introducing... Clearlooks
GNOME 2.12 will be released to the world on September 7th, 2005, culminating 6 months of very exciting work by members of the project. A number of exciting technologies come together in GNOME 2.12 that will set the standard for free software desktops to come. Here is a sample (by no means an exhaustive list) of some of the outstanding work that has gone into GNOME thanks to its many contributors.
GNOME 2.12 is going to be clearer and better looking then ever before. Clearlooks, the new theme engine that has proven incredibly popular with users, developers and distributors, is going to become the default theme for GNOME 2.12.
introducing... Clearlooks
All of the screenshots have been done in Clearlooks. A theme that we hope will be the default choice of every GNOME vendor, giving GNOME a unified face, no matter which vendor you choose.
GNOME 2.12 will utilise the latest and greatest in graphics toolkits through GTK+ 2.8. Still in its final stages of testing, GTK+ 2.8 will offer developers features not currently available in any other toolkit. Integration with the Cairo vector graphics library allows for smoother edges, RGBA translucency and better looking, more flexible theming.
From the developer's view, the new GTK+ remains 100% compatible with all releases in the GTK+ 2.x tree, so you can effortlessly begin using the new features of GTK+ 2.8 without first requiring a complicated port.
In the future, the GTK+/Cairo integration will allow for graphics accelerated through OpenGL by the Glitz library as well as easier printing without having to implement separate printing code. This will allow for better printing in more GNOME applications.
edges are now smoother thanks to Cairo antialiasing
Drag and drop handling has been improved and now previews blocks of text when you drag them.
preview text as you drag
New clipboard management, based on the Freedesktop.org specification and tightly integrated with GNOME, allows for objects to persist in the clipboard longer than the lifetime of an application. This means that if you cut or copy an object and then exit that application, the item you put on the clipboard will remain until you replace it. The new clipboard manager is technically superior to existing implementations and integrates tightly with specially designed GTK+ APIs, allowing for a faster and more flexible clipboard implementation.
More software is taking advantage of the Hardware Abstraction Layer from Project Utopia. HAL-aware applications can display more information to the user, as well as benefit from "it just works" plug and play style hardware support. GNOME-VFS in GNOME 2.12 has improved integration with HAL, and now gives more visual cues about the types and names of media devices.
displaying volume names and types courtesy of HAL
Nautilus is GNOME's file manager and wasn't neglected when the features and polish were added to GNOME 2.12. Along with over 200 bugs fixed, Nautilus now sports a spatial tree file view, popularised in the original Apple Macintosh operating systems.
Nautilus spatial tree view
The browser mode in Nautilus has also gotten some attention, and now has a side bar that shows your bookmarks, identically to in a file chooser or the Places menu on the panel.
browser mode
There is also an exciting list of new functionality extensions ready for use in Nautilus. Including a new "Send to..." feature for transferring documents, photos, music, etc. via Email, Instant Messaging or Bluetooth.
These extensions are not officially part of the GNOME Desktop, but some of them may end up as default functionality in the future.
email an entire folder, compressed as a single zip file
Some old features in Nautilus, such as the Open Terminal, that would be available on the desktop context menu, have now been moved into more powerful extensions, with more functionality for the power users that need them.
Based off the Gecko rendering engine used in Firefox and other popular web browsers, Epiphany is default web browser for the GNOME desktop environment. Epiphany both has new features and more extensions in GNOME 2.12, including the ability to share bookmarks over Bonjour, ne Rendezvous and extensions to provide support for popular web technologies like Greasemonkey.
With the release of Gecko 1.8, Epiphany will continue to strive towards GNOME's design goals, offering more useful error messages and clearer searching.
more helpful errors with Gecko 1.8
better searching of web pages
Epiphany extensions offer the ability to extend Epiphany in new ways. When combined with the popular RSS feed reader Liferea, Epiphany can handle RSS and other news feeds straight from the browser.
stay abreast of the important news
Evolution is the popular mail client for GNOME that was developed by Ximian/Novell. Evolution sports a cleaner interface in GNOME 2.12 and a number of extra productivity features.
the Marcus Bains line
The new Evolution also has a raft of new plugins available for users, including the support for inline PGP handling, a long-time requested feature, and the ability to do inline media playing. Additionally, Evolution's mail talking library libcamel has been moved into Evolution Data Server and made available to developers.
Work in Evolution is now focusing on performance. While already able to handle huge inboxes, the Evolution team wants to reduce memory usage while further increasing speed and capacity. The improvements are already noticeable. Work is also taking place on supporting CalDAV (calendaring over WebDAV) in Evolution, allowing for easy shared calendaring and integration with the Hula mail and calendar server.
A new configuration applet (or capplet) in 2.12 is the About Me dialog. This dialog does not send any personal information to the Internet. It simply stores a vCard in Evolution's data server that is accessible from applications on your desktop. You might like to beam it to a phone via Bluetooth, or simply attach the data to emails when asked for contact information.
