GNOME Notes 3.27.90

I know, I'm late, but after releasing 3.27.90 I took some days off GNOME Notes development to enjoy my holidays with my son - girls stayed at home, doing girls stuff, this time.

When I get back, I was involved in trying new Linux distros to see how my workflow would work with them. That took some days too, so here we go with my thoughts on GNOME Notes 3.28.

I'm using 3.27.90 version, which will become our 3.28, daily and it's becoming more stable every release. We're able to release in time on every scheduled date. We had 3.27 1, 2, 3, 4 and 90 dot releases and I believe that's great to make community to believe in GNOME Notes development team again.

This development cycle was so fun and productive, but most changes are "under the skin". You'll notice small UI changes though.

Fixed horizontal alignment

Everything started with our move to meson build system. This tool is amazingly fast and it has decreased application building time to more reasonable numbers - in my modest i5, these are the numbers:

real    0m13,665s
user    0m35,811s
sys     0m5,797s

That work and gettext port was done by Iñigo Martínez. Thanks man!

Another great contribution was done by Jonathan Kang who added the Shortcuts window and added support to GNOME Notes remember the view style (icon or list) used last time. Thank you Mr. Kang!

New shortcuts window

But the programming tractor on this release was Mohammed Sadiq, who is doing the heavy duty, improving and cleaning up the code, migrating widgets to GtkBuilder, improving code adherence to GNOME code standards, changing code to use g_auto* and fixing some annoying bugs, one of them was crashing application when importing notes and another one when running in X11 instead of Wayland. So, I don't have words to describe how thankful I am for having Mohammed in the team! Thank you man, you have made a huge difference!

We also had other contributors fixing code, translating, improving the application as a whole.  To all of you guys, my sincere gratitude! I hope you can continue contributing next cycle! Thank you!

One thing we are considering to remove from our code base is the support for Zeitgeist. This cycle we disabled support by default, but if you still want it, just configure meson to add it back:

$ meson configure -Dzeitgeist=true

If you still use Zeitgeist, please comment below and we can discuss how we can mitigate that. If we don't hear from the community then, we'll drop it from next release cycle.

Last but not least, we finally managed to improve {own|next}cloud support. Notes are not being lost any more, at least in my tests :) so please start to open ticket if that still happens. It is slow though, but this is something we'll try to address in the next cycle.

I'll write another post about our plans for the next release, so stay tuned!