GNOME 2.24 Release Notes

GNOME 2.24 announces the inclusion of an instant messaging client based off the Telepathy communications framework.

Figure 2 Empathy Instant Messenger

Empathy also supports XMPP/SIP audio and video conferencing as available on the Nokia N800/N810 devices (video requires H.263 codecs for GStreamer to be installed). Empathy is a great companion to Ekiga, GNOME's audio/video SIP client (see Section 2.3 ― Ekiga 3.0).

Telepathy provides a common framework for applications to access instant messaging functionality. It can utilise many common protocols including Jabber/XMPP, Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Apple's Bonjour/Rendezvous local network chat.

Any application is able to utilise the instant messaging session. As well as the Empathy client, GNOME 2.24 provides libraries enabling developers to add presence and status information, transfer files or set up sockets (known as Tubes) for collaboration and games over the Internet. See Section 4.4 ― Instant Messaging Libraries for more information on how this technology can be utilised in your application.

For many people in business, it is crucial that they track how much time they assign to each project and client. Everybody has their own system for this, from keeping a diary to making a guess. It's incredibly tedious. In today's world almost everything you do somehow involves a computer, so GNOME has added a panel application to make tracking your time easier.

Figure 3 Set Your Task Quickly

The panel shows you what task you've been working on and for how long. Clicking on the button allows you to change activity and see what activities you've been working on today. If you like, the timer can stop when your computer goes idle.

Activities can be categorised by any grouping you choose: be it the type of activity, client's name or how much you dislike it. You can also view and edit your activity log, insert missing activities and see daily, weekly and monthly graphs to see where you're spending most of your time.

Ekiga is a fully-featured SIP audio/video conferencing client for GNOME. As part of GNOME 2.24 we're proud to announce the release of Ekiga 3.0.

Figure 4 Ekiga 3.0

As well as a new interface that is centred around your phone book and the presence of your contacts, Ekiga 3.0 features SIP presence support, PBX line monitoring, better video codecs support (H.264, H.263+, MPEG-4 and Theora), accelerated video and optional fullscreen and many SIP-related improvements for robust conferencing.

As well as icon and list views, GNOME 2.24 now offers the compact list view, popular in several other desktop environments. Choose the view by selecting View ▸ Compact from the menu (or keyboard shortcut Control+3).

Figure 5 The three file views: icon, list and compact

As with icon and list view, the size of the icons in the compact view can be changed using the zoom options in the View menu.

The browser mode of the file manager now supports tabs for rapidly switching between directories within a single browser window.

Figure 6 Tabbed Browser Support

Today's modern filesystems are able to handle almost any desired character as part of the filename. Unfortunately this is not the case for the FAT filesystem that is commonly used on many USB thumb drives and portable music players, which is unable to use many common punctuation marks as part of the filename. GNOME 2.24 detects when you are copying files with names that contains characters that cannot be used and automatically converts these characters to a "_" without you having to rename the file yourself.

Automatic filename completion ("tab" completion) has also been improved in GNOME 2.24. Completion of filenames in the location bar using the Tab key is now faster and more predictable. It is also possible to complete any fragment of the path and the interface provides more feedback for when there are no other possible matches available.

The Deskbar in GNOME 2.24 adds several exciting new plugins: a calculator, Google Search (and code search), Yahoo! and Wikipedia suggestions plus updating of Twitter and identi.ca.

Figure 7 Deskbar

Also new is the ability to easily download and install new plugins directly from the Deskbar repository on the World Wide Web.

More and more computers (especially laptops) are gaining support for multiple monitors (known as multihead). Users need to be able to connect a second monitor, either as a clone (e.g. a projector for giving presentations) or as an extension of their desktop.

GNOME 2.24 has upgraded its screen resolution controls to make this possible. Utilising the new XRandR 1.2 specification from X.Org, this dialogue enables users to easily set up individual monitors in a number of configurations. Monitors are named and the names appear in the top left corner of the screen for easy identification.

Figure 8 New Screen Resolution Controls

Changes are applied immediately. No restart of GNOME is required.

Sound themes in GNOME are now handled by libcanberra, which implements the Freedesktop.org Sound Theme and Naming Specification. Sound themes can now be installed like icon themes. Using libcanberra also means that an application's alert sounds are less likely to interfere with your music player or movie player, so you can leave those important alert sounds switched on while watching a fullscreen movie.

