A Time to Introspect

GObject Introspection looks to be the future of GNOME language bindings, and the good news is, you need not wait until 3.0 to use it. I have just finished adding all the components currently available to Ports SVN, together with Seed, a WebKit-based JavaScript interpreter which automatically includes "bindings" to any of 30+ libraries which ship with Introspection data.

Here is a screenshot of several Seed examples using the GTK+, Clutter, VTE, and WebKit libraries through GObject Introspection. The LightsOff game shown there will be part of GNOME Games 2.28, but I've made a preview of the latest beta release available. All this will be part of the next upload, which I hope will be this week or next.

Google Gadgets for Linux

I just added a screenshot of Xfce 4.6.1 with Google Gadgets for Linux (which I just finished building today) and Konqueror 4.2.4 running on my new computer. Unfortunately, XWin multiwindow mode doesn't have the compositing support to make GGL look right, but it works fine on a desktop.

The Path of Evolution

GNOME Evolution, that is. This is one of those packages that has been bugging me for years; it would build but not run. But in the process of buildings Contacts, Dates, and Tasks, which also use Evolution-Data-Server but have very simple interfaces, I discovered that NSS still wasn't working, causing E-D-S to not initialize. So I rebuilt E-D-S and Evolution without NSS, and voila, it runs like a charm.

So Evolution will be part of the next upload, albeit without SSL support, together with the rest of GNOME 2.26.2. As for SSL support, as much as I would like to have it, I'll admit trying to fix NSPR/NSS again isn't my highest priority right now. (Why can't they use something more normal, like GnuTLS, instead?) As always, PTC.