What's New in GNOME 2
The lengthy GNOME 2 development cycle allowed the introduction of a number of features that improve performance and usability. It also includes a powerful new framework that can be leveraged by developers.
- 2.1. Improved Fonts and Graphics
- 2.2. Usability
- 2.3. Performance
- 2.4. Keyboard Navigation
- 2.5. Accessibility
- 2.6. Internationalization
- 2.7. XML
2.1. Improved Fonts and Graphics
- Fonts can be antialiased (or not, or only antialiased at certain sizes, or whatever you like).
- No flicker in GTK apps
- Images are composited onto backgrounds with full alpha channel, accelerated via MMX and the RENDER extension.
- New enhanced icons.
2.2. Usability
Streamlining, consistency and coherence have been the primary foci for GNOME 2 Usability work. Above all we have tried to consider you, the user, as the focus of our design.
Streamlining: Rather than adding a great pile of new gadgets and preferences, GNOME 2 has been streamlined. Interface clutter had led to a GNOME where you could almost literally "do less with more". GNOME 2 removes many obscure or rarely used features (one or two of which may have been dear to you personally). In exchange you will find that most of the features you care about are much easier to access because they are not obscured by a million other items.
Consistency: Interfaces that behave according to consistent patterns are easier to learn, faster to use, and less prone to error. The GNOME Human Interface Guidelines have helped make the GNOME 2 interface more predictable, producing consistency between applications and promoting usable patterns within individual applications.
Coherence: The GNOME 2 desktop fits together well. From "Log In" to "Log Out", usability studies, countless brainstorming hours, and tireless hacking have produced a holistic desktop - more than a loose confederation of modules.
Specific user-visible improvements include:
- 2.2.1. Menus and Panel
- 2.2.2. Dialogs
- 2.2.3. Icons and Themes
- 2.2.4. Applications
2.2.1. Menus and Panel
- Windows can be dragged between workspaces with the Workspace Switcher applet
- Menus scroll when they get too big
- Smarter menus accommodate diagonal mouse movements
2.2.2. Dialogs
- File selector doesn't forget filenames when selecting a different directory
- Revamped color and font selectors
- New Run Program dialog with command completion
- Text fields include right-click menus for cutting, copying and pasting text
2.2.3. Icons and Themes
- New stock icons and color palette
- Support for theming of stock icons
- CD Player and login screens are now themeable
- A clean and attractive default appearance
2.2.4. Applications
- Redesigned and easier to use Search Tool
- Brand new lightweight help application, Yelp
- Control center applications for controlling GNOME 2 properties have been greatly simplified and reduced in number
- Increasing compliance with freedesktop.org standards
- Rewritten terminal application with tabs and profiles
- A brand new dynamic, centralized configuration system
- Many applications have been renamed to better suit their purpose
2.3. Performance
GNOME 2.0.2 exhibits notable performance improvements over its predecessors and some competitors, even on older, slower machines:
- 2.3.1. Bradley Shuttleworth
- 2.3.2. Mads Villadsen
2.3.1. Bradley Shuttleworth
Just installed it smoothly on a P2-233 with 96 Mb RAM. Nautilus fires up a new window in under 5 seconds (which, given that Nautilus took longer than that in 1.4 on my Gigahertz laptop, is a pleasant change).
(And to brag, its faster than Windows XP on my laptop, too... XP takes a shine longer to fire up Explorer, and various other tasks are slightly faster.)
2.4. Keyboard Navigation
Thanks to the GNOME Accessibility Project, GNOME 2 has improved keyboard navigation, including mnemonics that are easier for developers to implement, improved keyboard navigation of the new tree widget and key bindings that are more consistent where standards already exist.
2.5. Accessibility
Keyboard navigation is a key part of accessibility support that will be useful to all users, but there are many other aspects to it.
The core of accessibility support is a set of hooks in GTK that allow an external program to query applications about their GUI. For example, an external program can ask what buttons and menu items there are, their state, what their labels contain, and so on. This can be used by a screen reader to tell a blind user what's on the screen, for example.
This would allow a high-level scripting feature with commands such as "activate the
menu, choose , , " This kind of scripting would use high level user comprehensible GUI features and would not depend on special application support for scripting. It would just work automatically with any GTK app.2.6. Internationalization
Internationalization has two major changes:
- GNOME 2 has moved to Unicode throughout, so you can mix multiple languages and scripts in the same document, and use funky symbols such as bullets and dingbats in a document.
- GNOME 2 handles “hard” languages such as right-to-left languages and languages that have ligatures and reordering.
2.7. XML
GNOME 2 marks the first GNOME release to use libxml2, one of the most complete and standards-compliant free XML libraries available. It includes libxslt, a complete implementation of the XSLT specification.