People involved with the release notes are: DavydMadeley, GeorgeWright, GuilhermePastore

DavydMadeley did his prerelease notes here: http://davyd.livejournal.com/167967.html

2.14 release notes items

Major user-visible changes in GNOME 2.14, to be mentioned in the release notes. Please make a list here when we reach feature freeze.

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. In fact, if it's too pretty, people will link to it and complain that it's not perfect.

See also the advice about the schedule and translation.

Contents

  1. 2.14 release notes items
    1. For Users
    2. For Administrators
    3. For Developers
    4. Improving the start page

For Users

  • Ekiga (GnomeMeeting with SIP (as _default_))?

    • We need examples of the new clients or hardware with which Ekiga/GnomeMeeting can now communicate, so that this doesn't sound like "Blahtechy now does blahtechy".
    • Is known to work with:
      • Twinkle
      • Asterisk PBX
      • How about with typical GSM/UMTS/CDMA mobile phones or popular VOIP handsets? Murray

        • I didn't know any SIP or H323 enabled mobile phones existed. Most VOIP handsets use a broker to handle the ins and outs, someone called me from their handset (which was brokered via Asterisk) so that much seems to work. Additionally, Ekiga has a button to set up PC-2-Phone service, if you have another handset you want to test out, [sip:davyd@ekiga.net call me]. We'll soon know if it works.

  • Edge Resistance in Metacity.
    • Edge resistance is basically a method of automatically assisting users with move and resize operations so that they can more easily line up windows with the edges of other windows or with the edges of the screen.
  • Eye of GNOME UI redesign
  • gedit:

  • Searching in Nautilus: http://blogs.gnome.org/view/alexl/2005/12/07/0

  • Performance gains/speed ups

  • Changes to Epiphany:

    • For a good tour of Epiphany 2.14 and its integration with GNOME 2.14 see this post

    • has two new zoom buttons on the default toolbar (screenshot)

    • Epiphany's novel approach of assigning 'topics' to bookmarks, rather than placing them in a hierarchical system, doesn't scale to large collections of bookmarks. Epiphany now automatically builds a hierarchical bookmark menu based upon the users' selections of topics. We achieve this by grouping together bookmarks which share common topics, and using these groupings (taken in order of largest cardinality) to form labelled submenus, or unlabelled subdivisions. To keep in the spirit of the original Epiphany bookmarks menu we generate subdivisions (a flat menu, with a divider) whenever possible, choosing to generate submenus only when the menu becomes unwieldy.
    • The bookmark properties dialog is now much more compact and looks very similar when adding or editing a bookmark.
    • The bookmark properties' topics field provides an easy way to enter and create topics for a bookmark, and to quickly review those that have been selected. The user enters topics from their set of existing topics that they think are appropriate, with an auto-completion list provided as assistance.

    • Individual toolbars can now be hidden or shown using the View -> Toolbars menu or the context menu of the toolbar. Bookmarks or topic menus can now be placed anywhere on a toolbar.

    • The topic list can now be shown or hidden with a simple toggle button. It is ordered with the selected topics first, then suggested ones, and then others. A comprehensive description is available here.

    • list2.png The new topic list in expanded state

    • phishing protection by indicating SSL connections in the location bar epiphany-ssl-location-bar.png

  • Keyboard shortcuts: multimedia key-binding moved/disabled-until-your-distro-has-the-layout-listed-in-keyboard-settings-one-day? http://blogs.gnome.org/view/uraeus/2006/01/23/0

    • I still have the Keyboard Shortcuts control panel in Ubuntu Dapper. What's the story here? Murray.

      • Keyboard shortcuts weren't removed; the ability to bind multimedia keys in those shortcuts were removed -- for a little while anyway. However, the patch was reverted (https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=133815#c33) so this item should probably be removed from the release notes. (Though maybe we should mention this time how things are still very broken?)

  • Yelp: Searching docs using Beaglified or basic search. Man / info pages much better. Much faster for everything (startup and showing docbook). Printing support.
  • new logout/shutdown dialog
  • a separator applet in the panel to help you organize your panels
  • enhanced "add to panel" dialog: it looks better now and has a search entry
  • A new background mode named "Zoom" which scales and crops an image to fill the screen whilst keeping its aspect ratio. For use with widescreen monitors or non 4:3 images.
  • Evolution:
    • CalDAV support (?) (need a URL to demo this with)
    • Memos support

  • Mini-commander applet is now replaced by DeskbarApplet, a new powerful tool to search and launch many things

  • GNOME Terminal:
    • Cool support for One-Time Passwords
    • Draggable/movable/detachable tabs with close buttons
    • GNOME proxy settings are now exported to the terminal
    • Several speed improvements (besides work on vte), specially noticeable when it's being run remotely
    • Avoids title desyncs, displays the whole tab title through tooltips, among several other UI improvements (should be groupped together and probably not even mentioned individually)

For Administrators

  • New admin suite
  • Lockdown Editor
  • "Sabayon" User Profiles Administration

For Developers

  • Most of the optimizations belong in here too, as they happened in the developer libs (e.g. pango)
  • Applets: add new API to automatically update the background of a widget
  • Vte: your very own terminal emulator widget, used in gnome-terminal, has gone under a significant performance boost. Simply put, it's taught to not use all your CPU clocks to render whatever happens to be going on the screen as soon as it goes. It will be considerate and do not render more than fourty frames per second, which is way faster than you can read anyway. That solves most of "gnome-terminal slows down my compiles" problems. The vte optimization is an ongoing effort, so, keep an eye on this very intimate widget of your hacking times.

  • g_slice: glib has got a new memory allocator, called g_slice, which performs in many ways like the kernel slab allocator does if that sounds familiar for you. In short, forget about GMemChunks and allocating them and freeing them, or GTrashStacks. You need super fast allocations of your tiny structs (or ints, doubles, ...)? Just call g_slice_new (MyStruct). The catch? You need to know the struct size when freeing. So don't free them using g_free (or you get into deep trouble.) When you are done, just call g_slice_free (MyStruct, ptr). It features an scalable thread-local cache of slices of different sizes. And it automatically calls g_malloc for you if the slice size if larger than a certain threshold. So, Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

Improving the start page

The start/2.12 page, for instance, creates a barrier between the visitor and what most of them want to see first - What's new for users, with pictures.

  • Maybe What's New For Users should be the first page, with a short introduction that takes people to the other information.
  • The LiveCD section should have a picture of a CD.
  • The LiveCD should mention that it's an Ubuntu CD, because people like to know.
  • Remove "Solaris, HP-UX, BSD and Apple's Darwin"? It's dull.
  • The first link (maybe most likely to be clicked) should be to more cool GNOME stuff, not to the boring GNU site.

TwoPointThirteen/ReleaseNotes (last edited 2010-03-28 13:10:54 by TobiasMueller)