Sprint 6: new Calendar icon, Flatpak portals in To Do, Privacy panel

The Sprint series comes out every 3 weeks or so. Focus will be on the apps I maintain (Calendar, To Do, Settings, and Mutter), but it may also include other applications that I contribute to.

This report is one Sprint late, since last Sprint was dominated by the GNOME Shell Hackfest. More on that below.

Calendar

Calendar saw a fantastic amount of improvements. It was dominated by stability improvements, such as a large number of crashes being fixed. Calendar does not misinterpret the -d command line option as a short of --date anymore. The search engine of GNOME Calendar received an important improvement that makes it more robust and less flickery.

Thanks to Jakub, Calendar also received a fresh new icon! Check this out:

And also a development icon:

The new development icon is only enabled when running a development Flatpak.

To Do

GNOME To Do unfortunately didn’t see a lot of action during this Sprint. It now uses the Background portal instead of adding a custom file to .config/autostart.

Settings

GNOME Settings, on the other hand, received some large chunks of cleanup! Thanks to Robert Ancell, the Network panel is in the process of being cleaned up to match modern practices, such as GtkTemplate and g_autoptr.

The Privacy panel was also split to a number of self-contained panels! Take a look:

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Keep in mind that this is just an initial implementation. There are plans and ongoing research to improve the sidebar navigation, new Display panel mockups, improvements in the Applications panel, and much more, so these screenshots are only representative of the current point in time.

I’ve started working on updating Bastien’s branch that adds a new dialog to select the Alternate Characters key. There is only a tiny fraction of work to be done, but I originally targeted it to be ready for next Sprint anyway.

Retrospective

I’m somewhat disappointed to see some fragility of Scrum when the team size is 1, and unexpected events happen. Even though I’m certain Scrum is supposed to be a team system, I admit I had higher expectations for it.

On the other hand, I’m positively surprised how much it allows me to do when I’m following a regular routine. Even dedicating mere 30 minutes of free time make a lot of difference with the focus the Sprints bring. And because I can manage these projects on my own, and prioritize tasks, I believe it has some balance between stability improvements, cleanups, code reviews, new features, redesigns, and issue tracker management.