Tag: GNOME

Solaris 11.4 released

Congrats to my colleagues in the Solaris team who released Solaris 11.4 today. Despite the 11.x moniker, this is actually a major Solaris release; Oracle has just decided to go down the perpetual macOS X / Windows 10 version numbering route from now on. (This development is unlikely to faze Solaris veterans, who have been using SunOS 5.x since 1992.)

Being the first major Solaris release in 7 years, it’s also the first to ship with a GNOME 3 desktop. So thanks, as always, to everyone in the GNOME and related FOSS communities who made that possible.

On a personal note, this version also ships the last significant Solaris project I worked on, which during development was known as the Analytics WebUI, but now goes by the marketing-approved moniker of the Observability Tools System Web Interface. It’s always nice when something you’ve worked on sees the light of day, and it’s even nicer when you know somebody else will have to deal with any complaints 😊

Media at your fingertips

Was just pondering in the shower at the weekend (as you do) about what makes, say, MacOS X feel like a more cohesive desktop than even the latest and greatest GNOME.

One thing that came to mind was its integrated management of your media– in pretty much any Mac app where you might want to insert or edit multimedia content, you can immediately access your entire music, photo or video library in a familiar-looking window and drag it over from there.  It’s built into the file selection dialog, too:

 Mail.app media browser  PulpMotion media browser  iMovie media browser  Open File dialog

Of course, Apple only really let you manage your media library with their own software: iTunes, iPhoto, Aperture, iMovie, Final Cut etc. But it did get me wondering if there was a place for a freedesktop ‘media library’ spec, that would offer our users the same sort of quick, searchable access to their media content (be it local, remote, stored on Flickr, split across three DVDs, or any combination of the above) in any application that required it. And, of course, to do what Apple doesn’t, and allow any app to manage that content, if it needs to do so.