System stored user information (GECOS) will also be updated if you have permission, allowing you to easily change your default details in legacy UNIX applications. In the future, more applications will be able to make use of this information through the Evolution Data Server.
give GNOME some information about yourself
Support for the custom mouse cursors extension has been merged into the GNOME control centre and no longer requires an additional application to set your preferred mouse theme. These cursors themes will instantly apply with GTK+ 2.8.
choose a cursor theme
The default GNOME System Tools, a suite of standardised, distribution agnostic tools for managing your desktop machine, now include a tool to configure your startup services as well as giving users the ability to start and stop services on demand.
configure your services
There have been lots of minor improvements in the GNOME panel and its applets.
In keeping with the theme of improved multimedia handling, the Disk Mounter applet now offers intelligent actions based on the type of media it has detected. This means that if a user has a DVD or CD in their computer, they can have the option to play it again, right from the panel.
choose to play the CD
The battery monitor has an experimental backend that utilises the Hardware Abstraction Layer. This backend will eventually become the default, and allow us to support more types of batteries across more platforms without requiring upgrades to GNOME.
The weather reporter now allows you to quickly search for your location, useful for when you don't know what state you're in.
find your location
The panel will also include an integrated menu editor compliant with the Freedesktop.org menu specification. This menu editor is not yet fully featured, however offers most of the basic functionality for systems administrators wanting to lock down menu items. Using the Freedesktop.org menu specification allows the user to choose any menu editor he/she wants, and there are several excellent third-party menu editors currently being developed also.
The panel also has improved support for less common layout options. Vertical panels are now handled better than before, with more panel objects now supporting vertical panels.
vertical menus
Totem is the multimedia player that is shipped with the GNOME Desktop. Based off the powerful GStreamer multimedia framework, Totem can play almost any media format available today. Additionally, the plugin nature of the GStreamer framework enables vendors to ship licensed, non-free plugins for media formats which are not supported by a free codec or implementation.
Totem and GStreamer embrace freedom and resultantly, have world class implementations of the Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora formats for audio and video respectively. Totem is the client of choice for connecting to the Flumotion streaming server, and it has been used to stream GUADEC and linux.conf.au.
A highly visible improvement in Totem 2.12 is the new playlist sidebar. For developers, this playlist handling is handled by a library plparser, available for your use in other applications.
Totem with its new sidebar
The GStreamer backend now has full support for DVD menus and other DVD features, making it fully featured, if not more featured then the alternate Xine backend to Totem.
Work has also begun on a Totem Mozilla plugin, allowing Totem's powerful multimedia handling inside Mozilla based web browsers, such as Firefox and Epiphany.
a movie trailer playing inside Firefox
While the most common and flexible format for purchasing music is still the compact disc, most people prefer their music in a more portable form. Sound Juicer imports CDs into your computer's music library. Again, built off the GStreamer framework, SJ can import your music using any format you have a plugin for. Ogg Vorbis, MP3, AAC, FLAC... anything. Configurable profiles also give you the ability to tweak your encoding for the best listening experience.
By popular demand, Sound Juicer 2.12 also has a feature to preview songs before you import them. Using the same digital audio extraction (DAE) techniques used in importing your music, SJ can play CDs on machines with no analog audio, such as some Dell and Apple laptops.
playing a CD
Nautilus is now more tightly integrated with the multimedia tasks you want to do. In addition to the thumbnailing of video and previewing of audio in past releases, Nautilus now offers drag and drop capabilities from audio CDs and the ability to play a track simply by double clicking.
audio CDs in nautilus
Finally, due to popular demand, audio CD copying has been added to Nautilus' CD burning functionality.
The GNOME Search Tool now shows file previews, making it even easier to find your files.
Evince is a new document reader to replace GGV and GPDF. Using the new libpoppler from freedesktop.org to render PDFs and utilising Cairo vector rendering throughout, Evince offers fulls text searching, text copying, thumbnailing, document bookmarks, a variety of scrolling modes and much more. As well as PDF and PS documents, Evince can (or will soon) handle DVI, and TIFF files, as well as OpenOffice.org Impress and Microsoft Powerpoint presentations.
viewing a PDF document
multiple views, full text searching, thumbnails and clipboard capabilities
Evince also extends Nautilus, allowing some more document types to be previewed.
preview PDFs in Nautilus
GNOME has used a keyring for an ever growing number of authentication tasks since its addition just over a year ago. The keyring manager offers an interface to inspect your keyrings, make changes to keys or remove sensitive keys. It is one of the first applications completely developed by the GNOME Love project, and we're proud to finally have it on board.
key management
All comments/complains/queries/flames to
Davyd Madeley.
Thanks to Luis Villa and Ryan Lortie for their help.
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