Two thousand and twelve brought many significant changes to GNOME.

Building on the solid foundation of GNOME 3.2, the community worked together to unleash GNOME 3.4 in March and GNOME 3.6 in September, maintaining the six-month cadence previously set by earlier releases.

Matthias Clasen oversaw the completion of GNOME 3.4 and described it as "a great leap forward for GNOME 3 ... we hope that our users enjoy it."

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GNOME 3.4 introduced a wealth of new features and improvements, including but not limited to beautiful new designs and interfaces for GNOME applications such as Web, Documents, Epiphany, and Contacts. The Activities overview was enhanced to allow users to search for documents and quickly access content stored locally and online. New application menus located on the top bar were introduced as a means to access options and actions for various applications.

Other enhancements to GNOME 3.4 included refreshed interface components, such as a new color picker, redesigned scrollbars, spin buttons and title bars, and smooth scrolling support. New animated backgrounds brought a nice touch of style.

Better hardware support, topic-oriented documentation, better accessibility and many other improvments made for a very solid release.

GNOME 3.6 focused on improving the experience that was developed in 3.4, refining the overall user interface and adding polish. Andreas Nilsson, President of the GNOME Foundation, described GNOME 3.6 as "an important milestone in our mission to bring a free and open computing environment to everyone."

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New features and enhancements to the interface included a new applications button and improved layout in the Activities Overview, a new login and lock screen, a redesigned Message Tray, smarter Notifications, improved System Settings and much more.

Accessibility became an always on feature in GNOME 3.6, enabling universal access to assistive technologies and settings such as brightness, contrast, inversion and greyscale, improved web navigation, and the Orca screen reader. Braille support was also improved in Orca.

Two new applications were included in the release. Boxes allows access and management of remote systems and virtual machines, and a preview of the new Clocks application was showcased.

Many other smaller enhancements rounded out the release to help make GNOME 3.6 the best one yet.

Looking ahead to the future, GNOME will continue to deliver an effective and efficient workflow while keeping an eye on security. Planned features, refinements and usability enhancements will provide an even better user experience going forward.