I just ran across this nice video that was done by the World of GNOME team:
It does a great job of highlighting some of the new things in 3.8. Worth watching, if you don’t want to wait until GNOME 3.8 appears in stable distributions, such as Fedora 19 (in ~ 2 months).
There is a silent version of the video as well, if you have trouble viewing the one above.
I’ve spent the last two weekends with the GTK+ Wayland backend, trying to make some progress towards day-to-day usability. While there are still some big gaps, things are looking pretty ok now.
This screenshot shows client-side decorations on a GTK+ window. You can see rounded corners and invisible borders – shadows are still missing. We use the proper resize cursors, depending on which directions the window can be resized. This is a combined work of Kristian and Rob, based on older work by Cody Russell.
This screenshot demonstrates that GTK+ applications are picking up desktop settings now – in this example the cursor theme as well as the text size.
The support for settings in GTK+ is a bit complicated: We have a GtkSettings object which receives changes from the xsettings client in the X backend. These xsettings are provided by the xsettings manager that is part of gnome-settings-daemon, which in turns reads the settings out of GSettings.
In Wayland, there is not root window to store properties on, and no X selection mechanism to manage it. In principle, the compositor could provide a settings interface for clients to use. Since we don’t have that yet, the GDK backend reads the settings directly out of GSettings for now. That works fine and fits the Wayland philosophy of doing things client-side.
This screenshot tries to capture some improvements of the keyboard support. Key repeat is done client-side and similar to the settings, we pick up the configuration for it directly from GSettings. Keyboard state information is propagated, and causes the Caps Lock warning icon to be shown in the password entry.
The Wayland backend should also handle keyboard layout changes, but since weston does not support changing layouts at runtime, this has not been tested.
The tooltip on that icon shows that there’s some work left to be done on popup window placement.
Once we have client-side decorations, it becomes very natural to allow custom titlebars, like the one shown in this example. This has always been possible: you could use old-style wm hints to tell the window manager not to put a titlebar, and do your own. Using gtk_window_set_titlebar() just makes this easier, and it does the right thing, regardless whether you are using client-side decorations under Wayland or traditional wm decorations under X.
All of the screenshots are with current git master of GTK+. Trying out Wayland is pretty easy if you are on Fedora 19. The gtk3 package has the Wayland backend enabled. Just install weston, and set GDK_BACKEND=wayland.
To learn more about the status of the GTK+ Wayland backend and the work that remains to be done, visit the wiki page.
GNOME 3.8 is right around the corner – we are working on the release candidate today. In 3.8, shell extensions get a lot more recognition; via the new Classic mode that is built with extensions.
But there’s a whole universe of interesting extensions out there on extensions.gnome.org beyond the ‘official’ ones. Unfortunately, many of them are not currently marked as compatible with 3.8. Now is the perfect time to test your extension and make sure it is ready for the new stable release.
With GNOME 3.7.90, we’ve entered the feature freeze and focus on polish and on whittling down the blocker list (don’t expect all of these to be fixed, the list currently still contains a mixture of actual blockers and nice-to-have things).
But just before that, there was a mighty effort to get things landed. All that happened while I was travelling, so here is a somewhat late tour of new things that have appeared recently.
GNOME Documents has a new scrollbar with integrated preview, and lets you edit Google docs in place. What you can’t see in these screenshots: it has also been turned from a clutter-gtk app into a pure GTK+ app. Among other things, this solves performance and accessibility problems.
The control-center has kept up its pace of one new panel per release. Here we see the redesigned Region & Language panel.
The network panel can now create multiple wired configurations (called profiles), and it lets you create things like bridges, bonds or vlans.
In GNOME shell, we have a new context menus on the desktop background and on the message tray. These can be opened both with a right click or a long press.
The shell overview will now show your the most frequently used applications in a separate tab.
GNOME 3.8 will be released at the end of March. If you want to try it before, we have a live image.
I was at the developer conference in Brno over the last weekend, so I missed this when it first came out, but I’ve just watched the new video by my colleague Monty, and I must say it is really fantastic. Go watch it!
If you want to learn more about the topic and about the software that he used in the production, its all here.
We are a bit past the midpoint of the development cycle for GNOME 3.8. That seems like a nice time to take a look at what new things are coming – most new features are visible at least in rudimentary form at this point.
