2.29 release notes items

Major changes in GNOME 2.29, to be mentioned in the release notes. Please make a list here when we reach feature freeze.

See the advice about the schedule and translation.

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.

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.

What's new for users

• hamster-applet

  • For advanced categorization, activities now can be tagged. Tags then can be used to filter out and drill down into reports. (screenshots 1, 2, 3)

  • A standalone mode, accessible via Gnome menu- Applications:Accessories:Time Tracker has been introduced (Screenshot).

  • Activities in overview can now be filtered by all aspects of activity - making data analysis and reporting simpler

  • Workspace tracking allows to switch activity automatically, when switching workspaces (preferences screenshot).

• gnome-applets
  • Gnome Keyboard Indicator - removed
• gnome-font-viewer
  • Install fonts by double clicking them in nautilus
• gnome-control-center
  • gnome-keyboard-preferences: GUI reviewed and updated
• gedit:
  • Added option in the save dialog to save with an specific newline type. (LF|CR|CR_LF)
  • Snippets plugin ported to the new completion framework.
  • Spell check plugin can now check comments and strings in programming languages.
  • Mac OSX port:
    • Improved integration.
  • Windows port:
    • Python plugins are now working.
• gnome-settings-daemon
  • When user chooses multiple keyboard layouts, the status icon automatically apears in the notification area
• gnome-system-tools:
  • Complete redesign of users-admin's UI, including:
    • Nice dialog to create an user, only need to provide the name and everything just works (including nice user name suggestions)
    • Users can't lose by mistake their own admin rights
    • We now ask for users for their old password before changing it, which avoids breaking keyrings and encrypted home dirs
    • Account types can be switched for existing users, instead of tweaking cryptic privileges by hand
    • Ability to remove home folders when deleting users
    • Support for encrypted home directories when adding an user
    • Many fixes of small silent failures
  • services-admin no longer hides services it doesn't know about, and shows them in a much nicer list
  • Improved D-Bus protocol to avoid destroying all users, groups or services on the system on failure

  • On-demand PolicyKit authentication, getting rid of the unfriendly Unlock button for users-admin and services-admin

• Evince:
  • Printing:
    • Page setup settings are now embedded in the print dialog
    • A new tab has been added to the print dialog with several scaling options
    • Lots of bug fixes
  • New tab in properties dialog to show information about the document license
  • PDF File Attachment annotation are now supported
  • Inverted colors mode has been added
  • cbt comics are now supported
  • Presentation mode has been reworked and several bugs has been fixed
  • The thumbnailer now supports remote files too.
  • Several performance improvements and robustness. Evince is now multiprocess instead of single instance.
  • Windows port:
    • Printing support

    • PostScript support

    • Comics support
    • dvi support
    • Windows executable contains now the evince window
• Evolution
  • Evolution has a new implementation of IMAP which provides substantial performance improvements.
  • Integration of contacts component with Google maps
• File Roller

  • Install the required packages with PackageKit if an archive cannot be opened because the required command is not available.

• Gucharmap
  • Supports Unicode 5.2.0
• Gnome Terminal
  • Unlimited scrollback
  • Scrollback saving
  • Improved proxy env suppport
  • Bold color support
• Brasero
  • support burning DTS wav file
  • new cdda2wav plugin to copy more accurately audio CDs

  • Integrate Brasero with PackageKit

  • Added Tracker support for searches besides Beagle
• Vinagre
  • Listener mode (similar to vncviewer -listen)

    • This allows the other side (the remote desktop you're going to see/control) to connect to you. This is useful if the other side is behind a firewall/router and is unreachable through the usual way. So, you just enable the listener mode in vinagre and tell the other side *your* ip address. To enable it, go to "Machine->Reverse connections" menu.

