Update Pulsar's Linux desktop & metainfo mostly from Flatpak

[cat-master21]

Changes

This PR updates/adds to the Linux metadata upstream, dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar.metainfo.xml from the Pulsar Flatpak metadata at https://github.com/flathub/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar/blob/master/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar.metainfo.xml.

Release Notes

• Update (Linux) metainfo from downstream Pulsar Flatpak

[confused-Techie]

Thanks a ton for contributing! These changes look to make sense to me, and I'm happy to get this one merged unless any of our other more Linux focused devs have anything to add?

[cat-master21]

As it is however, I have decided to make this a draft, as Pulsars' metadata could be improved upon more such as having branding colors.

[DeeDeeG]

I read Flathub's guidelines for this stuff a bit:

• https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/metainfo-guidelines/quality-guidelines
• https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/metainfo-guidelines

In following with what they suggest, maybe we can do the following:

Summary:

Hyper-hackable text editor

(My thinking: This fits within the 35 character limit per the guidelines. Guidelines say things like "open source" or "using this framework" or "has this ethos" should not be in the summary, it should be "what can people do with the app, what does it do?" I reckon "text editor" covers that base, although I considered "Edit code just how you like." (???). But also, the guidelines say the summary is kind of a slogan or advertisement, and "Community-led hyper-hackable text editor" has been the tagline since really early days, it should resemble that, IMO. We can move "community-led" to the overhauled description, see below. Again, for the sake of staying under the character limit. Also adjust capitalization per the Flathub guidelines. Though I kind of like having our own style flair with the capitalization, and the guidelines for the description aren't mandatory, just guidelines, so hmmmmmmmm...)

Description:

Pulsar is a community-led project built from the ashes of the much-loved (now sunset) Atom editor.
It is intuitive to start using, while remaining deeply customizable for those who want or need to.
Add-on packages are available to customize the editor and add functionality.
You are welcome to make and publish your own packages as well!

(My thinking: This seems to be in the vibes of what the guidelines wants from us here? And the current description is still "Pulsar is still brand new, we aspire to a lot, watch this space" whereas we aren't brand new and we're pretty established at this point. And we don't need to define our goals in terms of Atom, we started from Atom and carry some of that ethos forward, but "reaching feature parity with Atom" was achieved more or less day 1 when we forked and as soon as the package registry was live, basically. So, not an ongoing goal as much as checklist item completed, IMO.

Of course, we don't have Teletype running yet, but... Still.

This should be readable to a total newcomer who has never heard of us or Atom before. While giving context about our roots and such.)

Screenshot:

They really want that app window chrome and drop shadow, don't they? Dang. I guess we might be able to re-stage the Readme screenshot to be more window chrome-y and drop-shadow-y? Maybe?

App Icon:

Maybe I can download their icon gridlines thing and re-size our circle logo SVG so it's just right per their guidelines? I don't think it can possibly be very far off, but eh, they seem to care a bunch about it.

Brand colors:

Blarg, gotta come up with something the app icon would be legible on. Maybe a tint of the logo purple, or I can try and dig through the design mockups we got from the professional graphic designer that one time and see if we got some good backdrop colors/tints the logo can sit well on, for light + dark theming. (Side note: Seems to be used moreso for their app store/site than as necessarily our actual brand colors, so I dunno if I agree with their naming of what these colors are about, but eh...)

Developer name:

We can reformat this to use

<developer>
  <name></name>
</developer>

Per: https://docs.flathub.org/docs/for-app-authors/metainfo-guidelines/#name-summary-and-developer-name

---

So, a few little to-dos, maybe. I think the brand colors one might be the most pressing, if they're really going to start enforcing that like the screenshot above kind of implies??

[cat-master21]

So @DeeDeeG I have been looking into this and have made a PR at flathub/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar#36 in addition to the metadata already committed in the Pulsar Flatpak. Flathub aside, if this requires other assets, I am not sure as to how this will be packaged by Pulsar.

[DeeDeeG]

Okay, thanks for linking that PR over at the flathub repo, @cat-master21, and for the additional details.

Speaking for myself personally, I approve of those efforts (e.g. flathub/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar#36) generally to comply with their linter and the spirit of their guidelines, and we can all try to have some sort of consensus-oriented discussion here to update the various strings/colors/etc. if there is enough interest/participation here. Otherwise, just something that passes their linters and is basically in keeping with what it was before-ish is a safe way to proceed if there is no obvious consensus, IMO.

In other words, I would like to see some some suggestions discussed with people here and trying to get multiple people okay with the same values for the metadata before considering them blessed by the group as a whole, whereas I am personally okay with the light maintenance stuff in flathub/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar#36 happening until then. Something is much better than nothing if it would have blocked posting more versions of Pulsar to flathub, IMHO.

I am working on other stuff at the moment, I had simply chimed in above (#935 (comment)) with my thoughts as I had a free moment to do so at the time.

But yeah, all is well IMO. Sorry if the async and/or very light amount of communication has been unclear at any point, but nevertheless I think it's all good, IMO personally. (If there is something urgent that remains un-addressed, feel free to say "hey this thing really needs some action or it's going to be less A-OK!", or if you're looking for input ahead of some deadline(s), feel free to raise that issue to attention. I may have missed it if that is the case, speaking for myself personally.)

And thanks for keeping us posted on the updates/changes that the metadata guidelines are asking for or their linter is asking for, etc. (If I am understanding the context correctly.)