First of all, Settings !
The control-center and settings-daemon have seen a flurry of activity which has resulted in several new and refreshed panels. In other words, plenty of screenshot material — I’ll get to that soon.
First I want to mention a few things that are not easily shown in pictures, but are still going to have a significant positive effect:
On to screenshots.
Allowing you to focus on your task and minimizing interruptions has been an important aspect of the GNOME 3 design from the start. So far, we just had a global switch to turn off notifications. The new Notification panel expands on this and allows fine-grained control over what applications get to annoy you, and how much.
The new Privacy panel collects various settings to control who may get to see your personal data, etc. Some of these settings, e.g. the Screen Lock settings were previously available elsewhere, but have been moved here because they are related to privacy.
Similar to the Privacy panel, the Sharing panel collects settings that used to be available in other places, in this case the individual preference dialogs for gnome-bluetooth, gnome-user-share, vino, rygel, etc. It also lets you turn sshd on or off.
The new Search panel controls which applications get to show search results in the GNOME shell overview and the order in which they appear. there. Cosimo recently explained the various search improvements in GNOME 3.8 in great detail.
As mentioned above, the screen lock settings were subsumed by the Privacy panel. This left the Screen panel with very few settings, which all turned out to be related to power saving. Thus, they have been moved to the power panel, and the Screen panel has been dropped — which is a good thing, since three panels with monitors in their icon were a little too much.
There are more new things to discover in the control-center. I haven’t mentioned improvements to the user panel, or the color panel, or the rewritten network panel that will be merged soon. But enough about settings for now.
Next, some GNOME shell improvements:
The shell is being ported XInput2. Together with new pointer barrier features in the next X server release (1.14, expected in March) this will let us improve the somewhat annoying dwell-on-the-bottom-edge way to bring up the message tray. It also paves the way to improved side-by-side tiling and gesture support later on.
Keyboard shortcuts will work more consistently. E.g., it will be possible to take a screenshot while in the overview.
The shell overview is displaying search results in a new layout, using the order of search providers as configured in the search panel. I again point to Cosimo’s post for the fine points of this new design.
The algorithm for arranging the window thumbnails in the overview has been fine-tuned to create more pleasant layouts, and the currently hovered window is more clearly identifiable by a strong highlight.
Switching input sources is easier, thanks to a new OSD. This feature was already present in IBus; it has now been integrated in GNOME shell.
A new addition to GNOME 3.8 is the classic mode that is going to replace fallback mode as an alternative for users who want to keep using elements of GNOME 2, such as the minimize button, or the window list.
The reasons for replacing fallback mode have been explained here. In short, it needs to be replaced, because
Classic mode on the other hand, is using GNOME shell with a few extensions and few settings tweaks. New GNOME features, like the IBus integration, will ‘just work’ because classic mode is literally using the same code. We are reusing the infrastructure for defining ‘modes’ that was already present in the shell. It is used for the login screen in GNOME 3.6, for instance. The extensions and glue code that make up classic mode are being developed in the gnome-shell-extensions module.
The screenshots below give an impression of the current, preliminary, state of classic mode. We are still working on various aspects of it, and what ships with GNOME 3.8 may look different from what you see here.
To clearly differentiate classic mode from GNOME 3, we are using ‘GNOME 2 gray’. There is a window list at bottom, and the clock has been moved to where it was in GNOME 2.
An application menu.
The message tray coexists with the window list.
Finally, there will be a few new applications in GNOME 3.8. These apps are following the design patterns that have been developed over the last few releases in Documents, Boxes, etc.
A note-taking application.
A photo application.
A weather application.
Before Christmas, I wrote about the status of IBus integration and Input Sources in GNOME 3.7. Here is another update to show what has happened since then.
We have added back the option to have a different input source for each window. The GNOME shell overview with its search entry is considered a window in this context.
Many people rely on modifier-only keyboard shortcuts such as Alt+Alt or Shift+Caps to switch between input sources. GNOME 3.6 supports this, but we had to ‘park’ the UI for selecting this shortcut in gnome-tweak-tool, since it came too late to be included in the keyboard panel. This has now been rectified. In GNOME 3.7.4, the modifier-only shortcut can be configured in the Typing section of the keyboard panel.
