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GNOME: Sam Thursfield, GSoC, and Slop
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Sam Thursfield: 23rd August 2026
Hello,
Here’s some thoughts on software for August.Bear with me on these broad categories but I think you can group most software projects into one of these groups: art, infrastructure, and activism.
Art is primarily to communicate experiences and feelings to others. Making video games is art. Making digital musical and instruments and visual effects is art. The drawing you did as a child that’s stuck on somebody’s fridge is art. The 3rd year computing student’s university coursework, uploaded to Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub without comment and abandoned forever… that’s art, or at least, it’s a sketchbook. The thorny entry to the IOCCC, the optimized inner loop deep in some graphics toolkit, that only a handful of people will ever look at, but all of them will agree: that’s art.
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Michael Calabrese: Pitivi Timeline Ruler
Overview
My project was to write the Pitivi Timeline Ruler in Rust using GTK4 and create GObject bindings for it. The project goals overall went well, and I was able to complete the widget successfully along with adding a layout manager structure to the ruler for child widgets to be added from the Pitivi/Python side. My standalone repository contains a working Python demo to verify successful FFI functionality.
Integration into the Pitivi application is not complete. The GTK4 port branch is still a work in progress and is not quite ready yet for deployment.
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GNOME ☛ Laureen Caliman: GSoC 2026 Final Report – Laureen Caliman
Over the summer of 2026, I worked towards bringing the option of playing Vocab-Style puzzles to GNOME Crosswords as part of Google Summer of Code. This entailed adding support to the puzzle library, and writing the backend of the algorithm responsible for grid generation. Jonathan Blandford provides a thorough rundown on the ins and outs of Crosswords with these slides.
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OMG Ubuntu ☛ Postcard is a new email client for GNOME, built with AI [Ed: Slop-ware. Do not touch. Do not share.]
Postcard is a new email client for GNOME sporting a modern design reminiscent of Geary.