GNOME 2.24 发行注记

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

图 2 Empathy 即时聊天工具

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 第2.3节 ― Ekiga 3.0).

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

Any application is able to utilize 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 第4.4节 ― 即时消息工具库 for more information on how this technology can be utilized 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.

图 3 快速设定任务

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 categorized 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 是 GNOME 下全功能的 SIP 音/视频会议客户端。作为 GNOME 2.24 的一部分，我们高兴地发布了 Ekiga 3.0。

图 4 Ekiga 3.0

As well as a new interface that is centered 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).

图 5 三种文件视图：图标，列表和紧凑

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.

图 6 标签浏览支持

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.

图 7 桌面栏

还可以直接通过互联网上的 Deskbar 仓库轻松地下载并安装新的插件。

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. Utilizing the new XRandR 1.2 specification from X.Org, this dialog 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.

图 8 全新的屏幕分辨率控制

更改会立即生效。不需要重新启动 GNOME。

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.

图 9 声音主题支持

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.

同样是 GNOME 2.24 中的特性，支持高分辨率 YouTube 视频和远程文本字幕。

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 favorites with everyone.

图 10 吸引人的背景

从 GNOME 2.0 开始，对 GNOME 面板的组合键 Control+Alt+Tab 便已经可用。用户可以使用在此后使用 Tab 键在面板项目上移动，尤其是通知区域图标。

从 GNOME 2.24 开始，可以通过键盘导航到通知栏图标。

文件管理器中的键盘导航同样得到了改进。现在通过键盘选择是线形的而不是长方形的。

GNOME 2.22 引入了 鼠标控制可用性特别增强。这些在 GNOME 2.24 中被再一次改进了：

GNOME 和它的合作伙伴付出了非常多的努力以提高 GNOME 2.24 及众多流行的第三方应用程序的可用性和屏幕阅读支持。

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 dialogs 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 sythesized voice based on the system language, support for verbalized 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 是第一个基于 GLib 2.18 的 GNOME 版本。

GLib 2.18 提供了在附加 API 和 GIO 中对字符串翻译更好支持的 C_() 和 NC_() 宏。

一个新符号的完整列表可以在 GLib 和 GIO 上获得。

GNOME 2.24 是第一个基于 GTK+ 2.14 的 GNOME 版本。

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.

一个新的类，GtkMountOperation 因用于传递给 g_volume_mount 而被提供. GtkMountOperation 是一个 GMountOperation，可以在需要的时候显示认证对话。

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一个完整的新符号列表可以在 GTK+ 和 GDK.获得。

Along with its new instant messaging client (see 第2.1节 ― 保持联系), 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.