This week's report begins with some sad news for everyone. Elm_Toolbar was causing Efreet to call  stat(2) a bit too much and instead of killing the widget, an icon cache for Efreet was implemented. So if you build Efreet with --enable-icon-cache, we are faster. This option will be turned on by default after the 1.0 release.

Speaking of releases, there's a beta3 yet to be announced, but you can find the tarballs  here and some snapshots to go along  here.

And now, the happenings of the last seven days:

• We jumped into December, it's almost Christmas already.
• Efreet not only got its new cache, but it now follows the Freedesktop's specifications about it more closely, storing its files in the right place (that would be ~/.cache) or whatever XDG_CACHE_HOME is pointing at.
• Not only Efreet got faster, but also Eet, who got some of its internals redone to make better use of memory and improve overall performance.
• Ecore's handling of file handlers saw a revamp as well. Normal users won't notice much of an improvement here, but if you have an application using it to manage around 25k file descriptors, we are glad to tell you that you won't see your speed get massively hit anymore.
• Lots of fixes here and there to build cleanly on OpenBSD and MacOS X.
• Elementary Entry's item system to insert emoticons can now reference image files in your harddrive, by using the same ol' file:// syntax everyone knows.
• Hoverlist and Magnetslider in Elementary got renamed to Ctxpopup and Actionslider, respectively.
• Editje saw some work to support key modifiers in its mouse handling of object edition. You can play with Ctrl, Alt and Shift while dragging parts around.
• Edje_Edit is now capable of keeping your Embryo scripts in the generated source, if the Edje file edited was built with a recent enough edje_cc. It can also recompile the script and update the running VM with the new bytecode.

And to close, some Azy news from discomfitor:

• Spec file added (thanks to Rui Miguel Silva Seabra)
• distcheck now passes!
• 100% documentation coverage
• Client helper function added to make error checking and callback setting one call
• XML support is now OPTIONAL
• openssl dependency dropped
• Server module data is now correctly exposed for use in .azy code
• MYSQL example added to test code

Hello Monday, ProFUSION already writes internal progress reports and some developers, including Rasterman, found it could be useful for the community as a whole. If you want your news to be published, you can always contribute it or even help with the weekly news as we used to have before.

Highlights from the last couple of weeks (since I've been putting this off longer than I was supposed to)

• Elementary began to support textclasses. This means it's possible to change font and style for the widgets that support them. What widgets they are takes us to...
• elementary_config has received some more love and it can now change the cache settings for Elementary, as well as the textclasses for those widgets that support them, provided the chosen theme uses them.
• Following on the config thing, choosing the Standard profile, as opposed to default, will use a desktop oriented theme. As of now, the only difference to it is the scroller (and related widgets) having clickable scrollbars, which in turn are now affected by fingersize.
• Other changes in the scroller were made in the way it treats the contained object. This was done mostly so items in gengrid would be properly aligned, even when they are bigger than the shown area.
• The usual assorted fixes here and there include clearing the set image from elm_bg when calling elm_bg_file_set() with a NULL file argument; more hooks for more widgets, specifically signal_hooks to interact with the internal Edje objects; lists can now be disabled; and more.
• k-s (barbieri) added 2 new programs in Edje: edje_inspector and edje_external_inspector. These tools help developers see what is described in compiled edje files (edj) and external modules respectively. The first tool (edje_inspector) is useful to list groups and their parts, being able to filter based on name globs or even just those with 'api:' property, making easier for theme makers and application developers to establish a contract of what should be accessed. The second tool (edje_external_inspector) will list known modules (emotion, elementary...) and their registered types and parameters expected by these types, aiding those writing EDC files that use "type: EXTERNAL". Both tools have human or machine-readable output, helping tools to parse the output and produce some easier interaction or automation of processes (like tab-completion).

And in the not-core EFL front, contributed by acidx and abgrilo, respectively:

Enjoy

The past few weeks were pretty busy on the Enjoy front. The simple media player is almost ready for public consumption. Some highlights of what happened in november, in chronological order:

• MPRIS support has been added; MPRIS is a DBUS interface that lets a media player be controlled remotely.
• Elm_Toolbar is being used instead of our homecooked one. This means Enjoy won't look alien with a theme other than Efenniht.
• Shuffling now uses a better algorithm. Songs now won't repeat whenever the current playlist is in shuffle mode, and it'll be possible to go back to a previously-played song.
• Cover art is now downloaded from LastFM whenever they're not available locally. These images are cached locally so bandwidth won't be wasted.
• Resized cover art is now cached locally -- no more resizing them every time they're requested from the disk.
• Some themes were moved from Enjoy to the Black&White and Efenniht Elementary themes, mainly the list item stuff.
• Some bugfixes and small optimizations were performed as well.

There are more things on the works, like a user interface for the Library Manager -- so no more fiddling around with the command line just to add some songs to the database.

WebKit-EFL

Last week we had Tiled Backing Store for EFL port of WebKit upstreamed. With it, instead of rendering a single image buffer that is later displayed, it does in a matrix of image buffers. Then, with EFL Tiled Backing Store implementation, scroll and zoom operations can be done faster. For more info, please take a look at this Changelog entry  http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/72579.

We also test daily if WebKit-EFL upstream with EFL-SDK latest versions and correct the problems caused by API changes.

That's all for this week. Coming up next: More Elementary stuff and Edje_Edit will know what scripts are. Stay tuned.