Many thanks to you all for your help, support and donations. This month has been very exciting for us because the release cycle was over, the base jump to the new LTS base was achieved, we had plenty of ideas to implement, nothing got in our way and we could focus on development. Not only that but the development budget was high, and that’s thanks to you, and it tightens the bonds a little more between us. It makes everybody happy, some developers start looking for a new laptop, others use the money to relax. No matter how it’s used, it always helps, and because it helps them, it helps us.

Another team was set up recently to gather artists and web designers who are interested in improving our websites. This is a new team, with 9 members who just started to get to know each others. It’s hard to predict how the team will evolve, or if it will be successful. It’s hard to know also who in this team might end up being central to our designs and maybe not only to our websites but also to our software, our user interfaces.

Within this team, Carlos Fernandez and Eran Gilo started working on the Cinnamon Spices website. Here’s is an overview of Eran’s design:

And another page:

Cinnamon now supports vertical panels. You were numerous to ask for this feature and I know it’s been requested for a very long time. It will be part of Cinnamon 3.2 in Linux Mint 18.1:

If you want more information about vertical panels, please read http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2016/09/vertical-panels/, where Simon Brown explains how vertical panels work a little more in detail.

Improved support for accelerometers also landed in Cinnamon. These little sensors allow your desktop to automatically rotate based on the orientation of the screen. If you rotate the laptop, or the screen, Cinnamon rotates with it. It’s particularly handy when showing something to a person in front of you, or when watching a movie with the lid titled at 270 degrees, or even when using a laptop in tablet-mode for hot-seat games with the lid flat on its back at 360 degrees. Many thanks to Bastien Nocera for his amazing work on iio-sensors-proxy, and its integration into GNOME, and to Jakub Adam for porting this support into Cinnamon.

I’d like to thank Peter Hutterer also for bringing libinput support to Cinnamon in a way that kept full compatibility with Synaptics.

Many other little features and improvements got into Cinnamon this month.. Bumblebee users can now use the menu to launch applications using optirun, the show desktop applet now also lets you peek at the desktop etc etc.. I’m not mentioning the most important improvements here, some are quite technical, but the ones that might be the most visible to users.

There are also two big improvements to talk about… Joseph Mccullar’s improvements on backgrounds handling, and Michael Webster’s amazing new screensaver. I won’t spoil these here though. I’ll let Joseph and Michael talk about them instead.

Moving on to the XApps; It’s always really exciting for me to work on them because each little improvement has such a big repercussion. Each new feature we develop in an XApp not only lands in Cinnamon, but also in MATE and Xfce. And I know some of you are using some XApps in KDE, and people are also using them in other distributions. So, without further due, here’s what we improved so far.

For people without accelerometers, or for people like me who always seem to shoot videos with their phone turned the wrong way, the Xplayer rotation plugin is now enabled by default. This functionality has been there for a long time, but many people didn’t know about it. It is now enabled by default, so you’ll now see “View -> Rotate” options in the menubar.

For similar reasons, the subtitles downloader plugin is now enabled by default. If you’re watching a movie, you can now just press “View -> Subtitles -> Download subtitles”.

If you have more than one monitor, Xplayer is now able to blank other monitors when playing videos in full-screen.

This ability to blank other monitors can be useful in other XApps (Xreader, Xviewer, Pix for instance) but also for other software applications. With this in mind, it was developed within a new library called libxapp which will be available to all developers within the Linux community.

For more information on screen blanking and the new libxapp library, please read this article: http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2016/09/libxapp-and-blanking-other-monitors/

In Xed, the search dialog which obstructed the text editor was replaced by a brand new search bar inspired by Sublime and similar to Firefox:

To know more about Xed and its new searchbar, you can read this article: http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2016/09/sublime-like-search-bar-in-xed/

Xed was also given a distinctive red bar when running as root which looks just the same as in Nemo.

We’re now right in the middle of our development cycle, and as you can see we’re having a lot of fun developing very different aspects of the system 🙂

As always we look forward to reading your feedback. Many many thanks for your support and funding, and for those who want to get involved, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

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