2.31 release notes items

Major changes in GNOME 2.31, to be mentioned in the release notes. Please make a list here when we reach feature freeze.

Please note that this does not need to be pretty. It's just a list that will be used to make the actual release notes. In fact, if it's too pretty, people will link to it and complain that it's not perfect.

See also the advice about the schedule and translation.

How-to

Major changes are those that:

• Affect lots of people (users, administrators, or developers.)
• Are something people have been hoping for or discussing widely.
• Feature, usability, performance, internationalization or accessibility improvements.

Provide this information:

• What the module (application) is.
• What the change is.
  • Why it is important.
  • How it can be accessed.

Be as descriptive as you like.

What's new for users

• hamster-applet (time tracker)

  • overview gets a menu, drops toolbars and now supports date range browsing. the bars are interactive now and search is using full text (that means wildcards, exclusions and all the other nice things) - screenshot

  • optional integration with GTG (via preferences) - screenshot

  • HTML report template now can be overridden from $HOME folder. instructions can be found in the report footer - screenshot

  • generally a polish version that builds on 2.30 which was a major turner as we added tags

• gnome-system-tools

  • support for moving files or changing the owner of already present files when changing path to home directory

• Evince

  • A new action has been added to Edit menu to save current view settings as default for new documents.

  • Support for adding new annotations. See http://carlosgc.linups.org/gnome/evince-annotations.html

  • SyncTex support. See http://jaliste.blogspot.com/2010/08/synctex-support-in-gnome-232.html

  • Accessibility support, the view now implements the AtkText interface

  • Maximum zoom level has been increased
  • The "Loading..." text rendered on every page has been replaced by a small window with a spinner.

• Eye of GNOME

  • Re-render SVGs natively instead of showing a scaled pixbuf when zooming or when printing them
    • possibly easier explanation(?): Render them as vector image instead of showing a resized bitmap
  • User-selectable background color for image area defaulting to black for enhanced image contrast

• Empathy

  • Live contact search (type in the contact list to easily find your contacts)
  • Metacontacts (using libfolks) including a new dialog to link contacts together
  • The notifications bubbles now include buttons to directly accept or decline incoming events
  • Option to disable logging (which was moved to tp logger)
  • Empathy can now ask users to manually accept server certificates
  • Option to automatically popup incoming chats (by popular request)
  • The conversation window is now able to "undo" the closing of a tab.
  • Use status icons from the theme
  • Better connection error messages
  • The audio/video dialog gained a "details" pane containing some technical information about the call.
  • It's now possible to configure IRC accounts using the account assistant (and the IRC configuration UI has been improved).

• Nautilus:

  • Dialogue to handle conflicts within file copy/move operations
  • Transparent icons for cut files
  • A new button in the trash information bar allows to restore selected files on-the-fly
  • Trash now shows the original location of the file, and the date it was trashed

• Rygel:

  • Browse, search and stream multimedia contents from/to DLNA/UPnP devices (Sony PS3, XBox, Sony/Samsung DLNA TVs etc)
  • Easily specify what is shared on the UPnP/DLNA network.
  • On-fly, on-demand transcoding of media.

  • Playback control on remote desktops, either through GStreamer's playbin2 element or any MPRIS2-implementing media-players (e.g rhythmbox).

• Totem:

  • Add support for automatic deinterlacing of interlaced streams and movies
  • Do not block the UI when parsing playlists

• Zenity:

  • Added a new Login/Password Dialog.
• ...

What's new for administrators

What's new for developers

• hamster-applet (time tracker)

  • as the application is now split in backend d-bus service and frontend client, all functions are available via the d-bus interface. for convenience they are also wrapped in python (from hamster.client import Storage)

GTK+/Glib

• GTK+/Roadmap

• GTK+ 2.22

  • Added latest accessor functions needed to prepare your app to GTK+3
• Glib 2.26
  • GSettings (GConf replacement)
  • GDBus
  • GDateTime (New date / time API )
  • New convenience macros to implement boxed and pointer types: G_DEFINE_[BOXED|POINTER]_TYPE
  • New function g_object_notify_by_pspec (faster than g_object_notify)
  • GObject property bindings (like libexo)
  • Proxy support for GSocket
  • Add support for dtrace/systemtap static markers
  • GObject properties are now threadsafe

Anjuta

• Python and Vala are now fully supported including calltips and auto-completion ("IntelliSense")

• Debugger now supports pretty-printing: Known objects are shown in a more user-friendly fashion, for example GObjects or C++-Classes
• Symbol-Database has seen a massive performance improvement

Devhelp

• Possibility to disable specific books

Libfolks

• Libs to access meta contact

What's new for accessibility users

mousetweaks

• Does not depend anymore on the AT-SPI framework
• Does not depend anymore on dbus-glib
• Daemon and dwell click have been migrated to GDBus
• Does not use anymore the gconf keys

• Can be compiled with -DGSEAL_ENABLED; requires gtk >= 2.18

• The man pages have been updated
• The manual has been updated

Regressions

Plans for the next release

• ThreePointZero!