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.

/!\ 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.

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
    • 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)

    • Forms are saved now when saving a copy.
  • 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
    • Uses GtkPrint instead of the deprecated libgnomeprint(ui), GtkPrint can do more than the previous thingy

  • 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
  • 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

    • 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
  • 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.
  • 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

In Memory

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

TwoPointTwentyone/ReleaseNotes (last edited 2008-03-10 14:24:34 by WillieWalker)