GNOME

tl;dr: Let’s get rid of title bars. Join the revolution! Unless you’re one of a very lucky few, you probably use apps with title bars. In case you’ve never come across that term, title bars are the largely empty bars at the top of some application ... [More] windows. They contain only the window title and a close button, and are completely separate from the window’s content. This makes them very inflexible, as they can not contain any additional UI elements, or integrate with the application window’s content. Blender, with its badly integrated and pretty much useless title bar Luckily, the GNOME ecosystem has been moving away from title bars in favor of header bars. This is a newer, more flexible pattern that allows putting window controls and other UI elements in the same bar. Header bars are client-side decorations (CSD), which means they are drawn by the app rather than the display server. This allows for better integration between application and window chrome.   GNOME Builder, an app that makes heavy use of the header bar for UI elements All GNOME apps (except for Terminal) have moved to header bars over the past few years, and so have many third-party apps. However, there are still a few holdouts. Sadly, these include some of the most important productivity apps people rely on every day (e.g. LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Blender). There are ways to hide title bars on maximized and tiled windows, but these do not (and will never) work on Wayland (Note: I’m talking about GNOME Shell on Wayland here, not other desktops). All window decorations are client-side on Wayland (even when they look like title bars), so there is no way to hide them at a window manager level. The CSD Initiative The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we’ll have to do. That is why I’m hereby announcing the CSD Initiative, an effort to get as many applications as possible to drop title bars in favor of client-side decorations. This won’t be quick or easy, and will require work on many levels. However, with Wayland already being shipped as the default session by some distros, it’s high time we got started on this. For a glimpse at what this kind of transition will look like in practice, we can look to Firefox and Chromium. Chromium has recently shipped GNOME-style client-side decorations in v63, and Firefox has them in experimental CSD builds. These are great examples for other apps to follow, as they show that apps don’t have to be 100% native GTK in order to use CSD effectively. Chromium 63 with CSD Chromium 63 with window buttons on the left What is the goal? This initiative doesn’t aim to make all apps look and act exactly like native GNOME apps. If an app uses GTK, we do of course want it to respect the GNOME HIG. However, it isn’t realistic to assume that apps like Blender or Telegram will ever look like perfectly native GNOME apps. In these cases, we’re are aiming for functional, not visual consistency. For example, it’s fine if an Electron app has custom close/maximize/minimize icons, as long as they use the same metaphors as the native icons. Thus, our goal is for as many apps as possible to have the following properites: No title bar Native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons Respects the setting for showing/hiding minimize and maximize Respects the setting for buttons to be on the left/right side of the window Which apps are affected? Basically, all applications not using GTK3 (and a few that do use GTK3). That includes GTK2, Qt, and Electron apps. There’s a list of some of the most popular affected apps on this initiative’s Wiki page. The process will be different for each app, and the changes required will range from “can be done in a weekend” to “holy shit we have to redesign the entire app”. For example, GTK3 apps are relatively easy to port to header bars because they can just use the native GTK component. GTK2 apps first need to be ported to GTK3, which is a major undertaking in itself. Some apps will require major redesigns, because removing the title bar goes hand in hand with moving from old-style menu bars to more modern, contextual menus. Many Electron apps might be low-hanging fruit, because they already use CSD on macOS. This means it should be possible to make this happen on GNU/Linux as well without major changes to the app. However, some underlying work in Electron to expose the necessary settings to apps might be required first. Slack, like many Electron apps, uses CSD on macOS The same Slack app on Ubuntu (with a title bar) Apps with custom design languages will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, Telegram’s design should be easy to adapt to a header bar layout. Removing the title bar and adding window buttons in the toolbar would come very close to a native GNOME header bar functionally. Telegram as it looks currently, with a title bar Telegram mockup with no title bar How can I help? The first step will be making a list of all the apps affected by this initiative. You can add apps to the list on this Wiki page. Then we’ll need to do the following things for each app: Talk to the maintainers and convince them that this is a good idea Do the design work of adapting the layout Figure out what is required at a technical level Implement the new layout and get it merged In addition, we need to evaluate what we can do at the toolkit level to make it easier to implement CSD (e.g. in Electron or Qt apps). This will require lots of work from lots of people with different skills, and nothing will happen overnight. However, the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll live in an awesome CSD-only future. And that’s where you come in! Are you a developer who needs help updating your app to a header bar layout? A designer who would like to help redesign apps? A web developer who’d like to help make CSD work seamlessly in Electron apps? Come to #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix and talk to us. We can do this! Happy hacking!   