Tomorrows GNOME

GNOME for Artists

I can only manage to draw squiggly lines in GIMP. I am not really much of an artist at all, even with proper tools like a well-calibrated tablet.

Bastien Nocera and Peter Hutterer together with Jason Gerecke and Olivier Fourdan have worked really hard this cycle to bring first-class support for Wacom tablets to GNOME.

These tablets are amazingly complex devices, with programmable buttons, multiple styli, ‘touch rings’ and other fancy controls. In GNOME 3.4, all of their functionality will be accessible from the Wacom panel in gnome-control-center.

Together with our color management support, this should make artists feel more at home.

GNOME for Everybody

Accessibility has always been an important characteristic of GNOME. With 3.4, GNOME 3 will catch up in this area. Orca now reads all of the gnome-shell interface to me. And, what is more important, I can leave it running for a long time without problems – the stability of the accessibility stack has really improved.

We’ve also added a dialog that gives very detailed access to the options of the built-in gnome-shell magnifier. These options are just fun to play with for me, but for people who really dependent on a magnifier, they can be essential for being able to use the computer at all.

9 thoughts on “Tomorrows GNOME”

  1. This is all awesome, and really, I can’t wait to upgrade to Fedora 17 and use the latest GNOME 3.4.

    So first: kudos for the work you and the rest of the GNOME devs do, and thank you for letting me enjoy all of this for free.

    There is one area that I really wish had been covered by your “GNOME for Everybody” though, which is the handling of input methods.

    I live in Hong Kong now, and as long as those two bugs are not fixed, GNOME is close to useless to people here:
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641531
    https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=662489

    I’m subscribed to both bugs, so I know you’re involved in both of them, and really, I’m not trying to criticize anybody’s work (I mean, I could get my money back if I’m not happy 😉 ), but at the moment, it pains me when I see my girlfriend struggling to type Chinese on my laptop. (and that’s after I, who discovered these things even existed when she asked me how she could type in her mother tongue, took the time to figure out how to configure (what I think are) the appropriate input methods for her, hiding the awkward initial setup from her)

    I really hope this will get implemented as designed for GNOME 3.6, as this is currently the major hurdle to growing the GNOME user base here in my opinion (then again, I don’t type Chinese at all, so I might be wrong).

    Hopefully the coming GNOME.Asia summit in Hong Kong will be the occasion to do some user testing and finish this. 🙂

    Anyway, thanks again for all your work. I’m going to get back in my cave and build some more RPMs now.

    [WORDPRESS HASHCASH] The poster sent us ‘0 which is not a hashcash value.

    1. You can write in chinese/japanes without those bugs implemented (at least in F15 and F16). But it would be nicer if the multilingual input was better…

  2. Some of my buddies at school are designers, and some have eye problems- these features have already impressed them in 3.2. I’m sure 3.4 will just rub it in.

    Macs were great for designers, but I’ve personally always found OS X’s interaction patterns cumbersome. I have to use it at work occasionally, but luckily most of my work is in GNOME these days, and I can’t really imagine using another DE now that my wacom tablet integrates so well.

    Truly amazing work- everyone involved should be very proud. All my freelance work is done with free software these days, and you guys make it a pleasure.

  3. This week I bought a ThikPad X220 Tablet, so I look forward when I use Gnome on it.

    !thanks for the great job!

  4. I can only say that is amazing all the hard work you put on every GNOME release. Improvments after improvments. I’ve been a big fan of GNOME since 3 years ago, at first I was fond with KDE but when I entered the GNOME world I fell inlove. Thanks for all your hard work an support for the Open Source / Free Software Comnunity!

  5. Is GNOME, is Awesome!

    Excellent work by all who’ve contributed to make an incredibly powerful and flexible desktop environment with all the geeks, tweaks, bells whistles and sparkles one could hope for! Is GNOME, is AWESOME!

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