2.23 release notes items

Major changes in GNOME 2.23, 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.

/!\ 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, administrators, or developers.)
  • Are something people have been hoping for or discussing widely.
  • Feature, usability, performance, internationalization or accessibility improvements.

{i} 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

  • All:
    • Fixed un-click-able buttons, for instance in assistants: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56070

    • Much larger set of key compose sequences, synced with recent X.Org compose sequences
    • Printer status information in print dialogs
      • do you have a link to an explanation of this? - The Fedora feature page for this has a screenshot and some more explanation

    • Auto-completion in the file chooser has been reworked
      • Tab completion now works even if the cursor is not at the end of the entry. For example, if the entry has "filename.txt", you can hit Home, then "/tm[Tab]" and the entry will complete to "/tmp/filename.txt" (bug #314873).
      • Tab completion now has feedback: if you hit Tab multiple times, you will get a tooltip saying "sole completion" or "no match", like in Emacs.
      • Completion is more predictable and faster in general.
    • Status icons support keyboard navigation
      • more explanation please - When you transfer the keyboard focus to the panel with C-A-Tab, you can move the focus around between the menus and the applets using Tab. Previously, the focus would go to the notification area, but not to individual status icons. In this release, you can move the focus to the individual status icons inside the notification area, and access their functionality (e.g. menus, or click-actions) via keynav.

    • Font configuration changes are picked up at runtime without restart
  • Nautilus:
    • New column-wise view.
    • Tabbed interface, like Firefox.
      • I can't find this... and it doesn't appear to be Ctrl-T, what's the deal here?

        • It's only in the browse-mode, not the spatial mode (thankfully). Are you trying it there? murrayc.
    • Can copy to FAT32 (e.g. PMPs, USB sticks) without failing on special characters (like ".) See this bug report.

    • “Restore from Trash” through context menu.
      • Restores to original location (freedesktop.org trash specification).
    • Allow to add files to archives via drag and drop.
      • Uses File-Roller.
      • Supports local and remote archives.
    • Eject buttons for removable media and remote shares in the Places sidebar.
    • Seamless drag and drop interaction with path bar and Places sidebar.
      • for example?

    • Context menu support for path bar.
    • Allow applications to register as handlers for removable media (using x-content/* MIME types).
    • Update path bar dynamically when locations in path bar hierarchy are moved.
    • Vastly improve icon view keyboard navigation.
      • Use linear selection instead of rectangular selection for keyboard navigation.
      • Wrap around when hitting window edge (only if accessibility is disabled).
    • Clean up "Basic" tab of properties window.
      • Integrate launcher properties into "Basic" tab.
    • Truncate overlong item names in icon view and on desktop
      • Show entire text when hovering or selecting items.
      • Fine-graned preferences through GConf:
        • /apps/nautilus/icon_view/text_elipsis_limit
        • /apps/nautilus/desktop/text_elipsis_limit
  • Epiphany:
    • The location bar now has a new back-end based on gRegex. Because of this, a few old bugs were fixed:
      • Full Unicode support in bookmarks completion.
      • Give suggestions based on substrings.
      • Non ASCII chars on topic names.
      • Match against history/bookmark titles, URLs and keywords.
  • Control Center:
    • New screen resolution capplet with support for XRandR 1.2/multihead, bringing nice visual additions (such as labeling screens while configuring them.) Federico has a screenshot

    • Reworked sound theme support based on libcanberra.
      • what are the implications of this? - users can now switch between named sound themes as a whole (much like e.g. icon themes), in addition to tweaking individual sounds. Bastien has a screenshot

  • gnome-media Package:
    • New volume control dialog, with a much better look more friendly to modern things like PulseAudio.

  • Panel:
    • Improved location/timezone selection in the Clock applet sporting a live search entry when adding a new location.
  • Evolution:
    • New canned replies (templates) plugin.
  • Metacity
    • Horizontal and vertical maximisation can be carried out with the mouse
      • more explanation please

  • Disk Usage Analyzer (baobab)
    • Show both types of graphs in the main window
    • Port to GIO, thus closing the "move to trash does not use the trash fd.o specification" bug
  • Screenshot utility
    • Allow including the mouse cursor in the screenshot
    • Remember the user settings
    • Direct copy-to-clipboard of the screenshot image
  • Search Tools
    • Allow using extended regular expressions when searching
  • Totem
    • Enhanced DVB support (better error messages, support for multiple DVB adapters, support for external channel tuning helper)
      • a screenshot would be awesome (using standard GNOME theme/fonts/etc)

    • Enhanced YouTube plugin, with high-resolution support, ability to open the web page containing a movie, and numerous bug fixes

    • Better out-of-the-box LIRC support (doesn't require any configuration file tweaking with a majority of infra-red remotes)
    • Add support for remote (non-local) text subtitles
      • screenshot here too?