Update: There have been some misunderstandings about what I meant regarding server-side decorations on Wayland. As far as I know (and take this with a grain of salt), Wayland uses CSD by default, but it is possible to add SSD support via protocol extensions. KDE has proposed such a protocol, and support for this protocol has been contributed to GTK by the Sway developers. However, GNOME Shell does not support it and its developers have stated that they have no plans to support it at the moment. This is what I was referring to by saying that “it will never work on Wayland”. I can see how this could be misinterpreted from the point of view of other desktop environments but that was not my intention, it was simply unfortunate wording. I have updated the relevant part of this post to clarify. Also, some people seem to have taken from this that we plan on lobbying for removing title bar support from third-party apps in a way that affects other desktops. The goal of this initiative is for GNOME users to get a better experience by having fewer applications with badly integrated title bars on their systems. That doesn’t preclude applications from having title bars on different desktops, or having a preference for this (like Chromium does, for example). [Less]

tl;dr: Let’s get rid of title bars. Join the revolution! Unless you’re one of a very lucky few, you probably use apps with title bars. In case you’ve never come across that term, title bars are the largely empty bars at the top of some application ... [More] windows. They contain only the window title and a close button, and are completely separate from the window’s content. This makes them very inflexible, as they can not contain any additional UI elements, or integrate with the application window’s content. Blender, with its badly integrated and pretty much useless title bar Luckily, the GNOME ecosystem has been moving away from title bars in favor of header bars. This is a newer, more flexible pattern that allows putting window controls and other UI elements in the same bar. Header bars are client-side decorations (CSD), which means they are drawn by the app rather than the display server. This allows for better integration between application and window chrome.   GNOME Builder, an app that makes heavy use of the header bar for UI elements All GNOME apps (except for Terminal) have moved to header bars over the past few years, and so have many third-party apps. However, there are still a few holdouts. Sadly, these include some of the most important productivity apps people rely on every day (e.g. LibreOffice, Inkscape, and Blender). There are ways to hide title bars on maximized and tiled windows, but these do not (and will never) work on Wayland. All window decorations are client-side on Wayland (even when they look like title bars), so there is no way to hide them at a window manager level. The CSD Initiative The only way to solve this problem long-term is to patch applications upstream to not use title bars. So this is what we’ll have to do. That is why I’m hereby announcing the CSD Initiative, an effort to get as many applications as possible to drop title bars in favor of client-side decorations. This won’t be quick or easy, and will require work on many levels. However, with Wayland already being shipped as the default session by some distros, it’s high time we got started on this. For a glimpse at what this kind of transition will look like in practice, we can look to Firefox and Chromium. Chromium has recently shipped GNOME-style client-side decorations in v63, and Firefox has them in experimental CSD builds. These are great examples for other apps to follow, as they show that apps don’t have to be 100% native GTK in order to use CSD effectively. Chromium 63 with CSD Chromium 63 with window buttons on the left What is the goal? This initiative doesn’t aim to make all apps look and act exactly like native GNOME apps. If an app uses GTK, we do of course want it to respect the GNOME HIG. However, it isn’t realistic to assume that apps like Blender or Telegram will ever look like perfectly native GNOME apps. In these cases, we’re are aiming for functional, not visual consistency. For example, it’s fine if an Electron app has custom close/maximize/minimize icons, as long as they use the same metaphors as the native icons. Thus, our goal is for as many apps as possible to have the following properites: No title bar Native-looking close/maximize/minimize icons Respects the setting for showing/hiding minimize and maximize Respects the setting for buttons to be on the left/right