2.22 release notes items
Major changes in GNOME 2.22, 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.
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Attention: Press/reviewers: This is a work in progress. Items aren't checked for correctness. Statements may be completely wrong. Very large changes could be forgotten. Please wait until the final release notes are done. This page will not contain everything that will be in the final release notes. Contents
How-to
Major changes are those that:
- affect lots of people (users, admins, or developers).
- are related to something people already talk about.
Feature improvements
- Anjuta
- New module (devtools)
- Good IDE that integrates well with GNOME
- Improved debugger
- Improved syntax highlighting, auto-completion and auto-indentation for C/C++/Java
- Better glade integration
- "Quick Search" bar
- Extended Subversion plugin
- Cheese
- New module
- Photobooth (Mac OS X) like application
- Take pictures and make video through a webcam
- Use a range of effects on your pictures
- Directly set photos as Account picture
- Easily share pictures with you friends (send by mail)
- Export to F-Spot
- Deskbar Applet
- New Actions: Start a commando from a terminal
- Directly open Evolution contacts
- New templates module
- New Tomboy Modules, search in Tomboy notes, add and remove tasks
- Old Button UI from GNOME 2.18 makes a return
- Evince
- Support for page transition effects on presentations
- How can such PDF files be created?
- Automatic scrolling mode
- How to enable this?
CarlosGarciaCampos: it's available in the context menu
- How to enable this?
- Kinetic scrolling
- Note: This is the iPhone like thingy where it still scrolls for a while
DVI PostScript specials support
I know DVI and PostScript, what is specials
CarlosGarciaCampos: it means that dvi documents that contain images in eps format are now correctly rendered instead of just rendering the bounding box of the eps file.
- Message area for notification about errors instead of popups
--> Better usability. Maybe combine with Evolution
Printing improvements in PostScript backend (reverse, collate, page ranges in any order)
Due to GtkPrint or something else?
CarlosGarciaCampos: No, due to the use of libspectre, which provides such features, instead of ghostscript-x
- Forms are saved now when saving a copy.
- Support for page transition effects on presentations
- Evolution
- Non-intrusive errors: Errors are presented in the status bar instead of using popups
- Support for Google Calendars
- Custom labels for mails (aka Message Tagging)
New plugin to use an external editor to compose a mail (Heads up: This plugin will remain in the experimental set and thus not be built by default.)
Prettier
Uses Tango-styled default icons in lots more places - Improved spam filtering speed (White list support and Spam header based detection)
- Gedit
- Epiphany
- Image previews in the filechooser (hint: the one popping when hitting 'Browse...')
- Notifications via libnotify for downloads added/finished.
- Completion popup (suggested matchs in the location bar) now looks better and avoids duplicates
- File-roller
- Lzma archive support
- 'find the files of the archive with the specified filename' (from NEWS, don't understand it)
- GNOME Control Center
Merge keyboard settings, now only using 2 instead of 3 capplets
- GNOME Games
Network multiplayer support to glChess.
- Improved network support with GGZ 0.0.14.
- GNOME Panel
- Shiny new clock applet
- Multiple timezone support
- Displays all timezones on a map and in a list
- Possibility to show weather in all timezones
Optional PolicyKit integration
- Softly slides into view on startup
- New subtle animation when starting a launcher
- Shiny new clock applet
- GNOME System Monitor
- Shiny new graphics for displaying the system load
- GNOME System Tools
Optional PolicyKit support
- Now shares-admin is able to modify the SMB password database
- Update user interface if any configuration file changes
- Support PPPoE and GPRS connections
- Metacity
- Integration of its own compositor, enabling basic desktop effects
- Nautilus
- Now based on gvfs / gio (stil have to check what the advantages for the users are)
- Alex: Long term it should be faster and more stable, but as this is the first release
- that might not be true yet. One important user-visible advantage is that fuse is supported which lets applications not supporting gio/gvfs load and save files on remote shares. Another user-visible change is that remote mounts are session wide, so once you've mounted a share in one application you don't have to authenticate again when accessing it from another application. Note that this is a large amount of new and changed code, so there is a risk for bugs and regressions, for instance there is no ftp backend yet.
