 development release was
made this week. GNOME 2.4 includes lots of new applications which either
replace older applications or add new functionality to the desktop.
Things getting adding in GNOME 2.4 are things like the already popular
Gnomemeeting videoconferencing application and a video player called
Totem using the GStreamer. There are also many nice bugfixes and feature
additions in existing modules so be sure to check out the changelog or
see the Nautilus improvements article. 

        http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1205&mode=&order=0
        http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1198&mode=&order=0

==============================================================
7. Java GNOME 0.8
--------------------------------------------------------------

The options are many for developers who want to develop GNOME
applications using Java. There is the latest version of Swing in Java
1.4.2 that can immitate the look of GTK+ and Metacity. There is the GTK+
version of SWT from IBM, used in Eclipse and last but in no way least
there is Java-GNOME which just had their 0.8 release which is also their
first GNOME and GTK+ 2 release of their bindings. If you want your Java
application to easily have great integration the Java-GNOME is probably
what you want to go with as the bindings use the actuall GTK+ and GNOME
libraries to offer their services. 

       
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1204&mode=&order=0&thold=1

==============================================================
8. Gnumeric turned 5
--------------------------------------------------------------

Free Software has been around for a while now and many applications have
been turned into open source or free software projects. Yet the
applications that where started as free software projects and managed to
reach a level of completenes and power that make them equal or better
than properietary alternatives have a special place in our heart. Due to
this it was with great pleasure I saw that one of these applications,
Gnumeric, celebrate its 5th birthday this week. Gnumeric not only equals
market leader Excel, but in many ways surpass Excel. So a big
congratulations to the Gnumeric team for their 
excelent work so far, and we are really looking forward to your future
releases with anticipation. 

       
http://www.gnomedesktop.org/article.php?sid=1196&mode=&order=0&thold=1

==============================================================
9. GStreamer new media formats
--------------------------------------------------------------

The GStreamer team has for quite some time now focused on stability and 
bugfixes. Things seem to be working pretty well now which has allowed
the developers to move on to more fun things. One thing that developers
will be happy to hear is that Ronald Bultje has been working hard on
cleaning up the mime system used in GStreamer and user will be happy to
learn that as part of that he fixed/added plugins to handle quicktime,
vp3 and asf video formats. These will be made available in the 0.7
development release which is planned soon, and after some testing we
will probably backport them to the 0.6 stable branch.
 
Another little fun hack being done in relation to GStreamer is done by
Jeremy Apoc who is working on a sound-juicer gnome-vfs module so you can
rip your cd's from inside your file manager. Screenshot below. 

        http://apoc.chez.tiscali.fr/soundjuicer-vfs_module.png

==============================================================
10. New GNOME company Imendio started
--------------------------------------------------------------

Long time GNOME hackers Mikael Hallendal and Richard Hult recently left 
CodeFactory to set up their own software development company. Between
them Mikael and Richard is responsible for a lot of great GNOME work
like MrProject, Yelp and now latly Gossip, their new Jabber client. So
if you are interested in hiring swedens best programmers you should get
in touch with Imendio immediatly. 

        http://www.imendio.com
        http://www.imendio.com/projects/gossip/

==============================================================
11. Translated GNOME summaries
--------------------------------------------------------------

We now have French, German, Hungarian, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and
Japanese 
- all the links below. 

        http://www.gynov.org/gnome-summary/gnome_summary.php4
        http://www.gnome-de.org/news
        http://cactus.rulez.org/projects/gnome/summary/
        http://developer.gnome.or.kr/news/
        http://debian-br.cipsga.org.br/resumo-gnome/
        http://es.gnome.org/actualidad/
        http://www.gnome.gr.jp/summary/index.html

==============================================================
12. Gnome Bug Hunting Activity
--------------------------------------------------------------

This information is from http://bugzilla.gnome.org, which hosts bug and
feature reports for most of the Gnome modules. If you would like to join
the bug hunt, subscribe to the gnome-bugsquad mailing list.