side of the window Which apps are affected? Basically, all applications not using GTK3 (and a few that do use GTK3). That includes GTK2, Qt, and Electron apps. There’s a list of some of the most popular affected apps on this initiative’s Wiki page. The process will be different for each app, and the changes required will range from “can be done in a weekend” to “holy shit we have to redesign the entire app”. For example, GTK3 apps are relatively easy to port to header bars because they can just use the native GTK component. GTK2 apps first need to be ported to GTK3, which is a major undertaking in itself. Some apps will require major redesigns, because removing the title bar goes hand in hand with moving from old-style menu bars to more modern, contextual menus. Many Electron apps might be low-hanging fruit, because they already use CSD on macOS. This means it should be possible to make this happen on GNU/Linux as well without major changes to the app. However, some underlying work in Electron to expose the necessary settings to apps might be required first. Slack, like many Electron apps, uses CSD on macOS The same Slack app on Ubuntu (with a title bar) Apps with custom design languages will have to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. For example, Telegram’s design should be easy to adapt to a header bar layout. Removing the title bar and adding window buttons in the toolbar would come very close to a native GNOME header bar functionally. Telegram as it looks currently, with a title bar Telegram mockup with no title bar How can I help? The first step will be making a list of all the apps affected by this initiative. You can add apps to the list on this Wiki page. Then we’ll need to do the following things for each app: Talk to the maintainers and convince them that this is a good idea Do the design work of adapting the layout Figure out what is required at a technical level Implement the new layout and get it merged In addition, we need to evaluate what we can do at the toolkit level to make it easier to implement CSD (e.g. in Electron or Qt apps). This will require lots of work from lots of people with different skills, and nothing will happen overnight. However, the sooner we start, the sooner we’ll live in an awesome CSD-only future. And that’s where you come in! Are you a developer who needs help updating your app to a header bar layout? A designer who would like to help redesign apps? A web developer who’d like to help make CSD work seamlessly in Electron apps? Come to #gnome-design on IRC/Matrix and talk to us. We can do this! Happy hacking! [Less]

Say you’re building a HTTP service in Go and suddenly it starts giving you these: http: multiple response.WriteHeader calls Horrible when that happens, right? It’s not always very easy to figure out why you get them and where they come from. ... [More] Here’s a hack to help you trace them back to their origin: type debugLogger struct{} func (d debugLogger) Write(p []byte) (n int, err error) { s := string(p) if strings.Contains(s, "multiple response.WriteHeader") { debug.PrintStack() } return os.Stderr.Write(p) } // Now use the logger with your http.Server: logger := log.New(debugLogger{}, "", 0) server := &http.Server{ Addr: ":3001", Handler: s, ErrorLog: logger, } log.Fatal(server.ListenAndServe()) This will output a nice stack trace whenever it happens. Happy hacking! Comments | More on rocketeer.be | @rubenv on Twitter [Less]

We launched PipeWire last September with this blog entry. I thought it would be interesting for people to hear about the latest progress on what I believe is going to be a gigantic step forward for the Linux desktop. So I caught up with Pipewire ... [More] creator Wim Taymans during DevConf 2018 in Brno where Wim is doing a talk about Pipewire and we discussed the current state of the code and Wim demonstrated a few of the things that PipeWire now can do. Christian Schaller and Wim Taymans testing PipeWire with Cheese Priority number 1: video handling So as we said when we launched the top priority for PipeWire is to address our needs on the video side of multimedia. This is critical due to the more secure nature of Wayland, which makes the old methods for screen sharing not work anymore and the emergence of desktop containers in the form of Flatpak. Thus we need PipeWire to help us provide appliation and desktop developers with a new method for doing screen sharing and also to provide a secure way for applications inside a container to access audio and video devices on the system. There are 3 major challenges PipeWire wants to solve for video. One is device sharing, meaning that multiple applications can share the same video hardware device, second it wants to be able to do so in a secure manner, ensuring your video streams are not highjacked by a rogue process and finally it wants to provide an efficient method for sharing of multimedia between applications, like for instance fullscreen capture from your compositor (like GNOME Shell) to your video conferencing application running in your browser like Google Hangouts, Blue Jeans or Pexip. So the first thing Wim showed me in action was the device sharing. We launched the GNOME photoboot application Cheese which gets PipeWire support for free thanks to the PipeWire GStreamer plugin. And this