Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from November 14 to November 21.
GNOME Core Apps and Libraries
Calendar ↗
A simple calendar application.
Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️⚧️ says
Thanks to FineFindus, who previously worked on exporting events as
.icsfiles, GNOME Calendar can now export calendars as.icsfiles, courtesy of merge request !615! This will be available in GNOME 50.
Hari Rana | TheEvilSkeleton (any/all) 🇮🇳 🏳️⚧️ says
After two long and painful years, several design iterations, and more than 50 rebases later, we finally merged the infamous, trauma-inducing merge request !362 on GNOME Calendar. This changes the entire design of the quick-add popover by merging both pages into one and updating the style to conform better with modern GNOME designs. Additionally, it remodels the way the popover retrieves and displays calendars, reducing 120 lines of code.
The calendars list in the quick-add popover has undergone accessibility improvements, providing a better experience for assistive technologies and keyboard users. Specifically: tabbing from outside the list will focus the selected calendar in the list; tabbing from inside the list will skip the entire list; arrow keys automatically select the focused calendar; and finally, assistive technologies now inform the user of the checked/selected state.
Admittedly, the quick-add popover is currently unreachable via keyboard because we lack the resources to implement keyboard focus for month and week cells. We are currently trying to address this issue in merge request !564, and hope to get it merged for GNOME 50, but it’s a significant undertaking for a single unpaid developer. If it is not too much trouble, I would really appreciate some donations, to keep me motivated to improve accessibility throughout GNOME and sustain myself: https://tesk.page/#donate
This merge request allowed us to close 4 issues, and will be available in GNOME 50.
Files ↗
Providing a simple and integrated way of managing your files and browsing your file system.
Peter Eisenmann says
Files landed two big changes by Khalid Abu Shawarib this week.
The first change adds a bunch of tests, bringing the total coverage of the huge code base close to 30%. This will prevent regressions in previously uncovered areas such as bookmarking or creating files.
The second change is more noticeable as the way thumbnails are loaded was largely rewritten to finally make full use of GTK4’s recycling views. It took a lot of code detangling to get thumbnails to load asynchronously, but the result is a great speedup, making thumbnails show as fast as never before. 🚀
Attached is a comparison of reloading a folder before and after the change
Libadwaita ↗
Building blocks for modern GNOME apps using GTK4.
Alice (she/her) 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 announces
as of today, libadwaita has support for the new reduced motion preference, both supporting the
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)query from CSS, and using simple crossfade transitions where appropriate (e.g. inAdwDialog,AdwNavigationViewandAdwTabOverview
Alice (she/her) 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 reports
libadwaita has deprecated the
style-dark.css,style-hc.cssandstyle-hc-dark.cssresources thatAdwApplicationautomatically loads. They still work, but will be removed in 2.0. Applications are recommended to switch tostyle.cssand media queries for dark and high contrast styles
GTK ↗
Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.
Matthias Clasen reports
This weeks GTK 4.21.2 release includes initial support for the CSS backdrop-filter property. The GSK APIs enabling this are new copy/paste and composite render nodes, which allow flexible reuse of the ‘background’ at any point in the scene graph. We are looking forward to your experiments with this!
GLib ↗
The low-level core library that forms the basis for projects such as GTK and GNOME.
Philip Withnall says
Luca Bacci has dug into an intermittent output buffering issue with GLib on Windows, which should fix some CI issues and opt various GLib utilities into more modern features on Windows — https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/merge_requests/4788
Third Party Projects
Alain announces
Planify 4.16.0 — Natural dates, smoother flows, and smarter task handling
This week, Planify released version 4.16.0, bringing several improvements that make task management faster, more intuitive, and more predictable on GNOME.
The highlight of this release is natural language date parsing, now enabled by default in Quick Add. You can type things like “tomorrow 3pm”, “next Monday”, “25/12/2024”, or “ahora”, and Planify will automatically convert it into a proper scheduled date. Spanish support has also been added, including expressions like mañana, pasado mañana, próxima semana, and more.
