Month: January 2015

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Two thousand and fourteen

As 2015 is approaching with new goals, promises, and changes, I am keeping my annual tradition of bragging about the past year in a blog post.

If I were to describe 2014 in a word, I would go with… challenging. I have finally graduated from my computer science bachelor’s degree. I am thankful for the amazing folks I met at the university and for all I have learned in the past 5 years. This past year has been tough: taking the last courses and writing my final thesis while working at the same time.

I have not had the free time I wanted to contribute to GNOME, to read, or to practice sports. But all in all, It was a great year. I had again the awesome opportunity of attending GUADEC, this year in the lovely Strasbourg, France. I also spoke about GNOME at some local conferences.

I had my first real job opportunity at Parafernalia, working as a contractor within the Endless Mobile apps team writing GNOME-based applications for a great operating system. I have leaved Parafernalia in the end months of 2014. Now I am looking for new challenges, without having to worry about being reallocated and having to drop off university because of it.

In my past year New Year’s Resolutions blog post I have set up that I’d like to read 50 books, find a first job, and graduate. I did not achieve the easiest one. In the past year I have read 32 of 50 books, failing my Goodreads 2014 reading challenge. I guess I will aim lower in 2015!

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Patterned Wallpapers on GNOME Shell

Screenshot

2014 was a great year with its ups and downs. I have been pretty busy and stressed, but now that the end has come, I am finally on vacation after years without this much free time. In doing so, during the Christmas holiday I have started a new toy project: a GNOME Shell extension.

Patterned Wallpapers was inspired by Pattrn, an Android app created by our fellow oldschool GNOME hacker Lucas Rocha. It is a GNOME Shell extension which gets you a new patterned-wallpaper automatically every day/week, as specified in the metadata.json file. The patterned-wallpapers are downloaded from the COLOURLovers public API. COLOURLovers is a  community where people from around the world create and share colors, palettes, and patterns.

gnome-shell-extension-patterns already has a preferences dialog which allows you to set the kind of patterns you want (popular or random), set the frequency of updates (daily or weekly), and clear the cached wallpapers. These settings are gsettings, which means that they can be changed using dconf-editor or manually with the gsetting command line tool. All pattern images are stored in the backgrounds/ folder inside the extension’s folder ($HOME/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions/patterns@felipeborges.github.com/backgrounds/).

You can automatically install it on the GNOME Shell extensions website or unzip the source code into your gnome-shell/extensions folder.

In the future, I want users to be able to browse through patterns, mark them as favorite, search by keyword, and list their wallpaper history. These goals are issues in the project’s Github repository. Contributions are appreciated!