[cat-master21]

I have been looking at improvements, and it looks like the icon should be 120px instead of 128px:

Fixed (120px):

I have no idea where the Linux icon is packaged, and also a screenshot would be added showing the app window and shadows:

@confused-Techie & @DeeDeeG what do you think of this? This is not required to update the Pulsar Flatpak in Flathub so no rush.

[DeeDeeG]

I like the screenshot, looks pretty native to a GNOME desktop where FlatHub apps are probably most used at this point (besides KDE, etc?). If this satisfies their oddly specific need for window chrome and drop shadow, then that's great!

Icon appears to have been scaled properly using the vector art (SVG source?), and lines up with their template thingy, which should be great, again per their oddly specific requests. (I guess it's good for them to be opinionated about design, and for them to strive for a consistent app browsing & usage experience within their ecosystem...)

---

I have no idea where the Linux icon is packaged

It's defined here in the electron-builder config script:

pulsar/script/electron-builder.js

Line 43 in 7740b2f

const svgIcon = 'resources/app-icons/beta.svg'

Config is pointing to the actual icon files stored here in the repo --> https://github.com/pulsar-edit/pulsar/tree/7740b2f16812f811f0f2c95ae0edd5f771f93f26/resources/app-icons

How to get the flatpak to use a different icon than the .deb?

Maybe the little build script here (https://github.com/flathub/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar/blob/cecb17c99bcd9f9ed74c0a2f4640f90aace443bf/dev.pulsar_edit.Pulsar.json#L98-L110) can fetch a re-scaled icon from somewhere and replace the one from the .deb with it (after unpacking the .deb, but before finally re-packaging as a flatpak)?

Where to host the scaled SVG?

• Ideally we would see if the re-scaled icon seems nicer for use with the .deb itself, not just for the flatpak, in which case we can replace the SVG the .deb currently uses with this scaled-down version. Unify on one icon.
• If the full-scale SVG is preferred for the .deb, or for whatever reason replacing the original SVG is not desirable, we can host it with a new filename as bate-flatpak.svg or some such, and the little downloader script linked just above can fetch it from there?
• The flatpak repo itself could host the re-scaled icon, but if we ever update the main repo's icon we should probably update the flatpak icon at the same time, and hosting it in the official main repo would be a good reminder to change the flatpak one as well. As in, probably we should host the scaled icon at this official main repo, if possible, I reckon?

But realistically, this is such a small concern, I doubt there will be strong opinions on it, so short-circuiting that "wait around for people to voice an opinion" thing I'd expect to happen... taking the most conservative approach straight out of the gate to move quickly on, I would suggest just adding a new re-scaled icon in this repo, and leave the current icon used by the .deb alone, I suppose.

[cat-master21]

Also I have updated Pulsar's Linux desktop file with support for opening application/x-zerosize; (zero sized file) and also adding desktop support with opening a new tab instead of entire window like what Gnome Text Editor does in my newest commitcc2188f.

[cat-master21]

Thanks for the info @DeeDeeG. I found what you said to be true except that Pulsar does not use the SVG or a single PNG! This is packaged at /opt/Pulsar/resources/pulsar.svg & /opt/Pulsar/resources/pulsar.png. However I have found that these are not the icons being used, instead the deb, rpm, and flatpak uses the ones packaged at /usr/share/icons/hicolor/.../apps/pulsar.png (... being size).

pulsar/script/electron-builder.js

Lines 169 to 178 in 7740b2f

	"extraResources": [
	{
	// Extra SVG icon included in the resources folder to give a chance to
	// Linux packagers to add a scalable desktop icon under
	// /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable
	// (used only by desktops to show it on bar/switcher and app menus).
	"from": svgIcon,
	"to": "pulsar.svg"
	},
	],

My solution to this is to instead delete the scaled icons and use a single SVG that is scalable and place it at /usr/share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/pulsar.svg which is what many applications do nowadays.

In addition to the desktop & metainfo file changes done, another change I plan to implement is to actually package the appdata/metainfo at /usr/share/metainfo so that when locally installing from KDE Discover or Gnome Software, it will look almost the same as the Flatpak (not looking blank).
What installing the local rpm or deb currently looks like under Gnome Software if unaware:

[DeeDeeG]

Here's how the updated icons look in Linux Mint MATE 21, at least on my machine.

Taskbar

Before:

After:

(Looks pretty much identical to me.)

MintMenu

Before/after images of the Pulsar icon in MintMenu (click to expand):

Before:

After:

(If you look closely, the icon is smaller with this change, and the fine details are less-well resolved, in my opinion.)

[DeeDeeG]

Finally got a chance to test the icon tweaks on Linux, looking at the .deb in particular. I think it'd be good to keep the icons as-is for the non-Flatpak packaging (.deb, .rpm, etc.). The larger-scaled version of the icon, which visually takes up the full size of its dimensions, looks better to me for small icon sizes where fine details don't resolve as well otherwise. (And perhaps some SVG scaling is being done by the OS with a fast but not as good-looking algorithm compared to the manually exported PNGs? But regardless, there are less pixel dimensions to work with, and the result seems to struggle at least a bit for it.)

Can we revert the icon changes for the .deb and .rpm use-case, and apply the new scaled SVG only for purposes of the Flatpak?

(Flatpak-specific icon tweaks can potentially be implemented during the packaging script in the Flathub Pulsar repo?)

I don't mind if the new SVG lives in this repo ("upstream"), but I would personally like the keep the .PNGs for the time being.

[cat-master21]

Okay then @DeeDeeG I have reverted the icon changes, but the SVG is still under resources/linux/pulsar.svg for the Flatpak.

[DeeDeeG]

Looks good to me! Thanks for bearing with all the discussion and async communication, some delays, etc.