Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
GNOME Journal: PHP-GTK, Shotwell, Nokia, & More
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2010 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
While I was gallivanting around to conferences, a new GNOME Journal came out, shepherded by new Editor-in-Chief Paul Cutler.
- Paul has his first Letter from the Editor.
- Stormy Peters interviews Quim Gil of Nokia.
The GNOME community has been pushing plenty of brilliant ideas and concepts that now exist as key pieces of software in the free desktop stack. There is an ongoing consolidation process to establish the main platforms of the next years. We believe MeeGo will be one of them: what other strong alternatives are there closer to GNOME?
- I interviewed Elizabeth Smith, maintainer of PHP-GTK.
PHP-GTK is generally best suited for situations when you already have a lot of developers (or a lot of logic) already tied up in PHP. It makes it easy to whip up a desktop interface to that business logic without the need to expose that logic via a service or learn a new language. Personally, I got involved in PHP-GTK just to learn desktop programming. I didn't want to learn a new paradigm (web to desktop) and a new language at the same time. I started PHP-GTK to learn desktop programming without learning a new language... and ended up learning C and being the PHP-GTK maintainer. Funny how that happens.
- Jim Nelson introduced and described Shotwell, a new photo manager for the GNOME desktop.
This brings up one of the features we're most proud of, our auto-enhance tool. We considered various algorithms and performed qualitative testing of photos enhanced by different applications. After a few tries, we landed on an algorithm that gives great results most of the time. (We've yet to find an auto-enhance that improves every photo.)
Our algorithm involves analyzing the photo's luminescence, dropping the outer points of the distribution and boosting the middle ranges to expand the contrast of the image, making it punchier and more vibrant. If a fair portion of the photo is dark, the shadows are lightened to bring up detail.