is an important thing to remember, thanks to so many Linux applications using GStreamer these days we don’t need to port each one of them to PipeWire, instead the PipeWire GStreamer plugin does the ‘porting’ for us. We then launched a gst-launch command line pipeline in a terminal. The result is two applications sharing the same webcam input without one of them blocking access for the other. As you can see from the screenshot above it worked fine, and this was actually done on my Fedora Workstation 27 system and the only thing we had to do was to start the ‘pipewire’ process in a termal before starting Cheese and the gst-launch pipeline. GStreamer autoplugging took care of the rest. So feel free to try this out yourself if you are interested, but be aware that you will find bugs quickly if you try things like on the fly resolution changes or switching video devices. This is still tech preview level software in Fedora 27. The plan is for Wim Taymans to sit down with the web browser maintainers at Red Hat early next week and see if we can make progress on supporting PipeWire in Firefox and Chrome, so that conferencing software like the ones mentioned above can start working fully under Wayland. Since security was one of the drivers for the move to Wayland from X Windows we of course also put a lot of emphasis of not recreating the security holes of X in the compositor. So the way PipeWire now works is that if an application wants to do full screen capture it will check with the compositor through a dbus-api, or a portal in Flatpak and Wayland terminology, and only allows the permited application to do the screen capture, so the stream can’t be highjacked by a random rougue application or process on your computer. This also works from within a sandboxed setting like Flatpaks. Jack Support Another important goal of PipeWire was to bring all Linux audio and video together, which means PipeWire needed to be as good or better replacement for Jack for the Pro-Audio usecase. This is a tough usecase to satisfy so while getting the video part has been the top development priority Wim has also worked on verifying that the design allows for the low latency and control needed for Pro-Audio. To do this Wim has implemented the Jack protocol on top of PipeWire. Carla, a Jack application running on top of PipeWire. Through that work he has now verified that he is able to achieve the low latency needed for pro-audio with PipeWire and that he will be able to run Jack applications without changes on top of PipeWire. So above you see a screenshot of Carla, a Jack-based application running on top of PipeWire with no Jack server running on the system. ALSA/Legacy applications Another item Wim has written the first code for and verfied will work well is the Alsa emulation. The goal of this piece of code is to allow applications using the ALSA userspace API to output to Pipewire without needing special porting or application developer effort. At Red Hat we have many customers with older bespoke applications using this API so it has been of special interest for us to ensure this works just as well as the native ALSA output. It is also worth nothing that Pipewire also does mixing so that sound being routed through ALSA will get seamlessly mixed with audio coming through the Jack layer. Bluetooth support The last item Wim has spent some time on since last September is working on making sure Bluetooth output works and he demonstrated this to me while we where talking together during DevConf. The Pipewire bluetooth module plugs directly into the Bluez Bluetooth framework, meaning that things like the GNOME Bluetooth control panel just works with it without any porting work needed. And while the code is still quite young, Wim demonstrated pairing and playing music over bluetooth using it to me. What about PulseAudio? So as you probably noticed one thing we didn’t mention above is how to deal with PulseAudio applications. Handling this usecase is still on the todo list and the plan is to at least initially just keep PulseAudio running on the system outputing its sound through PipeWire. That said we are a bit unsure how many appliations would actually be using this path because as mentioned above all GStreamer applications for instance would be PipeWire native automatically through the PipeWire GStreamer plugins. And for legacy applications the PipeWire ALSA layer would replace the current PulseAudio ALSA layer as the default ALSA output, meaning that the only applications left are those outputing to PulseAudio directly themselves. The plan would also be to keep the PulseAudio ALSA device around so if people want to use things like the PulseAudio networked audio functionality they can choose the PA ALSA device manually to be able to keep doing so. Over time the goal would of course be to not have to keep the PulseAudio daemon around, but dropping it completely is likely to be a multiyear process with current plans, so it is kinda like XWayland on top of Wayland. Summary So you might read this and think, hey if all this work we are almost done right? Well unfortunately no, the components mentioned here are good enough for us to verify the design and features, but they still need a lot of maturing and testing before they will be in a state where we can consider switching Fedora Workstation over to using them by default. So there are many warts that needs to be cleaned up still, but a lot of things have become a lot more tangible now than when we last spoke about PipeWire in September. The video handling we hope to enable in Fedora Workstation 28 as mentioned, while the other pieces we will work towards enabling in later releases as the components mature. Of course the more people interesting in joining the PipeWire community to help us out, the quicker we can mature these different pieces. So if you are interested please join us in #pipewire on irc.freenode.net or just clone the code of github and start hacking. You find the details for irc and git here. [Less]

