3.12 Release Notes Items

Changes in GNOME 3.12, to be potentially mentioned in the release notes.

Please note that this does not need to be pretty. It's just a list that will be used to make the actual release notes.

See also the advice about the schedule and translation.

How-to

Major changes are those that:

• Affect lots of people (users, administrators, or developers.)
• Are something people have been hoping for or discussing widely.
• Feature, usability, performance, internationalization or accessibility improvements.

Provide this information:

• What the module (application) is.
• What the change is.
  • Why it is important.
  • How it can be accessed.

Be as descriptive as you like. Better too long than too short. Links and screenshots are very welcome!

GNOME 3.12

• https://live.gnome.org/ThreePointEleven/Features

What's new for users

Videos

• Redesigned to follow GNOME 3 style.
• Allows you to browse the videos on your computer.
• Much nicer playback view.
• Pocket integration.

See http://www.hadess.net/2014/02/videos-is-here.html

Software

Massive upgrade with many fixed bugs and lots of new and exciting features since it was first introduced last cycle:

• Screenshots are available for most popular applications. More screenshots are being added every day.
• Applications have a user-specific star rating based on how well they integrate with the desktop.
• Significant performance improvements for first-start and for searching.
• Support for installing individual package files.
• Checking for updates can also now be done manually to get the latest updates.
• Controls for which software sources you want to use and the ability to remove them.
• Ability to shutdown after installing updates at the end of the day rather than rebooting.
• Users can group installed applications affecting the grouping in the shell.

Geolocation

• More reliable & accurate sources in addition to existing IP-based source:

  • Cell towers and GPS, using 3G modems

  • WiFi, using Mozilla Location Service that allows you to easily help improve geolocation by installing/running a small app on your android phone.

• Status icon indicates when an app is using geolocation services.
• Controls in the system status area allow geolocation to be turned off.

Notes

• Ability to open notes in new windows.
• Trash for deleted notes.

Photos

• Search - both within the application and from the shell.
• Facebook integration.
• Automatic albums for screenshots.
• Performance improvements for cases where you add an online account with 1000s of items.

Terminal

• Line wrapping.
• Shell search provider.
• Setting to use the dark theme.
• Add Solarized Palette

Games

• Chess, Five or More, Four-in-a-row, Iagno, Mahjongg, Mines, Quadrapassel, Swell Foop, Tetravex, and Tali enjoy modernized window layouts.
• Four-in-a-row has a new theme, using art from the Faenza icon theme.
• The computer player in Chess is now much easier to play against when using the GNU Chess engine
• The computer player in Iagno and Chess now moves slower, to give the player more time to think.
• Lights Off and Quadrapassel now use the dark theme

Disks

• New header bar.
• Lost RAID support?

Music

• Now has playlists.

Maps

• Much smoother panning between locations on the map.
• Maps can now auto complete against the history in the search bar.
• Saner minimum zoom-levels which means no more post stamp sized maps in the middle of an otherwise empty window.

Web

• New history dialog.
• New page title/address UI.
• Ability to configure the search engine added to the preferences.
• New passwords dialog.
• New cookies dialog.
• Improved oops screen.
• Improved Most Visited page.
• Improved downloading experience: better looking download bar, uses the correct file name in the save dialog, avoids leaving half-downloaded files around, or exposing half-completed downloads.
• New window style for incognito mode.
• Streamlined context menus.

gedit

• New design UI
  • Header bar
  • new tabs
  • gear menu
  • popovers
  • Updated sidebar
• reopen closed tabs with shift+ctrl+T
• changecase shortcuts and right click menu

Logs

• New application to view the systemd journal

Sound recorder

• New application to make audio recordings

Settings

• New bluetooth panel.
• Flickr content in background panel.

Initial Setup

• Totally revamped.

• New design based on user testing study funded by Intel.

Core

• Wired network status added, along with support for switching network profiles.

• Apps can now add extra items to their shell context menus (aka jumplists)

• Manual app folders through Software.
• Various subtle fixes to the visual theme.
• New tabs.
• Header bars in dialogs.
• Updated symbolic icon theme.
• Popovers.
• Hi-resolution display support in the shell.

• Faster startup times for the shell (due to loading a single binary rather than tons of js files, also search optimizations).

• Google Cloud Print

• Lower memory consumption due to mozjs24?
• Details - maybe we should highlight some of the smaller areas of polish (there might be some repetition with items above here):

  • Animated window snapping highlight.

  • Header bars have consistent heights.
  • Nicer separators next to header bar close buttons.
  • New tabs.
  • Header bars in dialogs.
  • Theme updates - flatter pushed button state, ... , ...
  • Crisper, better aligned arrows in the system status area.
  • Smoother transition between All and Recent applications views.
  • Toned down the login animation.

