I'm an editor and the release coordinator for GNOME Journal, which just released its 19th issue.

This issue has six articles:

• Will Kahn-Greene introduces the GNOME Miro community, a website that brings GNOME-related videos to users.

  In November 2009, I released GNOME Miro Community. I'd just had a hard time finding GUADEC 2009 session videos, and Participatory Culture Foundation had just released the Miro Community curated video collection and search platform. So I decided to create a Miro Community focusing on GNOME-related video, so the next person will have an easier time finding things....

• My article describes why and how Canonical paid tens of thousands of USD to upgrade the GNOME bugtracker.

  GNOME bug-wranglers can now enjoy Bugzilla's per-product permissions, duplicate prevention, localization, and myriad enhancements from the last few years. And Bugzilla users will get to enjoy several features that started with GNOME's modifications. The browse.cgi view gives you a dashboard view of a project's outstanding bugs and patches. Users can indicate the status of an attachment to a bug (e.g., "accepted-commit_now" or "needs-work"). Everything Solved also developed a stack-trace parsing extension, traceparser, for Bugzilla 3.6. All in all, Everything Solved upstreamed more than forty features or bugfixes.

• Stormy Peters interviews an Igalia cofounder and member of the GNOME Advisory Board.

  Sometimes we the small open source consultancy companies can be seen as working right in the middle of two very different worlds: the evil empire of companies wanting to make profit, and the pure and ethically oriented free software community. But at the end there are a lot of shared interests and huge potential for the win-win. The main challenge is to find the people in key roles of big corporations or institutions that really understand how free software works, the dynamics of the community, and the right way to approach a project and have influence (as opposed to control) in its future.

• Jono Bacon describes Acire, Quickly, Ground Control, and the whole toolset for whipping up quick one-off Linux desktop apps.

  While most GNOME developers know that Quickly makes it easy to generate GNOME projects and package them for Ubuntu, Quickly actually has a template-based system, which means you can write any kind of application in it (this could include KDE applications and packaging for other distributions). What I like about Quickly is that it automates much of the repetition surrounding software development and it ultimately allows you to deploy software to your users. This instantly allows opportunistic developers to feel a sense of success around their projects as they can develop with ease--and deploy to real users with ease too.

• Shaun McCance explains Mallard, a new XML syntax for writing user documentation and help.

  A Mallard document is a collection of pages. Each page stands on its own. This is different from traditional documentation formats, where a document is a linear sequence of chapters and sections. The idea is not new. Encyclopedias have been organized around self-contained topics for centuries. When the idea is applied to documentation, it's called topic-oriented help. Users can read what they need without reading an entire manual.

• Jim Hodapp writes his last Letter from the Editor.

  Well, it is a sad day for me to say that I am leaving the leadership role of Editor-in-Chief; my ability to devote the time and energy to bringing the best content to the GNOME Journal is currently not possible. But it is a happy day that I’m passing on that role to Paul Cutler.

Paul, Jim, the authors and I put some hours into this and I think it's worth it. Check it out.