Joaquim Rocha
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GNOME Core Apps Hackfest 2016

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    Joaquim Rocha
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  • Principal Software Engineering Manager at Microsoft

Last weekend I attended the GNOME Core Apps hackfest that I helped organize here in Berlin.

It was the first time I participated in a Core Apps hackfest and I must say I am really glad with how it all went. I felt like there was a perfect balance of planning, working, and just hanging out together. If you want to know more about the planned items, check out this very complete post by Carlos Soriano. I focused on GNOME Software, leveraging the chance of having Allan Day and Jakub Steiner (from the GNOME Design team) nearby to get some long due ideas implemented upstream. They were restless in helping the different projects!

Here are the things I got done and are already integrated upstream:

Installed badge

— The way to show an installed app was by displaying a label “Installed” with a blue background on top of the app tiles, sometimes even covering important parts of them; now we use GNOME Software’s shopping bag icon with a check-mark, and a simpler “Installed” label when appropriate:

[Installed icons in the category view][1]
Installed icons in the category view
[Installed icons in the main view][2]
Installed icons in the main view
[Installed icons + labels in the search view][3]
Installed icons + labels in the search view

Categories grid

— The expander widget that reveals the secondary categories now remains visible when expanded, allowing to hide them back; — Merged the Education and Science categories; they had so many apps in common that it just made sense to make them one:

[Categories view][4]
Categories expander visible, showing the recently merged Education & Science category

Display sizes in the installed view

— For some users it is important to quickly see how much apps are occupying so they can decide to eventually remove them; as indicated by Jakub, this should be a temporary measure while we do not have this information in the Usage app which is the right place to display that:

[GNOME Software Installed view][5]
Apps’ sizes showing under the remove button

Until the next!

In the end I am happy with the outcome but there were two main features I didn’t have time to implement: categories redesign, and a license agreement dialog. I must also say that it was very nice to work along with Kalev and we both missed Richard who unfortunately could not make it. Cosimo also came all the way from SF for the hackfest which was great because we could tackle some Endless OS related tasks that were more complex to discuss over the interwebs.

It was great meeting everyone and I am looking forward to participating in the next one! Special thanks to Kinvolk for sharing their space, their snacks, and their help in organizing everything. Also to Collabora for sponsoring the nice dinner on Friday.