Software: Nuvola Player, GStreamer, MKVToolNix, Parlatype, and PulseEffects

• Nuvola Player 4.5 Integrates Progress & Volume Bars in Google Play Music, Deezer

  Jiří Janoušek was pleased to announce the release of Nuvola Player 4.5, a new stable update to the 4.x series of the open-source cloud music player for GNU/Linux desktops. The Nuvola Player project is designed as a wrapper for various cloud music services that runs as a web-based interface in a standalone app that fully integrates with your Linux desktop's elements, such as the system tray area, notifications system, dock menu, and even Ubuntu's sound menu.

• GStreamer 1.12 Open-Source Multimedia Framework Gets Its First Point Release

  The GStreamer development team announced the availability of the first point release of the GStreamer 1.12 stable series of the popular and widely-used open-source and cross-platform multimedia framework. Even if it comes about one and a half months after the GStreamer 1.12.0 release, the 1.12.1 update is a small one that contains only bugfixes. These include improvements to the Meson build system, a fix for a memory leak on the gstptpclock related to the delay request message release, leaving the timeout source referenced.

• MKVToolNix 13.0.0 Open-Source MKV Manipulation Tool Brings Small Enhancements

  MKVToolNix developer Moritz Bunkus is pleased to announce today the release and immediate availability of MKVToolNix 13.0.0, a new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform MKV (Matroska) manipulation utility. MKVToolNix 13.0.0 comes about one month after version 12.0.0 to add a handful of new features, and fix a bunch of bugs that have been reported by users during this period. The new version of MKVToolNix has been dubbed by the developer as "The Juggler" and it was built for GNU/Linux, macOS and Microsoft Windows platforms.

• Parlatype is an Ace Audio Transcription App for Linux

  Whether you’re a student needing to take notes from a lecture you recorded or a blogger trying to transcribe an audio interview, the following little GNOME app can help. Turning an audio recording into text format is a time-consuming and sometimes tedious affair, with endless stop/starts as you hurriedly attempt to keep pace with the spoken word, rewind to double check, and so on.

• PulseEffects is a Powerful GTK Audio Effects & Equalizer App for Linux

  If you’re on the hunt for an advanced audio equaliser for Ubuntu, you’re definitely going to want to check this app out. It’s called PulseEffects and it’s an equalizer, limiter, reverb, and compressor that works with Pulseaudio, the default sound server in Ubuntu.

Desktops: KDE, Budgie, and GNOME

• KMail Bug Sent Encrypted Emails in Plain-Text — for 4 years [Ed: Very misleading headline. KMmail (which I used with PGP since 2004) only did this under rare scenarios.]

  A KMail bug has inadvertently sent PGP encrypted emails in plain-text — for the past four years! A flaw in the ‘Send it Later’ feature, introduced in Kmail 4.11, allows users to schedule the time and date that emails are sent. Unfortunately, the feature was incompatible with the client’s OpenPGP implementation.

• digiKam 5.6 Professional Photo Management App Released with HTML Gallery Tool

  The digiKam development team is pleased to announce the release of digiKam 5.6, a new stable update of the open-source and cross-platform professional photo management app for GNU/Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows platforms. digiKam 5.6 is here about three and a half months after the previous release, which means that the development team had the time to implement all sort of new features and functionality to enhance the abilities of the image manipulator and organizer applications. Of course, as with any new version, there are various performance optimizations and bug fixes.

• Budgie Desktop / Solus: Minimal & Clean Desktop Environment

  You may have heard of (or currently use!) Budgie Desktop. It's a minimal, but full featured, workspace currently based upon the GNOME/GTK stack. (The developer has announced they will be moving to QT in the future). Recently, the creator of Solus & Budgie, Ikey Doherty, left his job at Intel to work on the Solus Project full time. This, coupled with another developer, Stefan Ric, joining the team means that Solus users should prepare for an influx of new development.

• Recurring Events Coming to GNOME Calendar

  The GNOME Calendar app is to gain support for recurring calendar events in GNOME 3.26. Developer Yash Singh is working to add the relevant code necessary to support recurring events as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2017. “Support for recurrent events already exists in Evolution calendar but it is lacking in GNOME Calendar. For example, right now, for a weekly repeating event, users have to manually add that event every week which is very inconvenient and time consuming,” he explains.

• Stuck in the Challenge

  My Sunday days are reserved for the GNOME Peru Challenge 2017-1 and one key action to success is to get an application running, to fix a bug. In this matter, jhbuild and GNOME Builder are the way to achieve it.

Fedora: New and Old Development News

• Upcoming Fedora Atomic Host lifecycle changes

• GSoC2017 (Fedora) — Week 3&4

• [Older] CI and infrastructure hackfest 2017

• [Older] Scribus 1.5.3 available on COPR repository

• [Older] Printing Improvements for Fedora 27 Workstation

  Fedora 26 is not out yet, but it’s already time to think about how to improve the Workstation edition of Fedora 27. One of the areas my team is focusing on is printing (the desktop side of it). For GNOME 3.24 and Fedora 26 Workstation we landed a new interface for the printing module in GNOME Control Center. It gives a much cleaner overview of printers that are set up on your system.

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