What's New for Users
The GNOME Project's focus on users and usability continues in GNOME 2.32 with its hundreds of bug fixes and user-requested improvements. The sheer number of enhancements makes it impossible to list every change and improvement made, but these notes aim to highlight some of the more exciting, user-oriented features in this release.
GNOME 2.32 is the last planned major release in the GNOME 2.x series, with only maintenance releases for GNOME 2.x planned going forward. GNOME 2.32 features a limited set of new features in some applications as GNOME developers continue to focus on the upcoming GNOME 3.0 release scheduled for April, 2011.
- 2.1. Organise Your Contacts
- 2.2. Improved PDF Support
- 2.3. View More Files
- 2.4. But Wait, There's More…
2.1. Organise Your Contacts
GNOME's instant messaging and communication application, Empathy, built on the Telepathy communications framework, has gained a number of new and important features to help users communicate and manage their contacts.
Empathy allows you to group a contact's information together using metacontacts. If one of your contacts uses multiple instant messaging services, for example, you can now link the different services together under one name for your contact. Empathy also has added the ability to easily find your contacts by adding live contact search. You can type in the contact list to quickly find a contact.
Empathy has added options to disable logging as well as automatically pop up incoming chats. Other updates to Empathy include the ability to configure IRC accounts using the account assistant; allowing you to manually accept server certificates; using status icons from your current theme; improved connection error messages; and the ability to accept or decline incoming events using buttons in the notification bubbles. You can also view technical information about your current call in the details pane of the audio / video dialogue and also re-open a closed tab using undo in the conversation window.
2.2. Improved PDF Support
The Evince document viewer has improved accessibility support through the use of the AtkText interface, which allows Orca, the GNOME screen reader, to read documents in Evince. The maximum zoom level has also been increased when viewing a document.
Annotation support has been improved and you can now add annotations from the side panel, change the default properties including author, colour, transparency and more.
SyncTeX support has been added to Evince. SyncTeX is a method that enables synchronization between a TeX source file and the resulting PDF (or DVI) output. SyncTeX support is available in Evince and as a new plug-in for gedit. Backward Search, from Evince to gedit, and Forward Search, from gedit to Evince, are both supported.
2.3. View More Files
GNOME 2.32 includes updates to Nautilus, the GNOME File Manager. Nautilus has added a dialogue to help you handle conflicts when performing copy or move operations. When cutting files to paste them in another directory, Nautilus will now display the cut files with transparent icons.
Managing the files you delete that are moved to the Wastebasket has seen improvements. When viewing the Wastebasket folder, there is a new button in the information bar that allows you to restore selected files. The Wastebasket folder also shows the original location of the deleted file and the date it was deleted.
2.4. But Wait, There's More…
As well as big changes, there are also various small additions and tweaks that happen in every GNOME release.
- Eye of GNOME, the GNOME image viewer, allows you to select a manual background colour to enhance image contrast.
- Totem, the GNOME movie player, now automatically deinterlaces a movie or stream that was recorded interlaced, improving the image quality. Totem has improved playlist support and will appear faster and more responsive when loading playlists.
- GNOME System Tools now allows users to change the owner of the file if they are moving it into their home directory and it's already present.