Nuvola 4.11.0 & friends released

[fenryxo]

Dear friends,

Nuvola 4.11 & friends were released.

Changes for Users

• Nuvola Adds Detection of Headphones and Changes Approach to GTK Theming: Nuvola can detect when headphones are (un)plugged and mute, pause or resume playback accordingly. Theming has changed: Greybird is used as a fallback theme instead of Adwaita, and Nuvola no longer bundles other GTK+ themes but embraces Flatpak GTK+ theme extensions instead.
• Nuvola Updates 8tracks, Bandcamp, Google Play Music, and Google Calendar: Flatpaks of 8tracks, Bandcamp, and Google Play Music were updated to use Chromium-based backend for music playback without Flash plugin. Google Calendar also uses Chromium engine for better performance and desktop notifications instead of web app alerts.
• Nuvola Supports Ubuntu 18.04; Updates OwnCloud Music, Plex Music, Pocket Casts, and SiriusXM: Flatpaks of OwnCloud Music, Plex Music, Pocket Casts, and SiriusXM were updated to use Chromium-based backend for music playback without Flash plugin and to improve desktop integration features such as a track progress bar and volume slider. Installation instructions were updated for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.
• Nuvola Updates Amazon Cloud Player, BBC iPlayer & Jupiter Broadcasting; Supports Fedora 28: Flatpaks of Amazon Cloud Player, BBC iPlayer & Jupiter Broadcasting — all maintained by Andrew Stubbs — were updated to use Chromium-based backend for music playback without Flash plugin whenever possible. Installation instructions were updated for the upcoming Fedora 28, and Nuvola Runtime received a few tweaks.

Changes for Script Maintainers

• New utility function Nuvola.queryText() (doc) used to query an element by a CSS selector expression and return text content or null.
• New utility function Nuvola.queryAttribute()(doc) used to query an element by a CSS selector expression and return its attribute or null.
• New utility function Nuvola.setInputValueWithEvent() (doc) used to set the value of an input element and then emit aninput event.
• New utility function Nuvola.exportImageAsBase64() (doc) used to load and export an image as base64 data URI, e.g., in the case of blob:// resources.
• The Chromium-based backend now supports URL filtering for external links, which is more powerful than that of WebKitGTK backend, e.g., it can detect JavaScript redirects in initially empty pop-up windows.
• Developer tools add the WebView sidebar to retrieve and change the dimensions of the web view or to take a snapshot. It will be used to provide AppStream metadata with per-app screenshots to be shown in GNOME Software, for example.
• Nuvola ADK includes Standard JavaScript code style checker. You can use the standard command to check the style of your script or use standard --fix to convert it.
• NuvolaKit JavaScript API Reference was updated with new symbols and changelogs were added to track changes more easily.
• Nuvola SDK calculates a micro version number from git as the number of commits from the last tag and adds it to metadata.json. The micro version number is shown in the About dialog.
• Nuvola SDK uses two spaces for the indentation of JSON files.

Changes for Third-Party Packagers

• Nuvola can still be built without the Chromium-based backend. Please let us know whether you still need that possibility or the WebKitGTK-based backend can be removed.
• Vala ≥ 0.40.4 is required and all compatibility issues with Valac 0.40 were fixed. [GitHub 1, GitHub 2]
• New dependencies: libpulse and libpulse-mainloop-glib.
• Canonical’s appindicator3 was replaced with a better maintained fork (libayatana-appindicator3) from Ayatana Indicators project.
• The WebKitGTK+ VAPI patch was dropped.
• WAF build system was upgraded to 2.0.6.
• Build instructions were updated and moved to aBUILD.md file [GitHub].
• Another batch of scripts was ported to use the Chromium-based backend: 8tracks, Bandcamp, Google Calendar, OwnCloud Music, Plex Music, Pocket Casts, SiriusXM, Amazon Cloud Player, BBC iPlayer, and Jupiter Broadcasting. If you still support only the WebKitGTK-based backend, you can try to remove Chromium[] Feature[MSE] flags from their requirements and add Feature[Flash] when necessary. However, this should be done on a case-by-case basis and only after careful testing. We do not test and support these modifications though.

Best regards,

Jiri Janousek