GNOME Summary, January 26 – February 2, 2000

This is the GNOME Summary for January 26-February 2, 2000.

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Table of Contents

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1) Documentation and Help System News
2) Haskell meets Bonobo component architecture
3) GNOME Sysadmin Guide
4) Gnumeric Zooming
5) Applix Alpha Version based on GTK+
6) Nautilus Status Update
7) New GNOME Core beta release
8) IBM DeveloperWorks article
9) Hacking Activity
10) New and Updated Software

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1) Documentation and Help System News

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GNOME Documentation god Dave Mason wrote up some plans for the
GNOME 2.0 online help system, developed by Dave, Elliot, and
Jonathan at RHAD Labs. Check it out:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-doc-list/2000-January/0121.shtml

Also, Dan Mueth started a document about how to write GNOME
documentation:

http://www.gnome.org/mailing-lists/archives/gnome-doc-list/2000-January/0109.shtml

gnome-doc-list is getting to be quite a community, quite a few
people are helping out in this area. GNOME 2.0 needs to have good
online help and manuals if it’s going to be truly easy to use; lots
more helpers are still needed. No coding skills required.

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2) Haskell meets Bonobo component architecture

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Manuel Chakravarty’s work on a Haskell binding for GNOME has
attracted funding from the Australian Research Council under the
Small ARC Grant scheme. The one year project entitled “Functional
Programming of Component-based Software” is described here:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/gnome/gnome-small/

This project is planned as an extension of an ongoing effort
developing a GTK+ binding for the high-level language Haskell:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~chak/haskell/gtk/

It is located at the School of Computer Science and Engineering
of the University of New South Wales, Sydney:

http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au,

The project is of course completely open and helping hands are
always welcome.

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3) GNOME Sysadmin Guide

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The GNOME Sysadmin Guide was Project of the Week Number Two, and
Paul Cooper stepped up with a good start on the this document. He
needs contributions from all the GNOME sysadmins out there; if you
manage a large GNOME deployment, consider mailing in some additions
to the Guide.

Have a look at this news item:

http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/948936343/index_html

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4) Gnumeric Zooming

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Another Project of the Week was nailed by Erdi Gergo, who added
a zoom feature to the Gnumeric toolbar. That’s two projects down.
🙂

Gnumeric now has a gnumeric/PROJECTS file in CVS with a number
of Project-of-the-Week type of projects, if you want to check it
out. I may steal some of these for future GNOME Summary POW’s
too.

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5) Applix Alpha Version based on GTK+

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An alpha release of the Applixware 5.0 office suite came out
this week, and it is written with GTK+. Have a look:

http://www.smartbeak.com/M1

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6) Nautilus Status Update

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Got the following update from the Nautilus team. They actually
encourage you to try to compile it, if you have what it takes. 🙂
Here’s the update:

Nautilus is the Gnome 2.0 Graphical Shell and File
Manager. Anyone interested in finding out more, or joining in
development should check out the #nautilus channel on
irc.gnome.org. There will also be a mailing list for discussion
soon.

Nautilus is being designed with an architecture that makes heavy
use of the Bonobo component model, with Bonobo controls for even
the basic file manager views. For an overview of the architecture,
see docs/architecture.txt in the nautilus module on gnome-cvs.

Compiling Nautilus yourself can be slightly hairy; you will need
to build several modules from the HEAD in CVS and install them in a
separate prefix to avoid conflicting with your existing GNOME
install. Further, many of these modules are changing rapidly, and
may not work or even compile together properly on any given day.
But if you’d like to give it a try, look at `HACKING’ in the
nautilus module for instructions.

Here are some of the new Nautilus features implemented since the
last summary:

• Items and backgrounds have right-click menus in the list and
  icon views; the only working options available so far are Zoom in,
  Zoom out and Select all.
• The icon view can show images as their own icons. Scaling to
  thumbnails is still in progress, but icon-sized images already work
  well:

  http://208.37.144.51/screenshots/icon-view-images.jpg

• The list view can also show images as their own mini-icons:
  http://208.37.144.51/screenshots/list-view-images.jpg
• The icon view now supports zooming. Icons can be viewed at a
  wide dynamic range of sizes, and the font size changes with zoom
  level as well. The current zooming support is only a rough cut. The
  icons are not scaled properly, and positioning inside the window
  when zooming does not work very well. Right now you can only zoom
  from the right-click menu; in time there will be zoom controls on
  the toolbar, using Bonobo menu/toobar merging support. Also,
  eventually more information about a file will be shown at higher
  zoom levels.
  http://208.37.144.51/screenshots/icon-view-zooming.jpg
• The list view also supports zooming; right now it just scales
  the icons, but in the future it may also change the font size. Many
  of the same caveats apply as with the icon view.
• The bookmarks menu and editor window now show icons:
  http://208.37.144.51/screenshots/bookmarks-menu.jpg

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7) New GNOME Core beta release

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Another GNOME Core, break it and report bugs:

http://news.gnome.org/gnome-news/949190343/index_html

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8) IBM DeveloperWorks article

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George posted another tutorial to IBM DeveloperWorks, this time
on the GNOME Canvas. Check it out to get started on canvas
hacking:

http://news.gnome.org:80/gnome-news/948861748/

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9) Hacking Activity

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Module Score-O-Matic:
(number of CVS commits per module, since the last summary)

93 gimp
61 nautilus
52 gnumeric
52 gnome-core
51 gnome-applets
50 guppi3
37 gtk–
34 gxsnmp
30 gtkhtml
29 gnome-docu
28 dr-genius
25 gnome-libs
21 gphoto
19 gtk+
17 gnome-db
16 dia
14 gnome-pilot
13 evolution

User Score-O-Matic:
(number of CVS commits per user, since the last summary)

50 trow
42 jirka
37 kenelson
32 remlali
30 neo
28 ettore
28 darin
23 hp
21 ole
19 sopwith
19 owen
19 jberkman
19 dmueth
18 platin
17 jody
15 unammx
15 mmeeks
14 rodrigo
14 martin
13 timj
13 mitch
13 glaurent
13 aaronl

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10) New and Updated Software

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See the software map on www.gnome.org (or Freshmeat) for more
information about any of these packages.

Dr Genius – Math tool
RheinTurm – some sort of clock
graham – document organizer
Finder – mac-style finder bar
GNet – simple glib-style network library
Oregano – circuit designer
Atomix – mind game
VDKBuilder – RAD tool for GTK
Pygmy – mail client in Python
GNOME Transcript – database client
g3DGMV – map viewer
gbox_applet – new mail notifier
gRhythm – EKG cardiac rhythm training program
Emma – money management
Gaby – personal database manager
gatO – “at” frontend
gcrontab – crontab editor
gmt – kernel module manipulator
sawmill – LISP-extensible window manager
gnuTaxes – tax preparation app
Sketch – vector drawing package
Elvis-GNOME – GNOME frontend for elvis vi clone
lua-gnome – bindings for lua programming language
genigma – simulates the Enigma machine
Sodipodi – vector drawing app
solfege – ear training program
Glitter – extract binary files from newsgroups (get your porno!
🙂
Pan – Usenet news client
gerk – utility for one button mice
GMasqDialer – masqdialer client
glogo – ucblogo frontend

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Until next week –
Havoc