We launched PipeWire last September with this blog entry. I thought it would be interesting for people to hear about the latest progress on what I believe is going to be a gigantic step forward for the Linux desktop. So I caught up with Pipewire ... [More] creator Wim Taymans during DevConf 2018 in Brno where Wim is doing a talk about Pipewire and we discussed the current state of the code and Wim demonstrated a few of the things that PipeWire now can do. Christian Schaller and Wim Taymans testing PipeWire with Cheese Priority number 1: video handling So as we said when we launched the top priority for PipeWire is to address our needs on the video side of multimedia. This is critical due to the more secure nature of Wayland, which makes the old methods for screen sharing not work anymore and the emergence of desktop containers in the form of Flatpak. Thus we need PipeWire to help us provide appliation and desktop developers with a new method for doing screen sharing and also to provide a secure way for applications inside a container to access audio and video devices on the system. There are 3 major challenges PipeWire wants to solve for video. One is device sharing, meaning that multiple applications can share the same video hardware device, second it wants to be able to do so in a secure manner, ensuring your video streams are not highjacked by a rogue process and finally it wants to provide an efficient method for sharing of multimedia between applications, like for instance fullscreen capture from your compositor (like GNOME Shell) to your video conferencing application running in your browser like Google Hangouts, Blue Jeans or Pexip. So the first thing Wim showed me in action was the device sharing. We launched the GNOME photoboot application Cheese which gets PipeWire support for free thanks to the PipeWire GStreamer plugin. And this is an important thing to remember, thanks to so many Linux applications using GStreamer these days we don’t need to port each one of them to PipeWire, instead the PipeWire GStreamer plugin does the ‘porting’ for us. We then launched a gst-launch command line pipeline in a terminal. The result is two applications sharing the same webcam input without one of them blocking access for the other. As you can see from the screenshot above it worked fine, and this was actually done on my Fedora Workstation 27 system and the only thing we had to do was to start the ‘pipewire’ process in a termal before starting Cheese and the gst-launch pipeline. GStreamer autoplugging took care of the rest. So feel free to try this out yourself if you are interested, but be aware that you will find bugs quickly if you try things like on the fly resolution changes or switching video devices. This is still tech preview level software in Fedora 27. The plan is for Wim Taymans to sit down with the web browser maintainers at Red Hat early next week and see if we can make progress on supporting PipeWire in Firefox and Chrome, so that conferencing software like the ones mentioned above can start working fully under Wayland. Since security was one of the drivers for the move to Wayland from X Windows we of course also put a lot of emphasis of not recreating the security holes of X in the compositor. So the way PipeWire now works is that if an application wants to do full screen capture it will check with the compositor through a dbus-api, or a portal in Flatpak and Wayland terminology, and only allows the permited application to do the screen capture, so the stream can’t be highjacked by a random rougue application or process on your computer. This also works from within a sandboxed setting like Flatpaks. Jack Support Another important goal of PipeWire was to bring all Linux audio and video together, which means PipeWire needed to be as good or better replacement for Jack for the Pro-Audio usecase. This is a tough usecase to satisfy so while getting the video part has been the top development priority Wim has also worked on verifying that the design allows for the low latency and control needed for Pro-Audio. To do this Wim has implemented the Jack protocol on top of PipeWire. Carla, a Jack application running on top of PipeWire. Through that work he has now verified that he is able to achieve the low latency needed for pro-audio with PipeWire and that he will be able to run Jack applications without changes on top of PipeWire. So above you see a screenshot of Carla, a Jack-based application running on top of PipeWire with no Jack server running on the system. ALSA/Legacy applications Another item Wim has written the first code for