Keyboard navigation got a boost too:
- Ctrl + D now opens the date picker instantly
- Ctrl + K toggles “Keep adding” mode
- And several shortcuts were cleaned up for more predictable behavior
Planify also adds label management in the task context menu, making it easier to add or remove labels without opening the full editor.
For calendar users, event items now open a richer details popover, with automatic detection of Google Meet and Microsoft Teams links, making online meetings just one click away.
As always, translations, bug fixes, and general UI refinements round out the update.
Planify 4.16.0 is available now on Flathub
Jan-Willem reports
This week I released Java-GI version 0.13.0, a Java language binding for GNOME and other libraries that support GObject-Introspection, based on OpenJDK’s new FFM functionality. Some of the highlights in this release are:
- Bindings for LibRsvg, GstApp (for GStreamer) and LibSecret have been added
- The website for Java-GI has its own domain name now: java-gi.org, and this is also used in all module- and package names
- Thanks to GObject-Introspection’s extensive testsuite, I’ve implemented over 900 testcases to test the Java bindings, and fixed many bugs along the way.
I hope that Java-GI will help Java (or Kotlin, Scala, Clojure, …) developers to create awesome new GNOME apps!
Quadrapassel ↗
Fit falling blocks together.
Will Warner says
Quadrapassel 49.2 is out! Here is whats new:
- Updated translations: Ukrainian, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (China), Slovenian, Georgian
- Made the ‘P’ key pause the game
- Replaced the user help docs with a ‘Game Rules’ dialog
- Stopped the menu button taking focus
- Fixed a bug where the game’s score would not be recorded when the app was quit
- Added total rows and level information to scores
Phosh ↗
A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.
Guido announces
Phosh 0.51.0 is out:
There’s a new quick setting that allows to toggle location services on/off and the ☕ quick setting can now disable itself after a certain amount of time (check here on how to configure the intervals). We also add added a toggle to enable automatic brightness from the top panel and when enabled the brightness slider acts as an offset to the current brightness value.
The minimum brightness of the 🔦 brightness slider can now be configured via
hwdb/udevallowing one go to lower values then the former hard coded 40%. The configuration is maintained in gmobile.If you’re using Phosh on a Google Pixel 3A XL you can now enjoy haptic feedback when typing on the on screen keyboard (like users on other devices) and creating notch configurations for new devices should now be simpler as our tooling can take screen shots of the resulting UI element layout in Phosh for you.
There’s more, see the full details at here
GNOME Websites
Emmanuele Bassi says
After a long time, the new user help website is now available and up to date with the latest content. The new help website replaces the static snapshot of the old library-web project, but it is still a work in progress, and contributions are welcome. Just like in the past, the content is sourced from each application, as well as from the gnome-user-docs repository. If you want to improve the documentation of GNOME components and core applications, make sure to join the #docs:gnome.org room.
Shell Extensions
Pedro Sader Azevedo announces
Foresight is a GNOME Shell extension that automatically enters the activities view on empty workspaces, making it faster to open apps and start using your computer!
This week, it gained support for GNOME 49, courtesy of gabrielpalassi. This is the second time in a row that Foresight gained support for a newer GNOME Shell version thanks to community contributions, which I’m immensely grateful for. I’m also very grateful to Just Perfection, who single-handedly holds so many responsibilities in the GNOME Shell extensions ecosystem.
The latest version of Foresight is available at EGO: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7901/foresight/
Happy foretelling 🔮👣
Miscellaneous
revisto reports
The Persian GNOME community was featured at the Debian 13 Release Party at Sharif University in Iran. The talk introduced GNOME, explained how the Persian community came together, highlighted its contributions (GTK/libadwaita apps, GNOME Circle involvement, translations, and fa.gnome.org), and invited newcomers to participate and contribute.
Recording available (Farsi): https://youtu.be/UPmNNygNQuc
GNOME Foundation
ramcq reports
The GNOME Foundation board has shared details about our recently-approved balanced budget for 2024-25, as well as a note to share our thanks to Karen Sandler, as she has decided to step down from the board.
That’s all for this week!
See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://thisweek.gnome.org/posts/2025/11/twig-226/