#260 Freezing

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Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 24 to July 31.

GNOME Releases

Sophie (she/her) reports

GNOME 51 is entering it’s API/ABI, Feature, and UI freezes this Saturday, August 1st. Accordingly, the GNOME 51 beta version is expected for the following week. All changes after that point require freeze exeption approval from the Release Team.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie (she/her) reports

Glycin 2.2.beta is now available. This version brings a new API to disable the automatic conversion of textures to sRGB if an ICC profile is present, alongside a new libglycin API to fetch ICC profiles. This gives apps optional manual control over color management. This feature has been implemented at the request of Inkscape to allow porting the app from gdk-pixbuf to libglycin.

Sophie’s work is funded by the GNOME Fellowship program. You can support the fellowship program via a donation.

Third Party Projects

Deimos Hall says

Decrypt It is an application to decrypt DLC files. JDownloader uses this container format to store lists of links, but the content of the file is encrypted, and you are forced to use JDownloader to download the content. With Decrypt It, you can decrypt your .dlc files and get the link URLs in plain text to use the service of your choice to download the content.

This week, the app received an important update fixing decrypting issues and its first contribution from a member of the community who ported the app icon from png to svg.

Get it on flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/dev.deimoshall.DecryptIt

Azakidev reports

Piccolo is an easy to use color picker and selector, inspired by the venerable gcolor3 and a spiritual successor to it, built using Rust and Libadwaita with a refined UX.

It was first released a couple months ago, but over the course of this week there has been an overhaul to the app.

It’s main features are the following:

  • HSV color wheel and sliders.
  • CSS functions for every color format.
  • A per session history of picked colors.
  • An option to launch directly into pick more, useful for custom keybinds. The most recent changes being:
  • Making the UI navigatable by keyboard.
  • Making thr UI adaptive for small screens and mobile.
  • Translation support and a translation to Spanish.

If you want to help translate Piccolo into more languages, feel free to reach out in it’s Github page.

You can get Piccolo on Flathub!

Daikhan ↗

Play Videos/Music with style.

Mazhar Hussain announces

It has been a couple of years since daikhan was last mentioned on TWIG. There have been some quality-of-life changes since then (not too many though). This week I released version 0.1-alpha7 which uses Clapper’s video sink for better color accuracy. This is a temporary solution, and will be reverted back when I (or someone else) can find time to properly investigate and fix the color issue in the official gtk4paintablesink.

I’ve also added an option in preferences to disable clappersink in favor of gtk4paintablesink for users who might experience issues after this change.

Censor ↗

Redact PDF documents, permanently removing text and images in selected areas.

Robert Wolff says

Censor, the PDF document redaction tool for GNOME, was released in version 0.10.0, titled “Pixel, pixel, on the page”.

Last week, I told you that Censor redacts without loosing quality in the censored documents. On the contrary, this release features a paranoid document redaction option, that draws the redaction rectangles, and saves page snapshots as raster images to the PDF document.

Censor now opens documents in multiple windows and uses their file names and real host paths in the window headers, inspired by Graphs, Typesetter, and others. On top of that, I added debugging information to the about dialog with package versions, system information, and detected monitors.

Find Censor at Flathub, its source at Codeberg, and translations at Codeberg Translate!

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection reports

The review queue has been flooded with AI generated extensions lately. Most of them repeat the exact same bad practices, which ends up slowing down the review process for everyone.

Since AI web crawlers index GNOME blogs, I wrote a blog post as an open reference and benchmark for LLMs generating extension code. Hopefully, this helps improve the quality of generated extensions or at least reminds anyone who can’t debug JS to keep their AI generated code for local use rather than uploading them to EGO.

Even if you don’t use AI, you might find some of the practices mentioned useful for improving the quality of your own extensions!

🇧🇷️ Fabito02 says

ChromaLeon is a GNOME extension capable of coloring the Shell and applications using accent colors derived from the wallpaper. Recent versions have received various refinements, as well as stability and performance improvements.

Some features include:

  • Tinted style – tints the Shell and Adwaita/Adw-gtk3 applications, with support for a darker tint.
  • Icon pack – Adwaita-style icon pack with MoreWaita support.
  • Custom stylesheet – a custom stylesheet that supports wallpaper accent colors.
  • App grid shortcut – creates a shortcut that displays settings as a standalone app.

Key recent changes include:

  • Prefer Light – applies a light style to the Shell.
  • Lighter icon pack – the icon pack now includes fewer unnecessary icons and supports symbolic links.
  • No more overlapping processes – functions are now cancelled in favor of the most recent execution (thanks to @yannmasoch for the fix).
  • Hot-reload – styles now update automatically, without the need to reopen applications.

I would also like to give a special thanks to everyone who supports the project with donations, suggestions, and praise! Community support is essential for driving further improvements and updates.

GitHub | GNOME Extensions

Miscellaneous

Sophie (she/her) announces

The discussion on the Proposal for an RFC Process has begun on Discourse. This is part of an ongoing effort to improve governance within the GNOME project. Feedback from active contributors is highly encouraged.

Sophie’s work is funded by the GNOME Fellowship program. You can support the fellowship program via a donation.

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/2026/07/twig-260/