Friday, July 15, 2016

GNOME Keysign new GUI and updates

As of now we have a new and better GUI for GnomeKeysign app which I've made using Glade3 and Gtk.Builder. The new user interface looks more sharp and integrates better with other gnome apps.

Here's are some windows comparison between the old GUI and the new one. The new GUI can be found on my github repo [1].

  • The app window for presenting User's own PGP keys

          Old:

           New:


  • The window for presenting the fingerprint and QR code of the key



  • The window for scanning a QR code or type a key fingerprint




Thanks to Allan Day for the mock-ups which I've followed when creating the new GUI [2].

Some widgets aren't yet integrated, such as the QR code generator or the integrated webcam, but the base functionality of the GUI is working and the code for it looks more clean.

I've discovered that using Gtk.Builder and Glade is a better approach than coding the GUI manually, as I've done in the past GSoC. Also, the builder object gives a more robust way of separating the user interface from the application logic.

The future work is to finish connecting the remaining functionality with the new GUI, and afterwards make it use Flatpak [3].



[1] https://github.com/andreimacavei/gnome-keysign-glade-ui/tree/master
[2] https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/blob/master/keysigning/keysigning.png
[3] http://flatpak.org/developer.html

5 comments:

  1. This looks really nice, but you should stop using short IDs as they're not collision-safe anymore. See also:
    - https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2016-06/msg02803.html
    - https://evil32.com/

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    Replies
    1. yep, we're working on it :)
      But as Andrei said: Security wise we're good. But we should get rid of short keyids nonetheless to not get people used to it.

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  2. I'm using the entire key fingeprint (160bit key id) as for the security code. The short key id is only used to show it in the GUI along with other details such as size, expiration date, etc.

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  3. Looks good but symbolic icons should be used in HeaderBar

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. @Alex B thanks for pointing this out. I've had zero knowledge about this. You can check the status on this here: https://github.com/andreimacavei/gnome-keysign-glade-ui/issues/4

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