Figure 9 Sound Theme Support

Powered by the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME 2.22 introduced digital television (DVB) capabilities into its Movie Player. Determined to make things even better, developers have worked to enhance this support by adding support for multiple DVB tuners (watch multiple channels at once) and better troubleshooting diagnostics.

They have also worked to improve out-of-the-box (zero configuration) support for the majority of infrared remote controls (using the LIRC framework). This makes it even easier to chill out instead of writing that important report.

Also featuring in GNOME 2.24, support for high-resolution YouTube videos and support for remote (non-local) text subtitling.

GNOME wants to make your computer look good, which is why we work hard on our themes and artwork. For GNOME 2.24 we ran a competition to collect some of the most intruiging desktop backgrounds our contributors have produced and we've shared our favourites with everyone.

Figure 10 Attractive Backgrounds

Since GNOME 2.0, it has been possible to focus the GNOME Panel using the key combination Control+Alt+Tab. A user could then use the Tab key to move between items on the panel, except for the notification icons.

Since GNOME 2.24 it is now possible to navigate to a notification icon using only the keyboard.

Keyboard navigation has also been improved in the file manager. Selection of files using the keyboard is now linear rather than rectangular.

GNOME 2.22 introduced special accessibility enhancements for controlling the mouse. These have been further improved in GNOME 2.24:

GNOME and its partners have worked hard to improve accessibility and screenreading support for both GNOME 2.24 and many popular third party applications.

Text-to-speech and braille device support is now vastly improved for Java applications, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla Thunderbird, Pidgin, GNOME's Help Browser and the GNOME Panel. Users are now made aware of unfocused dialogues when switching to an application.

There has also been a lot of work to integrate GNOME's screen reading technology with ARIA-enabled web browsers, starting with Mozilla Firefox.

Also new is automatic selection of the synthesised voice based on the system language, support for verbalised links, echo by sentence and optional tutorial messages.

In order to begin preparing developers for GLib and GTK+ 3.0, upcoming releases of both libraries will include flags to enforce stricter compatibility.

GLib, GTK+ and ATK 3.0 will require that only top-level headers (e.g. glib.h, gobject.h, gio.h) are included in applications. This change is important to allow individual headers to be removed, renamed and rearranged without affecting source code compatibility for applications.

To allow developers to test their applications for compatibility now, new compile-time options have been provided: G_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES for GLib, GTK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES for GTK+ and ATK_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES for ATK.

Simply pass these as compile-time flags when building your application (e.g. -DG_DISABLE_SINGLE_INCLUDES) to ensure that your application is correct.

GNOME 2.24 is the first version of GNOME release to depend on GLib 2.18.

GLib 2.18 features better support for providing context in string translations with C_() and NC_() macros as well as additional API in GIO.

A complete list of new symbols is available for GLib and GIO.

GNOME 2.24 is the first GNOME release to depend on GTK+ 2.14.

An important change in this version of GTK+ is that all widgets that inherit from GtkAdjustment (e.g. spinbuttons and sliders) now strictly enforce their range as [lower, upper - page size], as per the documentation. If you want to ensure a range of [lower, upper], set page_size to 0.

A new class, GtkMountOperation has been provided for passing to g_volume_mount. GtkMountOperation is a GMountOperation that is able to display an authentication dialogue to the user if required.

A portable method for opening files and other URIs using the default application is now available using the function gtk_show_uri(), rather than having to depend on libgnome. GDK now provides an implementation of GAppLaunchContext for handling graphical applications (including startup notification and focus stealing prevention), GdkAppLaunchContext.

Also new in GTK+ 2.14 is a GFile-based API for GtkFileChooser and the ability for GtkBuilder to build fragments of an XML tree.

A complete list of new symbols is available for GTK+ and GDK.

Along with its new instant messaging client (see Section 2.1 ― Stay in Touch), GNOME 2.24 includes the libraries libempathy, libempathy-gtk and telepathy-glib that can be used to integrate instant messaging features into any GNOME application.

The Match interface now includes two new methods: set_snippet and get_snippet. If a snippet is set it will be displayed in a new line underneath the match's get_verb value.

The Action interface has gained a new method get_tooltip. Overriding this method allows a tooltip to be shown when the user hovers the mouse over a match or action.