Draft: Don't link!

Feature enhancements

If you're running a laptop, have problems finding free space on your hard disks, want to customize your menu items, or find it hard to keep up with all your personal information, you'll be happy to upgrade to GNOME 2.16.

A longer life for your laptop

If you're traveling a lot with your laptop computer, the new integrated power management support of GNOME 2.16 will be a major help: It lets you manage your battery, UPS, and wireless peripherals. It also offers graphs showing you how much power is being used.

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Power management is easily controlled via a panel icon. A simple preference dialog lets you adapt to the situations you typically use your GNOME-based computer.

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By providing hooks via standardized DBUS methods, other programs are able to interact with power saving and thus reduce the necessity of taking care about power management manually. For example, an application like nautilus could stop the computer sleeping automatically when copying large files, or a service like beagled could use a slow indexing mode when on battery power.

Note taking made simple

A telephone number, an idea, a meeting with friends -- your life is an endless flow of small pieces of information. Keeping track of it all can be difficult and frustrating but GNOME 2.16 makes it easy with a powerful new note-taking application called Tomboy.

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Making a note is as simple as clicking the icon in your panel and selecting 'New note'. But the key to Tomboy's usefulness lies in its ability to relate notes and ideas together: Just highlight a phrase, click the link button and a new note appears. In this way you can organize your ideas in a way that makes sense to you. And links between your ideas won't break, even when renaming and reorganizing them.

Enhanced menu editing

Menu editing just got even more easier. The old menu editor is replaced with a new one, Alacarte, which is already known to Ubuntu users. Whether you want new menus, new items or separators: Alcarte makes it easier to make changes, and adapt the menu to your liking.

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Finer control of your disk space

If you're one of the people who always seem to struggle with an insufficient amount of free hard disk space, you'll be pleased to know that GNOME 2.16 provides a new tool to get a better overview of your hard disk space: With Baobab, you can analyse how the space is used and find and remove files that take up space. Scan local or remote directories, requested folders or the complete filesystem and Baobab displays an image showing the size of all the directories found.

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New screen reader

People with visual impairments will welcome GNOME's new screen reader, Orca. Using the Assistive Technology Service Provider Interface (AT-SPI) to query the display, Orca outputs the content using various combinations of speech synthesis, braille, and magnification. It thus supports all applications and toolkits that support AT-SPI. (// true ??)

Totem improves media web browsing

Totem, the GNOME video player has new support for reading and writing XSPF playlists, an open standard allowing people to share playlists.

Totem has exciting new features and some important fixes on its browser plugin, making Totem in conjunction with your web browser pure pleasure. Notable features are its ability to happily interoperate with web pages that embed Real and Windows media players even if the page specifically checks for Windows Media or Real Player. Even the javascript interfaces around them will work. Totem now allows you to listen to music in the background on web pages that support it as well.

Many small but useful changes

• You can now check the spelling of the text entered in the Epiphany web browser, when it is built with a Firefox 2.0 (or equivalent) back-end.
• You can now switch between the open windows of a certain application by using the shortcut ALT+F6. Of course, you can still use the short cut ALT+Tab to switch between the open windows on a work space.
• You can now move applications between different workspaces by dragging their taskbar icon onto the wanted workspace.
• You can now spot password-protected files in archives more easily due to an new emblem shown for these files.
• You can now preview a screensaver in fullscreen.
• You can now burn DVDs directly with Nautilus CD Burner; there's no need to make an image anymore.

• You can now also use Reminder Notes from existing GroupWise accounts by using Evolution.

Comments

• What about mentioning somewhere in this page (perhaps at the end of the "small changes") some bugzilla stats i.e. how many bugs were solved during this release, how many patches applied... something that shows all the activity that is not visible in a list of features but it is real and makes 2.16 be so good compared to the already good 2.14. Showing how many users contributed directly with code would also give an idea of the size of the release effort. We know there is more people contributing indirectly, but only this number would give an idea that is clear to us insiders but probably not to the majority of people that looks GNOME from the outside. -- QuimGil

  • we can probably get the number of bugs that were closed, the number of commits, and things like this -- Vincent Untz

  • It would be good to add data about the i18n progress, since multilingüism is one of our strengths. A summary of http://www.gnome.org/start/2.14/notes/en/rni18.html stressing new languages, new supported... -- QuimGil

• The importance of Orca & the accessibility tools rely not on statistics of current usage but on the fact that at least public administrations need to buy, contract, adopt technologies that are accessibility compliant. Since the public sector is one of our core targets it is good to show that we are making advances on that direction too. The Orca feature should be taken in the context of "the digital divide" when explained specially to journalists. -- QuimGil

  • An indicator to how many people Orca will be useful is good to make other people understand its importance. However, feel free to write a paragraph.-- ClausSchwarm