and verfied will work well is the Alsa emulation. The goal of this piece of code is to allow applications using the ALSA userspace API to output to Pipewire without needing special porting or application developer effort. At Red Hat we have many customers with older bespoke applications using this API so it has been of special interest for us to ensure this works just as well as the native ALSA output. It is also worth nothing that Pipewire also does mixing so that sound being routed through ALSA will get seamlessly mixed with audio coming through the Jack layer. Bluetooth support The last item Wim has spent some time on since last September is working on making sure Bluetooth output works and he demonstrated this to me while we where talking together during DevConf. The Pipewire bluetooth module plugs directly into the Bluez Bluetooth framework, meaning that things like the GNOME Bluetooth control panel just works with it without any porting work needed. And while the code is still quite young, Wim demonstrated pairing and playing music over bluetooth using it to me. What about PulseAudio? So as you probably noticed one thing we didn’t mention above is how to deal with PulseAudio applications. Handling this usecase is still on the todo list and the plan is to at least initially just keep PulseAudio running on the system outputing its sound through PipeWire. That said we are a bit unsure how many appliations would actually be using this path because as mentioned above all GStreamer applications for instance would be PipeWire native automatically through the PipeWire GStreamer plugins. And for legacy applications the PipeWire ALSA layer would replace the current PulseAudio ALSA layer as the default ALSA output, meaning that the only applications left are those outputing to PulseAudio directly themselves. The plan would also be to keep the PulseAudio ALSA device around so if people want to use things like the PulseAudio networked audio functionality they can choose the PA ALSA device manually to be able to keep doing so. Over time the goal would of course be to not have to keep the PulseAudio daemon around, but dropping it completely is likely to be a multiyear process with current plans, so it is kinda like XWayland on top of Wayland. Summary So you might read this and think, hey if all this work we are almost done right? Well unfortunately no, the components mentioned here are good enough for us to verify the design and features, but they still need a lot of maturing and testing before they will be in a state where we can consider switching Fedora Workstation over to using them by default. So there are many warts that needs to be cleaned up still, but a lot of things have become a lot more tangible now than when we last spoke about PipeWire in September. The video handling we hope to enable in Fedora Workstation 28 as mentioned, while the other pieces we will work towards enabling in later releases as the components mature. Of course the more people interesting in joining the PipeWire community to help us out, the quicker we can mature these different pieces. So if you are interested please join us in #pipewire on irc.freenode.net or just clone the code of github and start hacking. You find the details for irc and git here. [Less]

Sunrise over Hobart seen from Mt Wellington, Tasmania (CC-BY-SA 4.0). It’s been a while huh? The past six months held me busy traveling and studying abroad in Australia, but I’m back! With renewed energy, and lots and lots of GNOME socks for ... [More] everyone. Like previous years, I’m helping out in GNOME’s FOSDEM booth at the FOSDEM 2018 conference. FOSDEM 2016. (CC-BY-SA 4.0) I have arranged a whopping 420 pairs of GNOME socks produced and hopefully arriving before my departure. baby Socks, ankle socks, regular Socks and even knee socks – maybe I should order an extra suit case to fill up. Even so, I estimate I can probably bring 150 pairs at max (last year my small luggage held 55 pairs..). Because of the large quantity I’ve designed them to be fairly neutral and “simple” (well, actually the pattern is rather complicated). Sample sock made prior to production. Breakdown of the horizontally repeatable sock pattern. I plan to bring them to FOSDEM 2018, Open Source Days in Copenhagen, FOSS North and GUADEC. However, we have also talked about getting some socks shipped to the US or Asia, although a box of 100 socks weigh a lot resulting in expensive shipping. So if anyone is going to any of the aforementioned conferences and can keep some pairs in their luggage, let me know! Apart from GNOME Booth staffing I am also helping out with organizing small newcomer workshops at FOSDEM! If you are coming to FOSDEM and is interested in mentoring one or two newcomers with your project, let us know on the Newcomer workshop page (more details here too). Most of all, I look forward to meeting fellow GNOME people again as I feel I have been gone quite a long time. I miss you! [Less]