  • Ability to change depth color
  • Enable JPEG compression (lossy encoding)
    • These two features make remote support through low bandwidth connections possible. By choosing a lower depth of colors, you can reduce the bandwidth needed. As well by enabling JPEG compression. These options are available in the connection dialog.
  • SSH tunneling (VNC over SSH)
    • This allows you to access a remote machine in a more secure way, through a SSH tunnel. This means that you can type passwords and this kind of stuff without fear. You just need an account in a SSH server. In order to use this, supply the SSH host in the connection dialog.
• Tomboy
  • Automatic background note synchronization
    • When setting up note synchronization, you can now choose to have Tomboy automatically perform a sync periodically without any action on your part, and without having to deal with a big dialog interrupting your work.
    • You can turn this on and configure the sync interval in the Synchronization tab of Tomboy's Preferences dialog.

  • Windows 7 Jump list support (http://automorphic.blogspot.com/2010/01/tomboy-111-released-tomboy-online-plans.html)

    • Provides the Tomboy note menu right in the Taskbar and Start Menu.
  • Copy / paste rich HTML from notes

    • When pasting from a Tomboy note into OpenOffice.org, Evolution Mail, or other applications, formatting is now preserved as long as the application understands HTML.

    • This feature is only supported when gtk-sharp 2.12.10 is installed (scheduled for release in early March 2010).
  • Almost-instant startup
  • Safer note renaming and link updating
    • You now have a little more control over what happens when renaming a note, so that you don't unintentionally rename linking text in other notes.
• Nautilus
  • Split view mode
  • Browser UI reorganization
  • Default to browser mode
• gvfs
  • Support for iPhone and iPod Touch devices
• gnome-keyring
  • Users can now unlock keyrings for a specific amount of time, or a specific amount of idle time.
• empathy
  • Can join password protected rooms
  • Support most common IRC commands such as /join, /nick, etc.
  • Display an infobar in the contact list when an account fails to connect and display button to easily retry or edit the account
  • Allow to send files by drag and dropping it to the contact list or chat window.
  • The accounts dialog is now its own program and can displays the status of the accounts
  • Chat window gained a search bar
  • New widget to easily configure Facebook chat
• gcalctool
  • New simpler user interface
  • Superscript and subscript numbers to allow better notation, e.g. "₃√5", "5²"
  • Functions are now typed, e.g. s+i+n for sine instead of "k"
• gnome-panel

  • Important bugfix: Changing screen resolution will not randomize applets position in the panel anymore, see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=341441

• Orca

  • Many bug fixes and performance improvements across the board (over 160 bugs)

  • New "About" dialog
  • Rework of preferences UI so it fits on a netbook screen
  • As a result of work on bgo#598917, you must now use "orca --replace" if you want the new Orca process to kill any existing processes. Prior to this, merely running "orca" would automatically kill any existing processes. The new behavior is more consistent with the way singleton instances are handled by many other applications.
• Accessibility (in general)

  • Much work was done on Bonobo deprecation, but we're sticking with the CORBA implementation for GNOME 2.30. The D-Bus implementation of AT-SPI has been made to co-instal with the CORBA implementation and will be targeted for GNOME 3.0 (hopefully).

  • The Java ATK Wrapper was created -- it is meant to replace the Java Access Bridge for GNOME as part of the Bonobo deprecation work.

  • Much work was done on the GNOME Shell Magnifier, but the implementation will not be included until the next release cycle.

  • gnome-mag has included support for a new D-Bus API for magnification -- the API is yet to be finalized, but it is expected both gnome-mag and the GNOME Shell Magnifier will share the API.

  • Much work was done on the new preferences GUI, but the implementation will not be included until the next release cycle.

  • Much work was done on the Caribou on screen keyboard, but the implementation will not be included until the next release cycle.

  • See Accessibility/GNOME3 for information on accessibility planning for GNOME 3. We need help -- please come on board and lend a hand.

