Fly-Pie Update!
Fly-Pie 6 has been released some time ago and I haven’t posted a corresponding update on this page yet. So here we go!
Fly-Pie 6 is — to the best of my knowledge — the first GNOME Shell extension featuring achievements! To celebrate this, I created a short clip with Blender:
The list below contains the complete change set for this new version.
New Features
- Finally, achievements have been implemented! This is something I had in mind since the beginning but no time to work on until now.
- For now, 102 Achievements + 2 hidden achievements are available.
- Each will give you some experience points which in turn will make you level up at certain points.
- Once you reached level 10 you can truly call yourself Master Pielot!
- Maybe some balancing will be required in the future, a feature like this is hard to test
- Feel free to contribute ideas for new achievements!
- New preset: Numix! This uses the color palette of the well-known Numix theme.
Other Enhancements
- Fly-Pie can now be translated via Weblate. Every contribution is very appreciated!
- New Continuous Integration (CI) checks have been added which actually test whether Fly-Pie can be installed on various GNOME Shell versions.
- The layout of the settings page of the preferences dialog has been improved.
- The layout of the tutorial page of the preferences dialog has been improved.
- Fly-Pie now uses GResources for asset loading. This should increase performance of the preferences dialog.
Bug Fixes
- Saved user presets are no longer added to the list of built-in presets.
The next big step: GNOME 40
Supporting GNOME 40 is even more difficult than expected.
The main problem is, that the preferences dialog has to be ported to GTK4.
Up to now, I managed to port everything apart from the menu editor itself.
The issue is, that the drag-and-drop functionality of the GtkTreeView is broken in GTK4.
That’s a rather severe issue as you cannot configure your menus in Fly-Pie under GNOME 40 currently.
I chatted with some GTK devs on Matrix and they seem not to be eager to fix the bug as quickly as possible as GtkTreeView is considered to be a “legacy widget” and therefore there is no one who has the time to fix bugs in there.
The new alternative widgets (the closest match is GtkColumnView) do not support drag-and-drop at all.
Anyways, I do not like a tree view widget as the main menu editor widget to start with. It was the most easy way to implement the meu editor but definitely not the best. Mapping the vertical item position in the tree view to a radial position in the menu is pretty difficult and non-intuitive. Therefore, this might be the time to consider an entirely new way to configure your menus. I guess that I will have to implement a more WYSIWYG editor like I implemented for Gnome-Pie! However, this will be very complicated due to the nested menu structures of Fly-Pie…