Also: http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/presentations/guadec2007-gvfs.pdf
- Alex: Long term it should be faster and more stable, but as this is the first release
- Automount is now handled by Nautilus itself (replacing large chunks of GNOME Volume Manager)
- New copy dialogue. Displays multiple copy operations in one window
- Nautilus displays an icon in the notification area while copying
- Now based on gvfs / gio (stil have to check what the advantages for the users are)
- Nautilus CD Burner
- Inihibit power management while burning
- Add support for creating DVD Video
- Sound Juicer
- Allow user-entry of year and disc number
- Added Duplicate Disc feature
- Many many bugs fixed and usability improved
- swfdec-gnome
- new module
- thumbnailer and player for Flash files
- Tomboy
- Notebooks: Organize notes in notebooks
- Templates: Define preset content when creating new notes
- New Addin: Insert Timestamp
- Totem
- Enhanced browser integration (what does that mean for the users?)
- MythTV-Plugin
YouTube-Plugin
- Tracker-based video search (also a new plugin)
- Playlist sharing through libepc
- Add the ability to select subtitles for files in th UI
- Remove support for Audio CDs (better solutions out there)
- DVD-Playback with gstreamer-backend working again, menu support still missing though
- DVB-support
- Vinagre
- New Module
- VNC-Client - well integrated with the GNOME desktop
- complements Vino (server)
- Bookmark your most used connections
- List recently used connections
- Find VNC servers on your local network through avahi
- Passwords are stored in the GNOME Keyring
- Multiple connections at the same time with Tabs
JonhWendell: I can provide screenshots
- Vino
- capplet has a new section, "Advanced", where the user can control more bits of the VNC server.
Now it supports clipboard operations (copy & paste)
JonhWendell: I can provide screenshots
Usability improvements
Your changes here.
Performance improvements
- GNOME System Monitor
- Speedup of the graph display
- Nautilus
Still have to check if this is true
- Evince
PostScript backend is quite faster
- Reduce memory consumption by rendering images on demand
Improved Evolution/EDS Calendar Memory consumption (http://chenthill.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/libical-memory-management/)
- Eye of GNOME
- Faster image loading and several other performance/memory improvements.
Internationalization and accessibility improvements
- Mousetweaks
- a set of special accessibility enhancements to controlling the mouse cursor. It provides:
- a pointer capture are
- a way to open the contextual menu with a left click and hold
- a way to perform the various clicks (single -, double -, drag -,right click) by software without any hardware button, usually called dwelling.
- a set of special accessibility enhancements to controlling the mouse cursor. It provides:
The Orca team has been busy with lots of stuff.
Back-end improvements and code cleanups
- Across modules
- 98% of GNOME modules do command line parsing now using glib instead of deprecated popt.
- GNOME Keyring Manager
- removed as all of its functionality is now provided by Seahorse
- GNOME Settings daemon
- Splitted out from the GNOME Control Center, also used by the new GDM
- libgweather
- splitted out from GNOME Applets, now more easily reusable by other applications, first one to utilize this is the new Panel clock
- GNOME games
- Uses system installed GGZ library instead of self-contained one. This makes things easier for distributions.
- Evince
- Backends are now loadable modules
gnome-vfs -> deprecated. Note: it means we're still shipping gnome-vfs in our platform. It's just a way to tell people: "you shouldn't use this in new applications".
Regressions
- Currently the new gio-based nautilus has a few regression compared with the last release. If those are not fixed until the final release we should also mention them in the release notes
- FTP-support is missing
- No network-view
- Missing Connect-to dialog
AndreKlapper: we should explain that gio fixes a lot of gnome-vfs regressions that we have/had, too.
Future: Plans for the next release
Possible inclusion of empathy, providing some things are fixed (licensing, gnome keyring usage). See http://mail.gnome.org/archives/devel-announce-list/2008-January/msg00001.html.
Usage of GDI+ in GTK+ on win32, making it easier to build gtk+ there
- Porting most of the GNOME modules to use GIO instead of gnome-vfs
In Memory
Raphael Higino Silva: http://www.ogmaciel.com/?p=407 (cf. http://www.gnome.org/start/2.6/notes/rnmemorial.html )
@ogmaciel
Release Notes improvements
We'll base the 2.22 notes on the 2.20 DocBook XML, with these improvements:
- Introduction: Mention the date of the release.
Switch to new layout
Status: Needs some CSS work, @shaunm?,@fredp?automatically have Apache show the release notes in the users language (like it does on library.go)
@shaunm?,@fredp?- Place a dummy string for translations teams (i.e. each translation team has his ups and downs every release, so they can talk directly with their users, like: "we have improved a lot the documentation, check it out!" or "we are sorry to not make 100%, will you mind to help us?")
Comments regarding what KDE 4 did: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/marketing-list/2008-January/msg00007.html