As some of you may already know, I recently joined Purism to help developing GTK+ apps for the upcoming Librem 5 phone. Purism and GNOME share a lot of ideas and values, so the GNOME HIG and GNOME apps are what we will focus on primarily: we will do ... [More] all we can to not fork nor to reinvent the wheel but to help allowing existing GTK+ applications to work on phones. How Fit are Existing GTK+ Apps? Phones are very different from laptops and even tablets: their screen is very small and their main input method is a single thumb on a touchscreen. Luckily, many GNOME applications are touch-friendly and are fit for small screens. Many applications present you a tree of information you can browse and I see two main layouts used by for GNOME applications to let you navigate it. A first kind of layout is found in applications like Documents, I'll call it stack UI: it uses all the available space to display the collection of information sources (in that case, documents), clicking an element from the collection will focus on it, displaying its content stacked on top of the collection and letting you go back to the collection with a Back button. Applications sporting this layout are the most phone-enabled ones as phone apps typical following a similar layout. Some polish may be needed to make them shine on a phone but overall not so much. Other applications using this layout are Music, Videos, Games, Boxes… A second kind of layout is found in applications like Contacts, I'll call it panel UI: it displays all the levels of information side-by-side in panels: the closer the information is from the left, the closer it is from the root, each selected node of the information tree being highlighted. This is nice if you have enough window space to display all this information and focus on the leaves isn't required by the user as it allows to quickly jump to other elements of the collection. Unfortunately window space is rare on phones, so these applications would need to be adjusted to fit their screens. Other applications using this layout are Settings, Geary, Polari, FeedReader… Of course, other layouts exist and are used, but I won't cover these here. Stack UIs respond to size changes by displaying more or less of the current level of information, but panel UIs tend to seemingly arbitrarily limit the minimum size of the window to keep displaying all the levels information, even though some may not be needed. The responsibility of handling the layout ans sizes to display more or less of some levels of information is sometimes offloaded to the user via the usage of GtkPanel, who then has to manually adjust which information to hide or to display by changing the width of columns every time they need access to another information or when the window's size changes. A notable example of hurtful GtkPanel usage is Geary, which can be a bit of a pain to use half-maximized on a 1920×1080 screen. Responsive GTK+ Apps Panel UIs need to be smarter and should decide depending on the window's size which information is relevant to the user and should be displayed. As we don't want to replace the current experience but to extend it, the UIs need to respond to window size changes and explicit focus change requests. One way of doing it would be to stack the panels one on top of the other to show only one at a time, adding extra Back buttons as needed, effectively switching the UI between panels and a stack. Another one would be to have floating panels like on KDE Discover. I am not a fan of this method, but on the other hand I'm not a designer. I expect that to make applications like Geary easier to use even on laptops. Implementing GtkResponsiveBox I will try to implement a widget I call GtkResponsiveBox. It contains two children displayed side by side when the box's size is above a given threshold and only one of them when the size is below it. I expect this widget to look like a weird mix of GtkPaned and GtkStack, to be orientable and to have the following sizes: minimal size = max (widget 1 minimal size, widget 2 minimal size) natural size = widget 1 natural size + widget 2 natural size threshold size = widget 1 minimal size + widget 2 minimal size I am not completely sure yet how to implement it nor if this widget is a good idea overall. Don't expect anything working soon as it's the first time I subclass GtkContainer. I'll let you know how implementing the widget goes, but in the meantime any comment is welcome! Thanks Philip for your guide detailing how to implement a custom container, it helps me a lot! [Less]

As some of you may already know, I recently joined Purism to help developing GTK+ apps for the upcoming Librem 5 phone. Purism and GNOME share a lot of ideas and values, so the GNOME HIG and GNOME apps are what we will focus on primarily: we will do ... [More] all we can to not fork nor to reinvent the wheel but to help allowing existing GTK+ applications to work on phones. How Fit are Existing GTK+ Apps? Phones are very different from laptops and even tablets: their screen is very small and their main input method is a single thumb on a touchscreen. Luckily, many GNOME applications are touch-friendly and are fit for small screens. Many applications present you a tree of information you can browse and I see two main layouts used by for GNOME applications to let you navigate it. A first kind of layout is found in applications like Documents, I'll call it stack UI: it uses all the available space to display the collection of information sources (in that case, documents), clicking an element from the collection will focus on it, displaying its content stacked on top of the collection