WebKitGTK+ 2.5.1 is the first version of this release cycle. It comes very late mainly due to the regressions introduced by the switch to CMake and the problems we found after removing WebKit1 from the tree. It also includes some new features that I’ll talk about in other posts, probably when 2.6.0 is released. In this post I’ll only focus on the breaks introduced in this release, in order to help everybody to adapt their applications to the API changes if needed...

GNOME Asia 2014 is again phenomenal: women leadership (was there, now better), a gender-balanced audience, warm local media coverage, diverse topics, and live golden fish under the smoking area’s floor – of which I should have taken an photo...

July 31, 2014. Today KDE released the Release Candidate of the new versions of Applications and Development Platform. With API, dependency and feature freezes in place, the KDE team's focus is now on fixing bugs and further polishing.
With the large number of changes, the 4.14 releases need a thorough testing in order to maintain and improve the quality and user experience. Actual users are critical to maintaining high KDE quality, because developers simply cannot test every possible configuration. We're counting on you to help find bugs early so they can be squashed before the final release. Please consider joining the 4.14 team by installing the release candidate and reporting any bugs.

As usual, any new version of MySQL brings lots of improvements, and the current build is also quite large. Users will find that numerous changes have been made and some of them are quite interesting.

“The linked OpenSSL library for the MySQL 5.6 Commercial Server has been updated from version 1.0.1g to version 1.0.1h. Versions of OpenSSL prior to and including 1.0.1g are reported to be vulnerable to CVE-2014-0224. This change does not affect the Oracle-produced MySQL Community build of MySQL Server 5.6, which uses the yaSSL library instead,” notes the changelog.

FFmpeg 2.3.1, a complete solution to record, convert, and stream audio and video, is now available for download.

FFmpeg 2.3.1 is the latest major release of the software, and this current build is only a maintenance version and arrives just a few days after another major release was made available.

“2.3.1 was released on 2014-07-31. It is the latest stable FFmpeg release from the 2.3 release branch, which was cut from master on 2014-07-16. Amongst lots of other changes, it includes all changes from ffmpeg-mt, libav master of 2014-07-15, libav 10.2 as of 2014-07-15,” reads the official announcement.

This was a GSoC project of 2013, but the patch provided by the student was never in an “upstreamable” state. Again Germán, who always loved this feature, took care of the patch addressing my review comments. At the beginning of the hackfest most of the work has already been done, we only needed a few more review iterations during the hackfest to finally push this feature to master. The idea is to show the list of recent documents as an icon view with thumbnails and documents metadata. This view is loaded when evince is launched without any document replacing the useless empty window we had before. It also replaces the recent documents submenu in the gear menu.

The Tor encryption service is a high-profile bastion of computer security, but the project appears to have been compromised earlier this year. Today, the Tor Project blog announced that an unknown party likely managed to gather information about people who were looking up hidden services — websites that users can operate and visit anonymously, like Silk Road — and could theoretically have compromised other parts of the network.

Besides updates on Wayland support at this week's GUADEC conference in France was also an update on the work being done for implementing a scene graph within GTK+ itself and exposing a canvas API.

Emmanuele Bassi is the developer that for over one year has been working towards a canvas API inside GTK. It's also worth noting that Emmanuele Bassi is also the maintainer of the Clutter tool-kit, with some of his and others agenda being to move more of Clutter into GTK. Instead of a Clutter 2.0 release, there's hope for merging a subset of Clutter's features directly into GTK+.

Akademy 2014 will kick off on September 6 in Brno, Czech Republic; our keynote speakers will be opening the first two days. Continuing a tradition, the first keynote speaker is from outside the KDE community, while the second is somebody you all know. On Saturday, Sascha Meinrath will speak about the dangerous waters he sees our society sailing into, and what is being done to help us steer clear of the cliffs. Outgoing KDE e.V. Board President, Cornelius Schumacher, will open Sunday's sessions with a talk about what it is to be KDE and why it matters.

The Document Foundation announces LibreOffice 4.3, the 8th major release of the free office suite since the birth of the project in September 2010. The application includes the combined effort of thousands of volunteers and hundreds of developers, and has reached a point of maturity that makes it suitable for every kind of deployment, if backed by value added services by the growing LibreOffice ecosystem.

LibreOffice 4.3 offers a large number of improvements and new features.

The fourth day of GUADEC was mostly devoted to hardware. Attendees learned what it takes to integrate hardware with the desktop, how GNOME does continuous performance testing, how sandboxed apps may access hardware. Builder, a new IDE for GNOME, was introduced and the host city of GUADEC 2015 announced.

Black Lab Linux 6.0 Preview, a distribution based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, has been released and is now ready for testing.

While the GNOME project has been around since 1999 and is known by most Linux users as one of the common desktop environments, deal-of-the-day website Groupon recently introduced its own "Gnome" software.

Earlier this year the Groupon discount web-site introduced Gnome, a tablet software solution for helping business owners run their business. This software is completely unrelated to the open-source GNOME desktop environment on Linux systems. The Groupon Gnome announcement reads, "Today we announced Gnome, a new tablet-based platform that will provide sophisticated tools to local merchants to run their businesses more effectively and understand their customers better. The tablet will let merchants instantly recognize their Groupon customers as they enter their business, seamlessly redeem Groupons and save time and money with a simple point of-sale system and credit card payment processing service. Gnome will soon integrate with popular accounting software programs such as QuickBooks and Xero and offer a suite of customer relationship management tools, including the ability to customize marketing campaigns based on purchase history, share customer feedback via social media and respond to customer inquiries or comments."

If you live in the UK, you'll soon be able to fill out government paperwork with your freedoms intact. The British government announced last week that Open Document Format (ODF), HTML, and PDF will be the official file formats used by all government agencies.

The main part of GUADEC 2014, the premier annual GNOME conference, has just ended in Strasbourg, France. The core days are made up of talks, keynote presentations, as well as the GNOME Foundation Annual General Meeting.

The GUADEC core days have been packed with exciting, interesting talks. There were presentations on important initiatives in GNOME, such as Wayland and continuous performance testing. GTK+ had a strong presence, with talks on GTK+ dialogs, CSS, and the GTK+ Scene Graph Toolkit. There was also a whole day of talks on GTK+ applications.

The Qt 5.4 feature freeze is set to go into effect on 8 August with already there being a large number of changes for this next major Qt5 tool-kit release.

Heikkinen Jani of Digia sent out a reminder this morning that the 5.4 feature freeze is effective beginning 8 August. The Qt 5.4 code will be branched from Qt's "dev" branch on 11 August.

The third day of GUADEC was mostly devoted to lower level parts of the GNOME stack. There were talks on GTK+, CSS, Wayland, and WebKitGTK+, but also an annual general meeting of the GNOME Foundation.

The day started with Matthias Clasen’s talk on improvements in GTK+, especially in dialogs. Matthias demoed the changes for the whole time of the talk, switching between the code that was behind the dialogs and dialogs themselves. Matthias also showed how dialogs adapt to the environment they’re running in. GTK+ developers have been accused that they only care about GNOME, but they actually care about how GTK+ 3 apps look in other environments and good news for users of other desktop environments is that a lot has recently been done in this direction.

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 32 Beta 1 has been released, marking the start of another branch for the famous Internet browser.