This Week in GNOME: #274 Fancy Statistics

The GNOME project saw a flurry of updates this week, with developers announcing new features, performance improvements, and significant rewrites across the ecosystem. From core library enhancements to application updates, the improvements span multiple platforms and focus on user experience and developer productivity.

GTK Improvements

GTK received several important fixes for macOS, particularly addressing window maximization animations that now resize content smoothly rather than updating only after completion. The toolkit also improved startup behavior, eliminating the brief display of empty window frames before content appears.

Other macOS-specific fixes include proper support for mouse back/forward buttons in applications using AdwNavigationView, better trackpad scrolling detection that enables swipe-back gestures, and the ability to open custom URL scheme links. Additionally, a bug causing tooltip clipping has been resolved.

Application Updates

Bazaar 0.10.0 was released with notable improvements including the ability to install from user remotes in the Flatpak version and remove remotes from within the app. The daily downloads graph was redesigned, with a new distro statistics graph planned for future releases to help developers understand their user base.

Era 0.3.0, a calendar app for mobile and desktop, received updated month and agenda views with clearer time labels and larger date headers. Users can now move events between calendars, and the app remembers the last-used view upon reopening. Performance in month view was also improved.

Errands underwent a complete rewrite from Python to C, a two-year effort that resulted in significantly lower resource usage, instant startup, and a reworked UI. New features include recurrent tasks, task search and sorting, cancelled tasks tracking, custom colors, and an All Tasks view.

New Features and Tools

Moose, a chat application for AI models, added web search and calculator functionality to compatible Ollama and Ollama Cloud models. The redesigned Models view allows browsing by task with estimated memory and storage needs before downloading. Version 0.8.5 introduced Create Document, enabling users to export conversations to PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OpenDocument formats.

VidCom 0.8.0 improved window sizing and UI changes, made the encoding queue interactive during processing, and added confirmation dialogs for file overwrites. The video archival utility now works on Windows and can be installed via Flathub or AUR.

Klisi, a callgrind profile viewer alternative to KCachegrind, was highlighted for its simple interface, keyboard navigation, and touchpad gesture support. Written in Clojure using java-gi bindings, it aims to provide accessible code profiling for the GNOME desktop.