and letting you go back to the collection with a Back button. Applications sporting this layout are the most phone-enabled ones as phone apps typical following a similar layout. Some polish may be needed to make them shine on a phone but overall not so much. Other applications using this layout are Music, Videos, Games, Boxes… A second kind of layout is found in applications like Contacts, I'll call it panel UI: it displays all the levels of information side-by-side in panels: the closer the information is from the left, the closer it is from the root, each selected node of the information tree being highlighted. This is nice if you have enough window space to display all this information and focus on the leaves isn't required by the user as it allows to quickly jump to other elements of the collection. Unfortunately window space is rare on phones, so these applications would need to be adjusted to fit their screens. Other applications using this layout are Settings, Geary, Polari, FeedReader… Of course, other layouts exist and are used, but I won't cover these here. Stack UIs respond to size changes by displaying more or less of the current level of information, but panel UIs tend to seemingly arbitrarily limit the minimum size of the window to keep displaying all the levels information, even though some may not be needed. The responsibility of handling the layout ans sizes to display more or less of some levels of information is sometimes offloaded to the user via the usage of GtkPanel, who then has to manually adjust which information to hide or to display by changing the width of columns every time they need access to another information or when the window's size changes. A notable example of hurtful GtkPanel usage is Geary, which can be a bit of a pain to use half-maximized on a 1920×1080 screen. Responsive GTK+ Apps Panel UIs need to be smarter and should decide depending on the window's size which information is relevant to the user and should be displayed. As we don't want to replace the current experience but to extend it, the UIs need to respond to window size changes and explicit focus change requests. One way of doing it would be to stack the panels one on top of the other to show only one at a time, adding extra Back buttons as needed, effectively switching the UI between panels and a stack. Another one would be to have floating panels like on KDE Discover. I am not a fan of this method, but on the other hand I'm not a designer. I expect that to make applications like Geary easier to use even on laptops. Implementing GtkResponsiveBox I will try to implement a widget I call GtkResponsiveBox. It contains two children displayed side by side when the box's size is above a given threshold and only one of them when the size is below it. I expect this widget to look like a weird mix of GtkPaned and GtkStack, to be orientable and to have the following sizes: minimal size = max (widget 1 minimal size, widget 2 minimal size) natural size = widget 1 natural size + widget 2 natural size threshold size = widget 1 minimal size + widget 2 minimal size I am not completely sure yet how to implement it nor if this widget is a good idea overall. Don't expect anything working soon as it's the first time I subclass GtkContainer. I'll let you know how implementing the widget goes, but in the meantime any comment is welcome! Thanks Philip for your guide detailing how to implement a custom container, it helps me a lot! [Less]

If you use macOS, the best way to use a recent development snapshot of WebKit is surely Safari Technology Preview. But until now, there’s been no good way to do so on Linux, short of running a development distribution like Fedora Rawhide. Enter ... [More] Epiphany Technology Preview. This is a nightly build of Epiphany, on top of the latest development release of WebKitGTK+, running on the GNOME master Flatpak runtime. The target audience is anyone who wants to assist with Epiphany development by testing the latest code and reporting bugs, so I’ve added the download link to Epiphany’s development page. Since it uses Flatpak, there are no host dependencies asides from Flatpak itself, so it should work on any system that can run Flatpak. Thanks to the Flatpak sandbox, it’s far more secure than the version of Epiphany provided by your operating system. And of course, you enjoy automatic updates from GNOME Software or any software center that supports Flatpak. Enjoy! (P.S. If you want to use the latest stable version instead, with all the benefits provided by Flatpak, get that here.) [Less]

Yeah. I finally decided I’m going to FOSDEM this year. 2018 is the year I’m re-taken my life as I like it and a right way to start it is meeting all those friends and colleagues I missed in those years of exile. I plan to attend to the beer event ... [More] as soon I arrive to Brussels. If you want to talk to me about GUADEC 2018, Fedora Flock 2018 or whatever please reach me by Twitter (@olea) or Telegram (@IsmaelOlea). BTW, there are a couple relevant Telegram Groups FOSDEM related: General English Telegram group: https://t.me/fosdem Spanish spoken one: https://t.me/fosdem_ES PS:A funny thing about FOSDEM is… this is the place when the Spaniards (or Madrileños indeed) opensource entusiasts can meet at once a year… in Brussels! [Less]