This release is very special, since it includes an important architectural change, Gio/Gvfs a replacement for GNOME-VFS. Many people have worked hard to bring us a new GNOME stable release with important architectural changes, without regressions and in a six months release cycle. It's awesome!. Not so much time ago, we didn't have support for some basic network protocols such as ftp, the connect to server dialog in nautilus hadn't been ported to Gio/Gvfs as well as many of our core modules, computer:// and network:// weren't implemented either, etc. There are too many heroes in this release. Thanks to everybody. I love the GNOME community and I'm really happy to be part of it.

There are also many improvements in Evince for this new GNOME release:

• Most of the annoying popups dialogs have been replaced by a message area in the view. Based on the gedit message area.
• Transition effects in presentations are now supported (Thanks Carlos!)
• Thanks to the Google Highly Open Participation Contest automatic and kinetic scrolling have been implemented
• Many many improvements and bug fixes in the PS backend thanks to the use of libspectre.
• Important performance improvements of speed and memory consumption
• Many other bugs fixed

The new season starts this weekend. I'm looking forward to watching the first race

It's not a surprise that libspectre was thought to be used mainly (but not only) by evince and okular. I've just committed a patch to evince to use libspectre when it's present, otherwise falling back to gs. I haven't removed the old gs code because libspectre is still too new and it's not yet shipped by distros.

There are many many advantages of using libspectre in evince, some of them:

• One of the most important advantages is probably that it's noticeable faster.
• Postscript printing improvements: print as PDF, multiple copies (bug #443859), reverse and collate are now supported.
• Page labels
• PS specials support in dvi documents (bug #386005)
• Other bugs fixed: #317106, #499787, #501235, #421879, #445797, #486547

A new libspectre release 0.1.0 is now available.

This is the first public release of libspectre

What is libspectre
==================

libspectre is a small library for rendering Postscript documents. It
provides a convenient easy to use API for handling and rendering
Postscript documents.

libspectre is free software and is available to be redistributed
and/or modified under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at
your option) any later version.

More information about libspectre
=================================

Web site:

    http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/

The programming manual:

    http://libspectre.freedesktop.org/manual

Bug reports and feedback:

    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/ Product: libspectre

The full announcement is available here

I've been accepted again to receive a discount to buy, this time, a Nokia N810. I'm very excited about the new features like the hardware keyboard or the builtin GPS. I'm looking forward to try it out.

Kimi Räikkönen becomes the 2007 drivers' champion

“But we weren’t at all fazed about Kimi [Raikkonen, of Ferrari]. We weren’t racing Kimi, we were basically racing Fernando.” — Ron Dennis after Chinese Grand Prix in Shanghai

That's what happens when you race against your own team.

Hopefully, Fernando will be in a new team the next season

Finally, the patch I wrote to allow extracting images from a PDF has been applied to poppler cvs head (thanks Albert). Evince already supports this feature since 0.7.1 version. Here is a screencast.

(click to play back, ogg/theora, ~3.0 MBytes)

Images selection is not supported yet, but I'm already working on it ;-)

Select images

The list of approved projects has been announced!. Iñigo Martínez, a student from the Universidad del País Vasco, is going to be my student to implement annotations support in Evince. We received more than ten proposals to implement annotations support so the final decision hasn't been easy. I've been talking with Iñigo and he seems to be very motivated so I'm quite sure the project is not going to fail this year. Now is time to work and enjoy hacking!