The GNOME developers behind the Nautilus project (now known as Files) have announced that version 3.13.2 is now available for download and testing.

GTK+ 3.13.4, a multi-platform toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces that provide a complete set of widgets, suitable for projects ranging from small one-off tools to complete application suites, is now available for download and testing.

When I'm enjoying the sun/wind/rain on the balcony, I tend to use my XO-1.75 for duties where most people would use a tablet. Reading/writing emails, browsing the internet, bug triaging or writing small fixes, release notes and all can be done fine on a small screen. My preference goes definitely towards physical keyboards, and less to their onscreen variants. Even when the keyboard is small, I like the typing on it much more than using a touchscreen for it. Of course, the space saving of not needing to display a keyboard helps too. But well, that aside..

You would think that, in 2014, implementing a code of conduct for conferences or conventions would not be a controversial topic. sadly, you'd also be mistaken. there are various contrarian positions about implementing anti-harassment policies; most, if not all of those positions are wrong.

Meld, an open-source file/folder diff and merge graphical software designed for the GNOME desktop environment, has reached version 3.11.2. This is a development release geared towards Meld 3.12 and includes a couple of new features, updated translations and many bugfixes.

I’ve last written about GtkInspector in early June. Since then, a few things have fallen into place, so it is time for another status update.

The Tracker 1.1.1 release brings a brand new extractor, improves the extraction of content from ODT files by omitting line breaks and embedded tabs, and adds previously untranslated strings to the control component of Tracker.

Furthermore, the --watch command-line option has been added in order to allow the user to watch for database changes, language, author, and copyright information can now be extracted from ISO images, and AppData with screenshots for application stores has been added.

The last animations has been finished and I can now render out a full-fledged video about GNOME’s documentation efforts.

The colouring process was improved and sped up quite a bit when I bought an inexpensive USB Wacom graphire tablet a few years ago; I moved away from “cell shading” and achieved smoother results, quicker. Why Wacom? They’re the industry standard, their stylus/pen uses electromagnetic induction (no batteries required), and their hardware works out of the box with GNU/Linux and GNOME.

The mission: use GNOME Shell as the primary desktop for an entire week. Do I choose to accept it? Yes. It's easy enough to try something for a short time and discard it in a negative manner, which has been the case for me with GNOME Shell in the past, but perhaps it can be fun to challenge yourself to try something properly and for a longer time. Or perhaps you're a masochist! Either way, feel free to join me...

Also: In praise of Jim Hall

The Gnome team has announced the release of version 3.13.3, which is now available for download and testing. Those who don’t know, these snapshots are released as the team works toward the final release of the next version so 3.13.x branch is actually the development work going towards 3.14 branch.

Orca works with applications and toolkits that support the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI), which is the primary assistive technology infrastructure for Linux and Solaris.

The developers are making some very big changes to Orca and it looks like GNOME 3.14 will feature several important new features. This is the second major overhaul done by the Orca devs, but they are not stopping here.

The GNOME Control Center allows users to configure various components of their system using a vast collection of tools. It's the hub for all the major settings that can be done in a GNOME environment, so it's easy to see why any update for it might be considered important.

In fact, the GNOME Control Center didn't see many changes in the previous GNOME 3.12 release, besides the regular updates and new features. Some changes have been made, but nothing really stood out.

As someone that has dabbled from time to time making small GTK applications for Fedora, one of the pain points when making an interface was just figuring out what specific icons were named, and what they looked like. My previous workflow was to open up /usr/share/icons/ in Files, and search for the icon and the icon name.

This is the second update for GNOME Shell in the current 3.13.x development cycle, and it looks like some interesting changes have been made, although there is no major feature to be observed.

According to the changelog, closing windows with attached modals is no longer allowed, GNOME Shell is no longer self-restarting on OpenBSD, and the behavior of window buttons with compositor menus has been improved.

Also, a workaround has been implemented for an atspi-related performance regression, numerous smaller bugs have been fixed, and a handful of translations have been updated...

The issue we had to solve is that GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 cannot be loaded in the same address space. Moving Firefox from GTK+ 2 to GTK+ 3 isn’t a problem, as only GTK+ 3 gets loaded in its address space, and everything is fine. The problem comes when you load a plugin that links to GTK+ 2, e.g. Flash. Then, GTK+ 2 and GTK+ 3 get both loaded, GTK+ detects that, and aborts to avoid bigger problems.

With today's release of Mutter 3.13.3, GNOME on Wayland has support for touchscreen support.

The Mutter 3.13.3 release brings touch support on Wayland along with improved behavior of window buttons with comoositor menus, updated window shadows, support for keeping windows on the preferred output and various bug fixes.

A special PPA containing GTK+ applications with support for Mir has been recently created, enabling the users to test the new file manager, browser, image viewer and other apps specially developed for Mir and currently used only on Ubuntu Touch. For now, only Gedit, Gnome Calculator and Simple Scan are available for Mir, but new apps will join this list soon.

In a recent forum post, John Lindgren, Audacious Manager and Developer, notes that the long-term goal is to switch to Qt however, the GTK+ interfaces need to remain stable in the meantime and "going back to GTK2 appears to be the only way to achieve this".

According to John, for the 3.6 release, the devs might provide separate GTK2 and GTK3 tarballs if there's enough interest though.

Boxes is an GNOME application in Fedora that is used to create, manage, and run virtual machines, and Google Summer of Code student Adrien Plazas is working on implementing multiple monitor support in Boxes.