Boxes

• Improved networking: All new VMs are now on the same private (to host) network that is faster and make direct VM-VM and VM-host communication possible.
• Option to import existing VMs from system libvirt.
• More reliable and smoooth UI transition by dropping clutter-gtk use in favor of direct use of Gtk+.
• Detection for more operating systems and new versions of operating system through libosinfo.

(Please add your app or feature if it is not listed here!)

Tracker (Maybe this should be in Core?)

• New feature: new light weight libav extractor for extracting audio/video metadata
• New feature: Integration and support for images taken with GNOME screenshots
• New feature: folder indexing prioritization (mainly used for removable volumes and on DBus requests)
• Improved metadata content for EPUB, MP3 and GStreamer based content
• Improved Thunderbird plugin with better metadata and newly added localization

What's new for administrators

What's new for developers

• High DPI density displays are now supported in Clutter, using the same setting shared by GTK+ and the GNOME Settings Daemon.
• GSubprocess: More powerful process launching API
• gapplication commandline utility can be used for launching apps, opening files, invoking application actions and listing apps and actions, with bash completion
• GApplication supports commandline handling, including a convenient --gapplication-service option for easier implementation of dbus-activatable applications
• GNotification:
  • a new API that adds desktop notification support to GApplication
  • allows for notifications to persist after an application exits and restart the application when the notification is clicked
  • replaces libnotify, but can fall back to the org.freedesktop.Notifications D-Bus interface

  • more details at: https://wiki.gnome.org/HowDoI/GNotification

• Unicode 6.3.0 support

• GtkFlowBox: A container that its children in a reflowing grid, which can be oriented horizontally or vertically

• Most GTK+ containers draw backgrounds
• Model-based menus can hide items on various conditions

• GtkBox supports a centered child like GtkHeaderBar

• GtkActionBar: A new container, which has a centered child like GtkHeaderBar

• GtkPopover: A new widget that is can be used for transient views, as an alternative to menus or dialogs

• A new look (and improved content) for developer documentation

  • Rearranged content in GTK+ docs in more logical order (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.11/)

  • Uncluttered synopsis sections (eg https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.11/GtkWindow.html)

  • Excessive markup has been reduced, for a less cluttered appearance overall

  • Nicer object hierarchy rendering (eg https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.11/GtkDialog.html#GtkDialog.object-hierarchy)

  • Fresh images in the gallery (https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/3.11/ch03.html)

  • Using markdown now for easier maintenance and improvement at the source
• libmediaart: New library created from sources in Tracker to handle art associated with media (like audio/video). Not to be confused with thumbnail generation which is usually for personal content (e.g. photos taken).
• Tracker
  • New library: for managing miners you can use libtracker-control now
  • New feature: passive extraction offers specific metadata extraction (e.g. image orientation) by listening to signals on resource changes. Previously inserting ANY information about a resource was done in one step. This feature means that now file data (e.g. file name, size, etc) is inserted even if specific metadata isn't.
  • New feature: prioritization of RDF types is available to enable extraction of certain file types before others
  • New feature: SPARQL functions tracker:normalize() and tracker:unaccent() have been added
  • New feature: tracker-sparql --tree to describe the database ontology and help understand the class hierarchy.
  • New feature: encoding detection for metadata with ICU

  • New feature: store's GraphUpdated signal delay is now configurable. This signal is what's used to notify of resource changes in the database (e.g. new file added). Previously it was always 1 second.

  • Improved portability for OpenBSD, Solaris
• Python Bindings
  • New feature: Python doc strings for functions now show accurate call signatures including argument and return type information.
  • New feature: Implicit None default for tail-end function arguments annotated as allow-none.
  • New feature: All callback connection functions accept a variable number of user-data arguments.
  • New demos showing how to use CSS in GTK+ from Python.
  • Calling GObject.threads_init is no longer required for multi-threaded programming.
  • Lots of memory and performance improvements.

What's new in accessibility

• Links in labels are accessible #721410 #721421
• Model-based menus are accessible #720983

• GtkColorChooser accessibility improved #721045 #721048

• Add GtkPopover a11y #725864

• [tentative, not finished yet] Better PDF support (poppler support added, it needs changes in Evince)
• [tentative, not finished yet] Better Orca performance after big refactoring

• [tentative, not finished yet] Accesibility support for Evolution #722938 https://mail.gnome.org/archives/orca-list/2014-March/msg00087.html

What's new in i18n/l10n

Well-known bugs

(not sure we need to have this section in the release notes, just putting it here to collect candidate bugs)

• https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=706229

Plans for GNOME 3.14

Handy links