GNOME 3.0 Selling Points

These notes are out of date in places and should be treated with caution. For up to date messaging about GNOME 3, please refer to www.gnome3.org

GNOME 3.0 is a big advance for GNOME, especially in user experience, accessibility, and applications.

User Experience

The innovative GNOME 3 user experience allows you to focus on tasks when working on your computer, while minimizing distractions. We've replaced distracting popups with a notification that displays for a few seconds at the bottom of the screen and then gets out of the way. Users who want to focus can ignore these, and users that want to follow up can check the notification tray.

While using GNOME 3, the environment does everything it can to speed up your productive work. For example, invoking new applications can happen with only a few short keystrokes. The interface remembers what you use often, and helps you quickly select and launch applications.

Another important UI innovation is the new approach to managing multiple desktops. Desktops are now created as needed, and destroyed when no longer useful. This allows you to easily sort your windows by activity, instead of having all of your tasks mixed together.

Accessibility

Making GNOME 3 a usable and productive environment for everyone is very important for us. GNOME has always been a leader in Accessibility, and we have taken that role and doubled down on it. GNOME 3 makes its accessibility framework available to other desktop environments. This huge development will enable applications developed for other desktop environments to be just as accessible as native GNOME applications on GNOME 3. GNOME is committed to accelerating and supporting innovation in making computers usable for everyone, regardless of needs.

Applications

GNOME Apps have added more social collaboration in GNOME 3. For example, users can now drag and drop Tomboy notes directly into Instant Messaging windows in Empathy. They can share their notes with anyone they are chatting with. Tomboy continues to combine simple note taking that its users love with an ability to easily share with friends.

Social integration has been expanding in other applications as well. GEdit has exciting new features, allowing users to collaborate on text in real time. Unlike many online document collaboration tools, GEdit shows you every keystroke other users type, from directly within your desktop text editor. GNOME 3 is the best desktop environment for working in teams. Empathy allows for file transfer across a variety of IM networks.

To prevent data loss, many users have been moving data to the cloud. GNOME 3 is the only desktop environment on the market to include easy, 1-click cloud-based backup by default. The new release of DejaDup allows for one-click backup and restore to the popular Amazon S3 service. GNOME 3 leads the market in integrating desktop productivity with cloud reliability.

You can get more information about what's in GNOME 3 here. And about development in TwoPointNinetyone

If you are thinking about making your application work well with GNOME 3, the information on this page should help you to get started.