3.16 Release Notes Items

Changes in GNOME 3.16, 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 3.16

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

What's new for users

• Updated default Adwaita wallpaper
• Online accounts Foursquare support
• Add scroll wheel emulation in trackballs (g-s-d)
• Disable touchscreens when the screen is turned off (g-s-d)

• Don't enable hi-dpi on monitors with broken EDID https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734839

• Userspace nfs support: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gvfs/commit/?id=874bc00bd19c6853cedcea610e8ac035c8486ca7

Nautilus

• Simplified, more efficient views. Bigger icons! Line separators!
• Improved list columns.
• New View popover, with nice simplified controls.

• "Move to trash" shortcut is just Delete key again, no more <control> + Delete! To avoid accidents a notification that allows to undo the operation is shown when the user delete files.

Calculator

• Colored buttons (Elita Lobo)
• New history view (Elita Lobo)

Document Viewer

• Improve the sidebar UI (#739836, Trinh Anh Ngoc)

• Add support for TextMarkup annotation in read-only mode for now (#583377, Giselle Reis)

• Use headerbar and improve spacing and borders in properties dialog (#739836, Trinh Anh Ngoc)

Photos

• Major performance improvements - lots faster.

Documents

• Separate views for documents and collections.

GTK+

• Overlay scrollbars.
• File chooser search is back.
• Automatic app menu fallback for ssh connections.

Maps

• Retrieve and show metadata from OpenStreetMaps

• Allow sending a location to Weather or Clocks
• Enable marking places as favorite
• Allow routing from Map Bubbles
• Add "No network" detection and view
• Allow drag-n-drop of the route search entries
• Check-in from your current location now possible
• Allow search and route search to and from your contacts
• Tuning and fixups of Geoclue location handling

Music

• Smart playlists.
• Performance and stability improvements.

Books

• New ebook reader app.
• Only handles comic book archives right now. epub support is planned.

GNOME Shell

• New visual theme.

• New window decorations (Florians post)

• Notification redesign. Death of message tray.

Videos

• Hi-dpi support (requires new cairo)
• Handle "Powerpoint" buttons on remotes
• Only shows videos longer than 5 seconds in the overview
• New codec-installation experience using gnome-software.

Wayland

• Pointer barriers also work under Wayland [Jonas; #706655; mutter]
• GTK+ will use subsurfaces for popovers, so popovers can extend beyond the window boundaries
• gdm uses Wayland for the login screen

• https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2015/01/19/gnome-wayland-porting-the-endgame/

Privacy

• geocode-glib: switch to https://

• Control for automatic bug reporting (currently supported on Fedora, using abrt).
• Privacy page in gnome-initial-setup

Iagno

• Themes now change completely the appearance of the board

• New themes (including Black and White, suitable for people who need a high contrast)

• Important visual update, with a new-game screen

Taquin

GNOME Taquin is a new sliding-block puzzle game. Rearrange the blocks to form an image of the Internet's favorite animal. You can play a traditional 15-piece puzzle, or a rotationally-challenging puzzle with 16 pieces.

taquin-screenshot

Klotski, the other sliding-block puzzle game, has a cleaner interface.

Calendar

• New calendar application. "Preview release for 3.16"
• Provide a monthly view and a year view
• Support find as you type search
• Integrate into gnome-shell by adding a search provider
• Core application - highly integrated. Works with existing online accounts.
• Support for multiple calendars, which you can import from the web or local files.

Characters

• New character map application. Preview release for 3.16.
• Follows GNOME 3 design patterns, including find as you type search.
• Characters are helpfully organised into common categories.
• Has a recently used section, to make it easy to find characters that you've used in the past.

Control Center

• Refined notifications settings.
• New problem reporting settings in Privacy.

Eye of GNOME

Revamped UI, in line with GNOME 3 design patterns:

• Header bar.
• Overlaid navigation and rotation controls.

Terminal

• Terminal now compresses and encrypts the scrollback buffer contents that are stored in a temporary file on disk.

What's new for administrators and distributors

• The gnome-documents module now ships a second app, gnome-books. The recommendation is to package these two separately
• dconf-editor is now a separate module, no longer part of dconf

What's new for developers

GLib

• GObject instance counts for debugging: this helps for finding reference leaks. To use this facility, you have to set the GOBJECT_DEBUG=instance-count environment variable and can then use g_type_get_instance_count() to get the number of live objects of a given type at any time. GtkInspector has a UI for this

• Better implementation of the existing GNetworkMonitor interface (using NetworkManager). It lets applications find out if they are connected to the internet, or just locally, or stuck behind a portal

• GListModel: a GSequence-based object list. This is meant to be used as an alternative to GtkTreeModels when your data is already naturally organized in GObjects. GtkListBox has an api to use such models: gtk_list_box_bind_model

• G_DECLARE_TYPE: Boilerplate-reducing macros. This takes much of the tedious typing (or copy-paste) out of creating a GObject from scratch (in C)
• g_autoptr: Automatic cleanup for local variables (supported on gcc and clang). Another improvement for C programmers: automatic cleanup for local variables ("I can't believe its not C++")
• GSimpleIOStream: Simple wrapper for construcing GIOStreams

GTK+

• OpenGL support
• Mir backend

• Many GtkInspector improvements:

  • Better layout
  • Memory tracking
  • Magnifier
  • Separate display connection

  • JavaScript repl

• GtkPopoverMenu: New widget for creating popover menus manually

• GtkGLArea: New widget for OpenGL rendering
• Support for versioned themes
• Better OS X support for app menus

• Customizable selection behavior in GtkTextView

Tracker

• One tracker binary instead of several tools starting with 'tracker-'

gdk-pixbuf

• API changes:

  • Deprecate GdkPixdata

  • Add gdk_pixbuf_get_options() helper to list set options
  • Annotations fixes for various functions
  • Remove incorrect info about area-prepared signal
• Image format support changes
  • Flag multi-page TIFF files
  • Fix memory usage for GIF animations, add note about minimum frame length
  • Return an error for truncated PNG files
  • Add density (DPI) support for JPEG, PNG and TIFF
  • Fix reading CMYK JPEG files generated by Photoshop
  • Allow saving 1-bit mono TIFF files as used in faxes
  • Simplify loader names
  • Fix loading GIF files when the first write is short
  • Add progressive loading to ICNS files
  • Add support for 256x256 ICO files
  • Fix reading MS AMCap2 BMP files
• Other:
  • Honour requested depth in Xlib
  • Special-case compositing/copying with no scaling
  • Add relocation support to OSX and Linux
  • Prefer gdk-pixbuf's loaders to the GDI+ ones on Windows

libsoup

• Support for WebSockets, both client-side and server-side

GNOME MultiWriter

MultiWriter can be used to write an ISO file to multiple USB devices at once. MultiWriter may be useful for QA testing, to create a GNOME Live image for a code sprint or to create hundreds of LiveUSB drives for a trade show.

Screenshots available here: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-multi-writer/tree/data/appdata

Other

• Not used / deprecated: libgnomekbd

Plans for GNOME 3.18

• gnome-2048: A number game (unlikely to be ready for 3.16)
• GNOME Control Center can optionally use an Ambient Light Sensor to control the backlight brightness. This usually saves a lot of battery power. (Screenshot available on request)
• Complete Calendar application

Handy links