    • Make the thumbnailer use cover art when available
      • how do I make this work?

  • gnome-backgrounds
    • New awesome backgrounds (mention the election, that iirc was a contest of somekind)!
  • Cheese
  • Mousetweaks (accessibility features for pointer users)
    • now mousetweaks works also on a multiscreen setup
    • addition of timing feedback on the cursor for the simulated secondary click and for the dwell click
    • draws a line when making the gesture to specify the click type
    • addition of a button to the Dwell Click applet that can be used to start the dwell feature by dwelling on that button
    • it is now possible to set the dwell delay as low as 0.2 second
    • addition of more command line options
  • Deskbar-Applet
    • History is not in the main search window anymore but in a separate window as it was in 2.18 and earlier.
    • You can delete the selected item from history if you press the delete key.
    • New modules:
      • Calculator
      • Google search
      • Google code search
      • Yahoo! suggestions
      • Wikipedia suggest
      • Twitter and identi.ca
    • Yahoo! search can search for specified formats only (type in "format:<format> my query" where format is one of html, msword, pdf, ppt, rss, txt or xls.

    • Wikipedia suggest, Google search and Yahoo! search modules support various languages. The correct language should be detected automatically, but can be configured in preferences, too.
    • Capuchin support: easy download of additional plugins from internet.
    • Screenshots are available at http://k-d-w.org/node/56

  • Empathy
    • The new IM client for GNOME desktop.
  • Time Tracker Applet (project hamster)- new module (screenshots here, but probably should be redone with theme/content)

    • Easy time tracking
    • Stop tracking on idle or shutdown
    • Export HTML
    • Fancy graphs
    • Global hotkey support
  • Remote Desktop Viewer (Vinagre)
    • New panel applet, allowing quick access to your bookmarks and nearby hosts
    • Better fullscreen mode, with a toolbars that appears when you move the mouse to the top of the window
    • Connect dialog now remembers previous entries
    • Added "Send CTRL-ALT-DEL" feature
    • Scaling support, based on openGL (gtk-vnc must be compiled with scaling support, details on README file)
    • Minor new features, like:
      • Side panel now shows avahi-discovered machines
      • New command-line option, for debug purposes: --gtk-vnc-debug
      • Don't show tabs when only one connection is open
      • Support for host::port command line syntax
      • Initial support for VEncrypt sessions
  • Remote Desktop Server (Vino)
    • New command-line tool, vino-passwd, which allows you to change Vino password. Similar to Unix passwd command
    • Added the ability to hide the background on connections
  • Evince Document Viewer
    • The document is automatically updated when it has changed.
  • GNOME session
  • Ekiga
    • Reaching version 3.00, with many improvements
    • Completely new user interface (see manual for screenshots)
    • Supports SIP presence indications
    • Supports PBX lines monitoring
    • Supports better video codecs : H.264, H.263, MPEG-4, Theora
    • Supports accelerated display, including in fullscreen mode : XVideo
    • Based on the new Ekiga engine (for developers)
    • Contains a huge list of SIP improvements (support for several network interfaces, ...)
  • Orca
    • Many bug fixes and performance improvements across the board (over 600 bugs!!!)

    • Improvements to navigating and presenting information from gnome-panel -- works much better now!
    • Inclusion of new tutorial message option. When enabled via the preferences dialog, tutorial messages will be spoken when you navigate to objects.
    • Spoken progress bar updates now enabled by default -- enable/disable this via the preferences dialog
    • New "echo by sentence" feature -- enable/disable this via the preferences dialog
    • Magnifier now allows you to turn off the system sprite -- enable/disable this via the preferences dialog
    • End of line symbols in braille are configurable per application -- see bug #534022

    • New feature to allow bypass of Orca's keyboard commands (the default keybinding is Orca+Backspace)
    • New --list-apps option to print the list of known applications -- good for checking if the AT-SPI infrastructure is working

    • Default synthesis engine choice now takes language of user into account
    • Added ability to configure autostart on login directly from Orca user preferences dialog
    • New feature to provide awareness of unfocused dialogs when an application gains focus
    • Much work on Java support -- it's vastly improved
    • GNOME Help (yelp) is working much better now thanks to the combined efforts of several teams
    • Orca now reads the next/previous paragraph in StarOffice/OpenOffice when you navigate to them via Ctrl+Up and Ctrl+Down

    • Much work on Thunderbird usability
    • Much work on Firefox stability and usability, including work on ARIA gmail interface and support for ARIA "required" state
    • Support for verbalized links
    • Support for chatroom-specific message histories in Pidgin
    • Known Problems:
      • See the open bugs in the Orca bug database. We not only track Orca bugs in the Orca bug database, we also track bugs in other components that affect Orca's ability to provide good access to them.