Currently open: 9446 (In the last week: New: 614, Resolved: 650,
Difference: -36)

Modules with the most open bugs (excluding enhancement requests): 

  nautilus: 868 (In the last week: New: 40, Resolved: 27, Difference:
+13)
  gtk+: 606 (In the last week: New: 46, Resolved: 27, Difference: +19)
  galeon: 547 (In the last week: New: 55, Resolved: 48, Difference: +7)
  gnome-panel: 287 (In the last week: New: 46, Resolved: 92, Difference:
-46)
  gnome-vfs: 226 (In the last week: New: 2, Resolved: 9, Difference: -7)
  control-center: 194 (In the last week: New: 20, Resolved: 17,
Difference: +3)
  GIMP: 155 (In the last week: New: 17, Resolved: 19, Difference: -2)
  GnuCash: 152 (In the last week: New: 12, Resolved: 9, Difference: +3)
  balsa: 130 (In the last week: New: 5, Resolved: 6, Difference: -1)
  dia: 126 (In the last week: New: 8, Resolved: 5, Difference: +3)
  sawfish: 119 (In the last week: New: 4, Resolved: 4, Difference: 0)
  metacity: 115 (In the last week: New: 9, Resolved: 10, Difference: -1)
  gnome-applets: 104 (In the last week: New: 11, Resolved: 19,
Difference: -8)
  gnome-terminal: 102 (In the last week: New: 5, Resolved: 18,
Difference: -13)
  epiphany: 100 (In the last week: New: 57, Resolved: 40, Difference:
+17)
  
Gnome Bugzilla users who resolved or closed the most bugs: 
  
  kmaraas gnome org: 125 bugs closed.
  newren math utah edu: 56 bugs closed.
  yaneti declera com: 42 bugs closed.
  aldug astrolinux com: 33 bugs closed.
  mpeseng tin it: 21 bugs closed.
  mark skynet ie: 18 bugs closed.
  bill haneman sun com: 15 bugs closed.
  finlay moeraki com: 14 bugs closed.
  james daa com au: 12 bugs closed.
  sven gimp org: 12 bugs closed.
  aguelzow taliesin ca: 11 bugs closed.
  rbultje ronald bitfreak net: 10 bugs closed.
  jens triq net: 10 bugs closed.
  chpe+gnomebugz stud uni-saarland de: 9 bugs closed.
  readams hmc edu: 9 bugs closed.
  
==============================================================
13. New and Updated Software
--------------------------------------------------------------

gnome-pkgview  - gnome desktop component version tool.
Gnome Jabber Instant Messenger  - An IM using the Jabber protocol
ginterface  - gnome interface for easy communication
GNOME Database widgets library  - GNOME Database Widgets library
GNOME Database Access library  - GNOME Database Access library
Libcroco  - The Gnome CSS manipulation toolkit
Terminal Server Client  - remote desktop tool
ReciteWord  - Recite Word Easily
GSwitchIt  - Xkb state indicator for GNOME panel
Eye of Gnome  - Image viewer
Sound Juicer  - CD Ripper
Gribouy  - Type1 font editor
GPdf  - GNOME PDF Viewer
festival-gaim  - gaim plugin festival festival-gaim
Coriander  - IEEE1394 IIDC camera GUI firewire
GTK-Lsof  - GTK 2 GUI for Lsof
StarDict  - An international dictionary.
GtkSourceView  - Source editor widget
GCipher  - a simple encryption tool
gnome-crystal  - Crystalline structures visualizer
Gnome Chemistry Utils  - chemical widgets for gnome-2
GNOME Applets  - Applets
Devhelp  - API docs browser

For more information on these packages visit the GNOME Software map: 
http://www.gnome.org/softwaremap/latest.php

Lots of great things happening since the last summary, GUADEC for
instance. Lot of fun stuff happening there this year with demonstrations
of bluetooth, handhelds running GPE, Real talking about their plan to
make a new Real player using GTK2, gigantic rollout of GNOME desktops in
Spain and much more. You should have been there :)
 
Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller 
gnome-summary gnome org 
Join the Friends of GNOME! http://www.gnome.org/friends
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