Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from July 31 to August 7.GNOME Core Apps and LibrariesFile Previewer ↗A previewer companion for GNOME Files.Peter Eisenmann announcesSince its “revival”, sushi, the previewer companion for nautilus, has seen a lot of activity.This wouldn’t have been possible without the contributions and support of Tau Gärtli, who very recently also became a maintainer 🎉Additional changes for version 51 since the last report:Revamped plugin API to easily expand sushi’s capabilitiesSmoother transitions between files, especially noticable for imagesProtected HTML previews with optional web content loadingSimplified headerbar layoutReduced memory usage with fixed memory leaksMany additional bug fixes and added little nicetiesYou can test these changes in GNOME OS or by installing sushi and nautilus from the gnome-nightly Flatpak repository.Peter’s work is funded by the GNOME Fellowship program. You can support the fellowship program via a donation.Document Viewer (Papers) ↗View, search or annotate documents in many different formats.Lucas Baudin announcesWith Papers 51.beta, it is now possible to add visual signatures to PDF documents! This was part of Malika’s internship, read more about it here.GNOME Development ToolsFelipe Borges announcesA new implementation of GNOME Boxes (beta) is now available for general testing. It has been reworked from the ground up and has a bunch of new features in the works. You can find more about it on Felipe’s “Future of Boxes” blog post.GNOME FellowshipSophie (she/her) reportsI have completed my first month of my GNOME Fellowship. You can read my full report for July 2026 on my blog.Sovereign Tech FellowshipPhilipp Sauberzweig announcesI’ve started a blog about my design work in GNOME. Check out the introductory post, and follow the blog for regular updates on my activities during the Sovereign Tech Fellowship.Third Party Projectsseja-arctic-fox saysHello! This week, I released a new version of VidCom, a simple app for archiving and compressing videos.Changes in version 0.83 include:Prevent logout/suspend while encodingPage for results reflects the encoding status betterYou can now select multiple videos in the queue by holding the Shift key‘Select all’ button is no longer a toggle and can also deselect videosAdded support for AVC (H264) encodingYou can now open videos with VidCom. It will automatically import them into the queue upon doing soCustom default options can be set, such as the target size, export folder, all the exposed codec parameters and morebugfixes and improvementsVidcom is currently available on Flathub and AUR. Detailed release notes can be seen hereAlexander Vanhee reportsBazaar got its 0.9.2 update, mostly improving what happens when you’re not actively using the app. Instead of keeping the full app running, Bazaar now uses a lightweight background daemon process to handle the GNOME Shell search provider and the brand new auto-update system. This reduces the background memory footprint by at least 10 times!Please donate to Kolunmi if you like these changes.Ronnie Nissan reportsHello. This week I updated two of my apps, Sitra to v0.1.3 and Embellish to v1.1.0.Sitra:Installed fonts are now sorted first and have a badge indicating they are installed.Added Turkish translations thanks to episutvEmbellish:Updated to NerdFonts v3.5.0, and as a consequence:Added two new fonts: Annotation Mono and Google Sans CodeNew icons like Obsidian and Zsh.For now, you will have to reinstall all your fonts (expect custom fonts) to update them to the latest version, will think of a better mechanism for the next release.Concessio is also being rewritten in Vala, making the code very clean and easier to add features and the app very fast.See some other week hopefully 🤞Tanay Bhomia reportsWhisp v1.4.0 - OCR Text Extraction and French TranslationWhisp is a frictionless, gesture-driven note-taking application designed natively for the GNOME desktop. It eliminates file management and save buttons entirely, acting as a rapid-capture scratchpad for passing thoughts, code snippets, and daily tasks.This week, Whisp released version 1.4.0, introducing a powerful new feature called “Smart Paste”. By copying an image or taking a screenshot of unselectable text—like a paused video tutorial or a system dialog—and pasting it into Whisp, the app instantly extracts the embedded text. The on-device OCR engine not only grabs the words, but mathematically reconstructs the original indentation and paragraph spacing. The release also includes official French localization and several keyboard workflow refinements.This update is perfect for developers, students, and researchers who frequently need to digitize structured text from YouTube videos, scanned PDFs, or locked interfaces without ever breaking their keyboard workflow.github - https://github.com/tanaybhomia/Whispwebsite - https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate - https://tanaybhomia.github.io/Whisp/donate.htmlShell ExtensionsDisk_MTH reportsI’ve released Tailscale for GNOME 1.0.1, a Shell extension that brings theTailscale VPN into the Quick Settings menu: connect and switch accounts, pick an exit node(with a panel warning when the node you picked stops routing), send and receive files overTaildrop, and publish local services with Funnel. It stays close to the platform: the filepicker is the XDG portal, revealing a received file goes through org.freedesktop.FileManager1,and there’s a “Send with Taildrop” entry in the Nautilus right-click menu. With no tailscaleinstalled it goes inert instead of breaking, and it comes back on its own once the packageis there, with no reload. Available on extensions.gnome.orgfor GNOME Shell 49 and 50, in English, French, German and Italian.SourceCleo Menezes Jr. saysA new version of Static Workspace Background extension is out, and now it’s even smoother. Fast switches between workspaces get a nice little bounce.Get it on EGO: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/8505/static-workspace-backgroundEventsBrage Fuglseth saysThe talks from GUADEC 2026 are now available as individual clips on YouTube. Feel free to engage with the videos and share them with anyone who may find them interesting.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!