Archive for the ‘Blogroll’ Category
GNOME Photos 3.8.0
After a year of development, I am happy to announce GNOME Photos 3.8.0. This completes the last unfinished GNOME 3.8 feature – Photos is now the latest in the set of Finding & Reminding applications for GNOME 3.
Even though it is a preview in GNOME 3.8, Photos already has a nice set of well-rounded features.
- Albums – create, add to, remove from and delete albums
- Favorites – mark and unmark items as favorites
- Printing, setting background and properties, etc.
With the basics now in place, we are going to start filling in some of the gaps during the 3.9.x/3.10 cycle.
- Cloud integration – starting with Flickr and Facebook
- Search – including a search provider for GNOME Shell
Infinite scroll back in Empathy
The Nokia N9, N900 and other phones have popularized the idea of scrolling upwards to incrementally retrieve your chat history. Now you can have it on GNOME too, via Empathy. The code is now in Git master, so you can either grab it from there or wait till GNOME 3.8 is released in March this year.
Internally, it works using the TplLogWalker API that was recently added to telepathy-logger, and by adding a #prepend node to each of the Adium themes provided by Empathy. Currently it is not a part of the Adium specification. So if you are a vendor (eg., Ubuntu) shipping your own themes, then you should update them accordingly.
There is room for further improvements to the user experience, but it works and it can be very addictive once you get used to it.
Thanks to Guillaume Desmottes, Xavier Claessens and Nicolas Dufresne for all their reviews.
The VoIP stack in GNOME 3.6.2
GNOME‘s VoIP stack based on Empathy, Telepathy, Farstream (formerly Farsight), Libnice and GStreamer received a bunch of fixes for GNOME 3.6.2 which significantly improves voice and video calling over Jabber or XMPP as compared to what it used to be in earlier GNOME releases.
If you are an end-user you can expect voice and video calls between Empathy clients on both ends to be much more stable. There are still a few oddities here and there, but you should be able to place and receive calls much more reliably now.
Voice calls between the proprietary Google Talk client and Empathy should also work, but if you are looking to place a video call then make sure you have the H264 encoder and decoder for GStreamer 1.0. Typically they come from gst-plugins-ugly and gst-libav respectively. Trying to place a video call without H264 support will not cause it to be gracefully degraded into an voice or audio only call. This is something that we need to address in the future. So, if you don’t have the H264 codecs then you should explicitly choose to make an audio call.
If you are a distributor or packager, then please make sure that you are shipping the following releases that were made for GNOME 3.6.2:
- empathy-3.6.2
- telepathy-gabble-0.16.4
- telepathy-glib-0.20.1
- farstream-0.2.2
- gst-plugins-good-1.0.3
- webrtc-audio-processing-0.1
So, go ahead and try it out, and let us know if it breaks.
GNOME Photos: a preview
Last weekend, in the spirit of perfection being the enemy of good, I rolled out the first preview tarball of GNOME Photos. Based heavily on Documents, it is the latest in the set of Finding & Reminding applications for GNOME 3.
Left Orkut
So I deleted my Orkut account today. I do not intend to return.
I have a Facebook account, but I do not really use it. Maybe I should get rid of it too.
Phone calls and post cards are so much better than long winding forwarded emails supposedly aimed at making someone feel special for one reason or the other.
This is not an attempt to paint Orkut, Facebook, forwarded emails or those who like to use them in a bad light. I am just a misfit.
