danigm.net - outreachy

GNOME Outreachy 2022

danigm — Mon, 30 May 2022 00:00:00 +0200

GNOME Translation Editor, Road to Gtk4

It's time to move to Gtk4. That could be an easy task for new project or for small projects without a lot of custom widgets, but gtranslator is old and the migration will require some time.

Some time ago I did the Gtk2 to Gtk3 migration. It was fun and during the journey we redesigned a bit the interface, but the internals didn't change a lot. Now we can do the same, migrate to Gtk4 and also update the User Interface.

Thankfully, I'm not alone this time, the GNOME community is there to help. A couple of months ago, Maximiliano started a series of commits to prepare the project to the Gtk4 migration, and today starts the Outreachy program and we've a great intern to work in this. Afshan Ahmed Khan will be working during this summer in the GNOME Translation Editor migration to Gtk4.

Outreachy

The Outreachy program provides internship to work in Free and Open Source Software. This year I've proposed the "Migrate GNOME Translation Editor to Gtk4" project and we had a lot of applicants. We had some great contributions during the application phase, and at the end Afshan was selected.

We've now an initial intern blog post and he is working now in the first step, trying to build the project with Gtk4. It's not a simple task, because gtranslator uses a lot of inheritance and there's a lot of widgets in the project.

User Interface redesign?

Once we've the project working with Gtk4 and libadwaita we can start to think about user interface improvements, and all the collaboration here is welcome, so if some designer or translator want to help, don't hesitate to take a look to the current interface and propose some ideas in the corresponding task

End of GNOME Outreachy 2019

danigm — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0100

The Outreachy Program

The outreachy program ended the past week and we've done great improvements during this four months of work. I'm very happy with the result and with the work of the two interns and also the GNOME co-mentors that make this possible.

If we're lucky the interns will continue contributing in the future and we can see the GNOME comunity growing in developers and diversity 🎉.

GNOME translation editor (Gtranslator)

Video showing the new gtranslator search bar

Priyanka Saggu has been working on the new gtranslator search bar. It's a replacement for the old search dialog with a new and modern search bar, inspired in the gnome-builder search.

This is how it looks in the current gtranslator version and the video is from gtranslator master, that I'll try to release as 3.36.0 this weekend.

I want to thank to the other co-mentor of this project, Daniel Mustieles, who has been testing and reviewing this new functionality.

Fractal

Sonja Heinze has been working on the video player for Fractal, so now we can see videos inside the fractal message history instead of open it with an external video player.

Video showing the new fractal video player

This is now in master and will appear in the next release, that I'll try to publish soon, maybe during this month. I want to fix some performance issues first.

Jordan Petridis (alatiera) has done a great work as co-mentor, guiding the project and helping with the gstreamer.

I've not presented any project proposal for the next outreachy, I want to take a break and rest a bit before the Google Summer of Code, when I'll try to get the multi-account support implemented in Fractal.

This programs give me a bit of work, reviewing and guiding the intern, but it's really great to have paid people working on free software, so I'm very happy to be able to be a mentor in GNOME to help to boost some free software projects using these resources.

GNOME Outreachy 2019

danigm — Mon, 16 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100

The Outreachy Program

The Outreachy program provides internship to work in Free and Open Source Software. This year I've proposed two projects as part of the GNOME project and we've two interns working for three months, so we'll have a lot of improvements in the following months!

I'll be mentoring these interns, so I will need to spend some time helping them to work on the existing codebase, but it worth it, if this makes more people to collaborate in free software development and if this help us to improve some useful apps.

These two projects are Fractal and the GNOME translation editor. You can take a look to the list of outreachy interns.

Fractal

Fractal is a Matrix.org gtk client, and I've proposed for this year program to implement a video player in the message list. We've a preview for images, for audio files but nothing for video files.

Sonja Heinze is the one that will be working on this during the next three months. She has been working during the past month in some small issues in Fractal so I'm really sure that she will be able to do great contributions to the project.

Jordan Petridis (alatiera) will be helping in this project as a co-mentor, I don't know a lot about gstreamer, so he'll be really helpful here with the gstreamer and rust.

GNOME translation editor (Gtranslator)

GNOME translation editor (gtranslator) is a simple .po editor. I've proposed to Rework the search and replace dialog. We've right now a simple find/replace modal dialog and I want to modernize the interface to integrate better in the window as a popover.

Priyanka Saggu is the one that will be working on this during the next three months. She has been working on gtranslator during the past month and she has done great contributions and improvements during this time.

Daniel Mustieles is the other co-mentor for this project. He's an experienced GNOME translator so he will help us a lot with the app user experience design and testing.

GNOME Outreachy mentorship

danigm — Sun, 13 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0100

The Outreachy program is a three month internship to work in FOSS. There are two periods for the outreachy, the first one from December to March and the other one from May to August. It's similar to the Google Summer Of Code, but in this case the interns doesn't need to be students.

I proposed some ideas for interts to work on GNOME, with me as a mentor. I wrote three proposals this time:

Extend Fractal media viewer with video support and explore video conference
Create Gtranslator initial integration with Damned Lies
Books : Improve the epub support in gnome-books

There was people interested in all of three projects, but for the Books app we don't have any real contribution so there was no real applicants.

I've two good proposals for Fractal and for Gtranslator, so I approve both and the Outreachy people approve these two interts. So we get two new devs working in GNOME for three months as interns.

This is something great, paid developers working in my proposals is a good thing, but this implies that I need to do the mentor work for these two interns during the three months period, so it's more work for me :/

But I think this is a really important work to do to bring more people to the free software, so I've less time for hacking, but I think it's good, because the fresh blood can do the hacking and if, after the Outreachy, one of the interns continues collaborating with GNOME, that will be more important for the GNOME project that some new features in one app.

GNOME Translation Editor

Teja is the intern working in gtranslator. She is working in the Damned Lies integration.

Damned Lies is a web application for GNOME translators. This app provides updated .po file for each GNOME module and language and translators can download and update that file using the web interface. That web is able to do the commit to the original repository with the upload version from translators.

The idea is to provide a simple integration with this platform in the GNOME Translation Editor app, using the web json API to be able to open .po files from the web directly without the need to download the file and then open it.

The current API of DL is really simple so we can't implement a real integration without adding more functionality to this API. So this project requires some work in the DL app too.

In the future we can improve the integration adding the posibility to upload the new .po after saving to DL so translators doesn't need to go to the web interface and can do all the translation flow using only the Translation Editor.

Fractal

Maira is the intern working in Fractal. They are working in the initial video preview widget.

Fractal is a instant messaging app that works over matrix.org. Currently we support different types of messages, like text, images, audio and files. But for video we're using the same widget as we're using for files, so you can download or open, but we've not a preview or inline player.

The main idea of this project is to provide a simple video player using gstreamer to play the video inside the Fractal app.

This is not an easy task, because we're using Rust in Fractal and we need to deal with bindings and language stuff, but I think it's doable.

During the internship, Maira is also working fixing some bugs in the audio player, becuase it uses gstreamer too, so during the code review, Maira detected some problems and they are fixing it.