Releases

Target word count: 250 - 300 words

Article for the 2015 annual report. Describes the 3.16 and 3.18 releases.

Article

Author: Allan Day

The GNOME project produced two new releases during the 2014-15 financial year: versions 3.16 and 3.18. As is typical for GNOME, each release included significant improvements to the GNOME 3 user experience, GNOME technologies, and to the GNOME developer experience.

To improve the user experience, GNOME Shell's notifications were overhauled for the 3.16 release. The new design provided a modern and easy-to-use experience that was positively received by users. Other improvements to the core experience for 3.16 and 3.18 included support for multitouch touchpad gestures, a better experience when interacting with text via a touchscreen, automatic screen brightness support, and firmware updates via the Software app.

GNOME's applications also had many updates during the 2014-15 financial year. For example, Files had a great number of minor enhancements to give it a much more polished experience, and it gained a major new feature with Google Drive integration. Other apps updated included Maps, Calculator, Polari, Boxes, and the Image Viewer. A number of new apps were also introduced including Calendar, Characters, Books, and To Do.

The GNOME developer experience continued to improve with GTK+ receiving OpenGL integration and new typographic features. Tooling was enhanced, with the creation of the gtk-builder-tool and enhancements to GTK+ Inspector, including a live JavaScript prompt. GLib gained instance counting (which allows it to debug memory issues), and a new list model and network monitor interface were added. WebKitGtk+ also received major improvements.

Perhaps most significantly, 2014-15's two releases included major developments in long-term GNOME initiatives. 3.16 included the first release of Builder, GNOME's new integrated development environment, which matured significantly for the 3.18 release thanks to a successful crowdfunding campaign. 3.16 and 3.18 also included major progress in GNOME's effort to support the Wayland display protocol, and 3.18 included the first release of Flatpak (formerly called xdg-app), the new cross desktop, cross distro application distribution framework, that is being strongly supported by the GNOME project.

The 3.16 and 3.18 releases included many other improvements and more details can be found in their release notes. Release videos are also available on the GNOMEDesktop YouTube channel.

Images

Screenshots can be found in the screenshot packs.

Comments

Is "Files" meant to be capitalized? Is that supposed to be Nautilous? - Nuritzi - RESOLVED

The original paragraph for the developer experience section is: "The GNOME developer experience also continued to improve with the 3.16 and 3.18 releases. GTK+ improved, with OpenGL integration and new typographic features. Tooling was enhanced, with the creation of the gtk-builder-tool and enhancements to GTK+ Inspector (including a live JavaScript prompt). GLib gained instance counting (allowing debugging memory issues), a new list model, and a new network monitor interface. WebKitGtk+ also received major improvements." I added my edits above but would like someone to check to make sure that I've retained the true intent of the paragraph. - Nuritzi - RESOLVED

Proofread By

Nuritzi Sanchez on May 31, 2016 Rosanna and Nuritzi on June 3rd