Few months back, I convinced Zander Brown to take over GNOME Clocks with me and we have been working hard to refresh the code base and give it a new look for GNOME 3.36.

So far, we have got all the four panels re-designed based on the mockups made by the GNOME design team.

• GNOME Shell + Mutter See Changes For Tracking Software Rendering, VNC To Toggle Animations

  GNOME Shell and Mutter saw a set of patches land today for GNOME 3.36 that have been around for a few months and deal with the tracking of software rendering and VNC usage where GNOME Shell should in turn disable animations to ease the rendering workload.

  The GNOME Settings Daemon has until now been responsible for controlling the animation heuristics when they should be disabled while now Mutter has added support for tracking software rendering situations and in turn GNOME Shell is relying upon that for determining when to disable desktop animations.

• How not to lose the alpha channel
  

  Working on color imagery for QiTissue recently, I realized we were accidentally losing the alpha channel in multiple places. For efficiency reasons, we keep colors in memory using the QRgb type, and convert that to/from QString for serialization purposes via QColor as needed. Here’s what I discovered about why that doesn’t work, and some ways I fixed it.

  Firstly, be aware there is no QRgba in the Qt API . There is only QRgb, for 8bit color channels. It can hold an alpha value too, despite the lack of a trailing a in the type name. Then there is QRgba64 which uses 16bit per color channel. For our purposes, 8bit per channel is sufficient. So where do we lose the alpha channel, when QRgb can store it in principle?

• Fosdem and Plasma Mobile Sprint

  From January 31st to February 8th I went on a little tour, first at the two days of Fosdem in Brussels, then to Berlin for a KDE sprint about Plasma Mobile.

  It was the first time i went to Fodem: it’s an awesome experience, even tough big and messy: which is the awesome of it… and the bad of it at the same time

  Even tough there were 800 talks I didn’t attend that many, some about the Elixir language, some about retrocomputing, some about iot stuff. At Fosdem the best thing to do there.. is meeting a lot of interesting people, rather than attending talks, which are very interesting never the less, which you can find videos here.

• Norbert Preining: Okular update for Debian

  The quest for a good tabbed pdf viewer lead me okular. While Gnome3 has gone they way of “keep it stupid keep it simple” to appeal to less versed users, KDE has gone the opposite direction and provides lots of bells and knobs to configure their application. Not surprisingly, I am tending more and more to KDE apps away from the redux stuff of Gnome apps.

Cast to TV, a GNOME Shell extension to cast media (with optional transcoding) to Chromecast and other devices over the local network, has been updated to version 12. In this release, the extension has received an option for audio only transcoding, automatic image slideshow, support for casting files from network GVFS mounts, and much more.

Cast to TV is a very capable and feature-packed GNOME Shell extension for casting videos, music and pictures to Chromecast (and other devices) on the local network. It features on-the-fly transcoding for video or audio files that aren't directly supported by the Chromecast (with hardware-accelerated encoding using VA-API or NVENC), customizable subtitles, music visualizer, an optional remote control applet (with playlist support) displayed on GNOME Shell's top bar, and more.

• GNOME 3.35.91 released!

  Hi,
  
  GNOME 3.35.91 is now available! This is the second beta release of GNOME 3.36.
  
  Please note: we are now in string freeze, so be kind to translators and stop changing strings.
  
  The corresponding flatpak runtimes have been published to Flathub. If you'd like to target the GNOME 3.36 platform, you can test your application against the 3.36beta branch of the Flathub Beta repository.
  
  You can also try the experimental VM image, available here for a limited time only:
  
  https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/jobs/598561/artifacts/file/image/disk.qcow2
  
  It needs a UEFI bios and a VirtIO GPU to run.
  
  If you want to compile GNOME 3.35.91 yourself, you can use the
  official BuildStream project snapshot:
  
  https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.35.91/gnome-3.35.91.tar.xz
  
  The list of updated modules and changes is available here:
  
  https://download.gnome.org/core/3.35/3.35.91/NEWS
  
  The source packages are available here:
  
  https://download.gnome.org/core/3.35/3.35.91/sources/
  
  
  WARNING!
  --------
  This release is a snapshot of development code. Although it is
  buildable and usable, it is primarily intended for testing and hacking
  purposes. GNOME uses odd minor version numbers to indicate development
  status.
  
  For more information about 3.36, the full schedule, the official module
  lists and the proposed module lists, please see our 3.35 wiki page:
  
  https://www.gnome.org/start/unstable
  
  Happy Tuesday,
  
  Michael
  

• GNOME 3.36 Beta 2 Released With Initial Setup Parental Controls, Lock-Screen USB Disable

  GNOME 3.35.91 is out today as the second beta ahead of next month's GNOME 3.36 desktop release.

  The 3.35.91 release is the last stop before the GNOME 3.36 release candidate at month's end and then GNOME 3.36.0 should be debuting on 11 March. While past the UI and feature freeze since the 3.35.90 beta earlier this month, there are still some prominent changes to note with today's second beta:

• GNOME 3.36 Desktop Gets Second Beta Release Ahead of March 11 Launch

  GNOME Project’s Michael Catanzaro just announced a few moments ago the availability of the second beta release of the upcoming GNOME 3.36 desktop environment.

  With only three weeks left until the final release on March 11th, the GNOME 3.36 desktop environment received today a new beta version, GNOME 3.35.91, which can be downloaded and installed on various GNU/Linux distributions using the official Flatpak runtimes from Flathub, the official BuildStream project snapshot, the experimental VM image, or the source packages.

  The development cycle of GNOME 3.36 is almost over and String Freeze stage is now in effect. There will be one more milestone published before the final release next month, GNOME 3.35.92 a.k.a. GNOME 3.36 Release Candidate (RC), which is expected at the end of the month on February 29th.