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And More...

Further Improvements in 3.6

Other GNOME Platform improvements in GNOME 3.6 include:

  • Pango, the library for laying out and rendering of text, has been ported to use Harfbuzz to provide higher quality rendering and memory savings. As a side effect the deprecated pangox backend was removed. A tarball of a standalone pangox helps with the transition of the deprecated pangox APIs.

  • The Zeitgeist activity logging framework is used in Empathy and by folks.

  • libgdata received support for Google Drawings.

  • To test your DBus app you can use GTestDBus so your tests will be using a private session bus instead of the user's.

  • gnome-common provides a GNOME_CODE_COVERAGE m4 macro to allow projects to easily add code coverage support using lcov. See totem-pl-parser for an example implementation.

  • GNOME's default GSettings backend dconf received a massive refactoring with a focus on testability.

  • librest, the API for accessing RESTful web services, received HTTP authentication support.

  • All gvfs utilities, as well as command line utilities that are part of GLib and GTK+ now include manual pages.

Plans for 3.8

  • libgnome-keyring will be completely deprecated in favor of libsecret.

    The libsecret library is a new client for the Secret Service D-Bus API. It allows storage of passwords in a common way on the desktop.

  • GNOME's browser Web is being ported to WebKit2. If you want to give this work in progress a try, build the browser with --with-webkit2. This will mean:

    • Increased responsiveness (how amazing the scrolling is!) and stability.

    • Thanks to the OOP plugin support GTK 2.x plugins work out of the box again. That means Flash support without having to rely on nspluginwrapper.

    • Other things that are there, but invisible to users, like increased security or a new and improved API, built on top of all our experience with the classic WebKit.

  • Evolution will use WebKit also for composing messages. This will deprecate GtkHtml. It will also receive a new importer framework.

  • Evolution-Exchange (one of Evolution's connectors to Microsoft Exchange servers) might be deprecated in favor of Evolution-EWS and Evolution-MAPI.