• Epiphany
  • Support for remembering form passwords, using gnome keyring
  • Migrates old gecko form and http auth passwords
  • Reimplement favicon support

  • Enable WebKit page cache, faster browsing and back/forward

  • Cookie acceptance policies are back
  • Print preview is back
  • Toolbars redesigned to only one

  • Embed persist is back, meaning that right click -> download/save target as work again

  • Broken SSL certs are reported
  • Downloads support is much much much more improved.
  • A new configuration option to enable/disable all plugins (java, flash)
  • Tabs menu uses icons instead of radio buttons now
  • Support for changing the default search engine (in gconf)
  • Up navigation arrow is back
  • Middle click to open clipboard contents is back
  • Epiphany context menus are back, and compatible with custom page menus like Google Docs
  • Support for custom User Agents (in gconf)
  • Support for Accept-Language (meaning pages are correctly localized)
  • An insane amount of regression bugs were fixed
  • Misc: WebKitGTK saw lots of fixing and improvements too, this should impact positively the Epiphany experience
  • Epiphany-extensions (not part of gnome officially but relevant)
    • New extension: html5tube, replaces youtube flash with an html5 video element. Doesn't require flash plugin
    • New extension: tab-key-tab-navigate, allows to use control+tab to change tabs
    • Fixed and re-enabled: gestures, rss, actions, push-scroller, greasemonkey
    • Removed the sidebar extension
    • Lots of bug fixes and regressions squashed

What's new for administrators

What's new for developers

• gtksourceview:

  • Added completion framework. Also see http://blogs.gnome.org/nacho/2009/12/05/news-on-geditgtksourceview/

• Evince:

  • EvPageCache has been split up into document part (moved to EvDocument which has been converted into an abstract class instead of an interface) and view part: EvDocumentModel. This allows more than one EvView for the same document

  • EvPrintOperation has been moved to libview so that it can be used by EvView users

• Evolution
  • Evolution and Evolution-Data-Server are finally 100% Bonobo-free!
  • Evolution-Data-Server now uses D-Bus behind the same client-side APIs.
• Anjuta

  • Improved code completion features, including completion of ".", "->" and "::" in C/C++

  • Complete asyncronous operation of code completion so it won't be disturbing anymore while typing
  • Full Javascript support (code completion, debugging, building)
  • Basic support for non-automake projects, choose directory backend when importing a project
  • Support for Vala symbols in the symbol manager
• Brasero
  • Gobject-introspection support for libbrasero-media and libbrasero-burn
• gnome-mag

  • gnome-mag now also supports D-Bus parallel to deprecated Bonobo

• devhelp
  • fullscreen mode
  • will look for symbols on library.gnome.org when they are not found locally
• glib
  • Added GConverter, a generic interface for streaming data conversion
  • threads are enabled automatically when g_Type_init() is called
• GTK+

  • A throbber widget (GtkSpinner) and cell renderer (GtkCellRendererSpinner) have been added

  • GtkToolPalette is a new container to show tool items in collapsible groups

  • GtkNotebook can have action widgets next to the tabs

• gnome-keyring
  • Implements new 'Secret Service' cross desktop password storage DBus API.
• empathy
  • libempathy and libempathy-gtk have been removed; developpers should use telepathy-glib instead.
  • Empathy doesn't dispatch tube channels any more; application should implement the Client.Handler interface to interact properly with telepathy-mission-control-5.

What's new for mobile developers

Regressions

• gnome-keyring
  • No longer able to store keyrings on removable media. This will be reimplemented for the next release.

Plans for the next release

• Yelp: See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2010-January/msg00085.html and http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2010-February/msg00047.html

• AT-SPI/D-Bus to be used instead of AT-SPI/Corba
• Complete removal of modules that have been deprecated in GNOME 2, such as libgnomeprint(ui), libglade, libgnome, libgnomeui, libbonobo(ui), gnome-vfs, esound, libart_lgpl, libgnomecanvas, libsexy.
• Porting gnome-panel from Bonobo to DBus, includes port of libpanel-applet to DBus