Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 02 to January 09.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Maps ↗

Maps gives you quick access to maps all across the world.

mlundblad announces

Thanks to work done by Jamie Gravendeel Maps has now been ported to use Blueprint to define the UI templates. Also Hari Rana ported the share locations (“Send to”) dialog to AdwDialog.

Third Party Projects

Giant Pink Robots! says

Version v2026.1.5 of the Varia download manager was released with automatic archive extraction, improvements to accessibility and tons of bug fixes and small improvements. The biggest part of this new release however is macOS support, albeit in an experimental state for now. With this, Varia now supports all three big desktop OS platforms: Linux, Windows and Mac. https://giantpinkrobots.github.io/varia/

francescocaracciolo announces

Newelle, AI Assistant for Gnome, received a new major update!

• Added MCP server support, enabling integration with thousands of apps
• Added Tools, extensions can now add new tools very easily
• Added the possibility to set some models as favoutites
• You can now trigger recording and TTS stop with keyboard shortcuts

Download it on Flathub

Phosh ↗

A pure wayland shell for mobile devices.

Guido announces

Phosh 0.52 is out:

We’ve added a QR code to the Wi-Fi quick setting so clients can connect easily by scanning it and there’s a new gesture to control brightness on the lock screen.

There’s more — see the full details here .

Flare ↗

Chat with your friends on Signal.

schmiddi announces

Version 0.18.0-beta.1 of Flare was now released on flathub-beta. This release includes fixes for using Flare as a primary device, which I have done successfully for a while now. Feel free to test it out and provide feedback. Note that if you want to try it out, I would heavily encourage linking Signal-Desktop to Flare in order to set your profile information and to start new chats. Feel free to give feedback if you have any issues with this beta in the Matrix room or issue tracker .

Emergency Alerts ↗

Receive emergency alerts

Leonhard reports

Emergency Alerts 2.0.0 has been released! It finally brings the long-awaited weather alerts for the U.S. and air raid alerts for Ukraine. Location selection is now also more powerful, allowing you to choose any point on Earth, and the new map view lets you see active alerts and affected areas at a glance. Please note that to make all this possible, the way locations are stored had to be updated. When you first launch the app after updating, it tries to migrate your existing locations automatically. In rare cases, this may not work and you might need to re-add them manually. If that happens a notification will be sent.

Highlights:

• Weather alerts now available across the U.S.
• Air raid alerts now available for Ukraine
• Pick any point on Earth as a location
• New map view showing active alerts and impacted areas

GNOME Websites

Sophie (she/her) says

The www.gnome.org pages are now available in English, Bulgarian, Basque, Brazilian Portuguese, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Chinese. You can contribute additional translations on l10n.gnome.org .

Miscellaneous

Guillaume Bernard reports

Damned Lies has been refreshed during the last weeks of 2025.

To refresh the statistics of branches, many of you complained that the task was synchronous and ended in timeouts. I have reworked this part in anticipation of ticket #409 (asynchronous git pushes) and the refresh now delegates refresh statistics to a Celery worker. For git pushes, we’ll use Celery tasks the same way!

In short, this means every time you click the refresh statistics button, it will start a job in the background, and a progress bar will show you the refresh status of the job in real time. There will be a maximum of three concurrent refreshes at a time, that should be enough :-).

In addition to these major changes, I reworked the presentation of languages and POT files in modules:

1. The date & time of the POT file generation is now shown with the number of messages.

2. Your languages are shown on top of the list; it will no longer be necessary to scroll down to find your language in the language list.

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.55.1 has been released. It’s the second development release (it’s not available on PyPI) in the current GNOME release cycle.

Notable changes include:

• A fix do do_dispose() is always called on your object.
• You can define a do_constructed() method that will be called after the object is initialised.
• A regression in 3.55.0 has been fixed: instance data is now saved and outlives the garbage collector.

All changes can be found in the Changelog

This release can be downloaded from Gitlab and the GNOME download server .If you use PyGObject in your project, please give it a swing and see if everything works as expected.

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!