Coder's Log

I just flew back from Berlin where I spent the last week, mainly to participate in the GNOME Developer Experience hackfest . As you can see from blog posts from other awesome gnomies , the hackfest was a pretty big success. I focused on the use of virtual machines (as thats right up my alley) for making application development as easy as possible. I talked to Christian , who has been working on an IDE for GNOME about his idea of a simulator VM which allows the developer to quickly test their app in a pristine environment. We discussed if and how Boxes can be involved. After some discussion we decided that we probably don't want to use Boxes but rather create another binary that re-uses the existing virtualization infrastructure: libvirt, qemu, spice (and maybe libosinfo) etc. Another way to make GNOME development easy through VM would be what we already have on a very crude level: Distribution of ready-made VMs with all the development environment setup. Continuous alre...

I just rolled out Boxes 3.11.92 , which is going to become 3.12 in a week. Apart from lots of fixes and minor improvements like addition of keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility for example, there are some note worthy changes against 3.10: Dropped use of clutter and clutter-gtk: While it was a good idea to mix gtk+ and clutter at the beginning of the project to make most of the animations and transparency controls possible, Gtk+ gained new API over last few years to make most of what Boxes needed, possible. So I decided to attempt to remove clutter* from the picture and I'm glad to report that my attempt was a success. This means: Less animations: Some of the animations we had are still not possible with Gtk+ (at least not in any easy/nice way) so they had to be dropped but they are nothing really essential to how Boxes work and were only good for impressing first time users. I'm talking about box thumbnail flying around the window for transitions between d...