      • Compiz has gotten better, but it is still not fully accessibility friendly at this point in time. We recommend you stick with Metacity until the Compiz kinks are worked out. If you're using Compiz and want to switch to Metacity, you can run the following command: metacity --replace.

What's new for administrators

  • Nautilus
    • Media handling is extensible by installing custom content types in the mime system.
      • what is this? - being able to add new types of media to this dialog, as well as new handlers for exisiting media types. One example would be to define a a media type for some kind of VM image, and have nautilus automatically offer to run the image in the appropriate VM when it gets inserted.

  • Totem:
    • Backends (xine-lib/GStreamer) are now built as shared libraries, making it easier to switch between backends without recompilation
    • Web browser plugin does not require rebuilding/updating for new versions of Firefox (remove dependency on ABI unstable Mozilla libraries)

What's new for developers

  • GLib:
    • Enforce that only top-level headers (glib.h, gobject.h, gio.h) are directly included (can be turned off by G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.)
    • Better support for context in translations with C_(), NC_() macros.
  • GTK+:
    • Support for mounting volumes with GtkMountOperation (will show a password dialog if necessary.)

    • Support for launching applications with GdkAppLaunchContext (handles startup notification, focus stealing prevention, etc.)

    • gtk_show_uri() as replacement for gnome_vfs_url_show() and gnome_url_show().
    • Enforce that only toplevel headers (gtk.h, gdk-pixbuf.h) are directly included (can be turned off with GTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES.)
    • GtkBuilder can build parts of an XML tree.

    • GtkFilechooser has a !GFile-oriented api.

  • Totem:
    • Added a Python Console for plugin development
  • Deskbar-Applet
    • Added (set|get)_snippet methods to Match interface. If a snippet is set it will displayed in a new line under the matche's get_verb value
    • Added get_tooltip method to Action interface. Override this method to display a tooltip when the user hovers over the match (the default action's tooltip is displayed) or over an action in the list of additional actions.
  • Anjuta
    • New build system with support for out-of-tree builds and different build configurations (debug, optimized, profiling)
    • Git version control plugin
  • Empathy
    • libempathy, libempathy-gtk and telepathy-glib can be used to integrate IM features into any GNOME applications.
  • GNOME session dbus API ... have filed a bug to have the docs on library.gnome.org

What's new for mobile developers

GNOME 2.24 is the first release of the GNOME Mobile release set! GNOME Mobile brings standard desktop components together to provide a core platform on which distributors and handheld manufacturers can build rich programming environments.

The initial GNOME Mobile release set consists of:

  • System infrastructure:
    • BlueZ is a complete, modular, standards compliant Bluetooth stack for Linux, which includes graphical utilities for GNOME.

    • Evolution Data Server (D-Bus port) manages access to the calendar, tasks and address book information available for personal information management applications, via the convenient D-Bus messaging system.

    • Telepathy uses the D-Bus messaging system to provide a unified framework for instant messaging, voice over IP and other types of real-time communications.

    • Avahi facilitates Zeroconf service discovery on a local network.

    • GStreamer is a rich multimedia library, covering use-cases including simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

    • SQLite is a high-performance, very simple transactional SQL database which you can easily embed into your applications.

    • Matchbox is a window manager for non-desktop X11 environments such as handhelds, set-top boxes, kiosks and anything else for which screen space, input mechanisms or system resources are limited.

    • GConf is the GNOME Configuration system, for storage and retrieval of user preferences.

    • gio and gvfs provide a virtual filesystem API supporting a wide array of back-ends including local disks, FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, NFS and SMB shares.

  • User interface
    • GTK+
    • Pango
    • ATK
    • Cairo
  • Core infrastructure
    • glib
    • DBus
  • Language bindings
    • C
    • C++
    • Python

As soon as they start to become available, we will be collecting downloadable, testable virtual machine images of distributions based on GNOME Mobile 2.24, such as Poky, Moblin and Ubuntu Mobile, which developers can try for themselves and develop against.

The GNOME Mobile platform is at the heart of a wide range of Linux-based mobile platforms, including Maemo, the ACCESS Linux Platform, the LiMo reference platform, Ubuntu Mobile, Moblin, and Poky.

Regressions

  • <Module name>: <The changes>.

Plans for the next release

  • <Module name>: <The changes>.

We'll base the 2.24 notes on the 2.22 DocBook XML, with these improvements:

  • 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?")

TwoPointTwentythree/ReleaseNotes (last edited 2010-03-28 13:10:23 by TobiasMueller)