The plan is to get a new major release of Clutter, the 2D animated canvas blingotron, in time for GUADEC. The first step on the way is the release of Clutter 0.7.0 the first development release. The intention is that this release is pretty much API stable and it should be a good base to started porting applications to the new API.

The new release will contain lots of new and interesting goodies including new and improved backends and a rewrite of the COGL abstraction layer, support for layouts, multiple stages and multiple devices. Plenty more details in Matthew’s blog post.

Contacts is a small, lightweight addressbook that uses libebook, part of
EDS. This is the same library that GNOME Evolution uses, so all contact
data that exists in your Evolution addressbook is accessible via
Contacts. Contacts features advanced vCard field type handling and is
designed for use on hand-held devices, such as the Nokia 770 or the
Sharp Zaurus series of PDAs.

A special thanks to Adrien Bustany and Gilles Dartiguelongue for their patches that have been included in this release.

Overview of Changes in 0.9 (since 0.8)

Bugs fixed:

• 139: Contacts does not exit cleanly, leaves socket behind
• 169: horrificially non-obvious choices of field names
• 224: Search chokes on non-ascii chars
• 275: tab key behavior inconsistent
• 305: Available labels for email are insane
• 306: Better location labels for us stupid Americans
• 308: No way to view “unfiled” contacts
• 309: Groups dropdown in main window not alpha-sorted
• 310: Contacts does not create “file under” field, not usable in Evolution
• 318: Do not show fields that are blank
• 338: Possible to add duplicate groups to a contact
• 339: Keyboard shortcut conflicts
• 341: Unexpected triple-click behavior in Name/Groups display
• 368: Should import concatenated vcards
• 489: Missing field definitions in Contacts.
• 492: Only installing 26×26 icons when building for Maemo platforms.
• 659: New contacts do not have a N: field - my mobile reject them
• 774: Fails to build from source under Ubuntu Hardy
• 808: All vcards for companies are displayed as ‘Unnamed’
• 885, 42: Attributes not sorted in view mode
• 888: Contacts segfaults when provided with incomplete options on command line
• 890: Typos in source code
• 893: Remove recursive function
• 896: Simple DBus interface

(more…)

Vala bindings are now available for GUPnP and are included in the main repository here. These are the result of the hard work of Jussi Kukkonen and Zeeshan Ali Khattak. And for those that haven’t heard of it, Vala is a new programming language based around GObject with a style similar to C#. It makes it very easy to interact with GObject based APIs whilst still having the ease of use of a higher level programming language.

In related news, Ross has come up with a tool to autogenerate bindings for remote calls this makes is even easier to use GUPnP within your application with even less typing!