Here is another collection of things I’ve seen appear in the tarballs that are coming in for the 3.5.3 development snapshot.

Accessibility is now ‘always on’. We’ve worked towards this goal ever since GNOME 3.0, and we’re finally at a point where we can have accessibility enabled by default without affecting stability or performance in a major way.

To celebrate this achievement, we’ve added a ‘Screen Reader’ item to the shell menu.

The first signs of ‘Enterprise Login’ (i.e. Active Directory) support can be seen in the user panel. This is first and foremost the achievement of Stef Walter, who has more information on his blog post.

Some of our smaller applications and utilities are getting some love and attention. As an example, here is the reimplemented baobab disk usage analyzer.

Mounting removable media is now handled with a shell-style dialog.

Finally, the list of supported online accounts keeps growing longer.

I’ve just completed the GNOME 3.5.2 development snapshot. It is still early in the cycle, and many of the planned changes are either still being developed in branches, or are still ‘under the hood’. However, while smoke-testing the release, I managed to capture a few glimpses of improvements that I wanted to share:

Application menus are now very well adopted.

The user menu has been streamlined. We don’t show ‘Online Accounts’ separately anymore, you can just use ‘System Settings’ to get there. ‘Power Off’ is back. The ‘Switch User’ and ‘Log out’ items are only shown when they make sense.

A rewritten font viewer application has appeared. It uses the same patterns that we have seen in other GNOME 3 applications: An overview with a top bar, optimized for maximized windows, a detailed screen for individual fonts, etc.

The accessible high-contrast theme has been greatly improved.

Finally, the beginning of Input Sources support has landed.

See the feature list some other things that will appear in GNOME 3.6, if things go as planned.

Update: Since I have been asked about this. The engineering position that is on the website with a location of Munich can also be filled in Boston (or Brno, for that matter).

This post is not going to talk about exiting (or boring) technical stuff – I’ll get back to that in my next post. Today, I want to point out some job openings in the desktop group at Red Hat.

While our daily business is to maintain and improve GNOME  and its underpinnings, we are also responsible for the user experience of servers and other non-desktoppy deployments.  We have a small team that is looking to bring our design principles and many desktop technologies into that space. We are currently looking for an engineer to join that team.

Please check back on our website – we are going to have more positions open in this team soon.

Other things we are concerned with in the desktop group are graphics (ie X and graphics drivers) and virtualization (mainly desktop virtualization, with technologies like Spice). If you are a graphics wizard who knows GPUs and video codecs inside out and know something about virtualization, then we have a job for you at the intersection of these topics.

If you are more into managing development teams than into writing code, you may be interested in this position.

Finally, we have an opening in our Brno office for a software engineer to help us  maintain and support our products. This is an entry-level position that does not require a super-long resume of GNOME contributions (we expect you to grow that list on the job). If you are a student near Brno, we also have a number of desktop-related intern projects in the Brno office that are opening very soon – but I don’t have a link for these just yet.

Now back to my regular technical content – I have a GNOME release to do that will be chock-full of cool new stuff.