The GNOME Project is an international community that works to make great software available to all. GNOME focuses on ease of use, stability, first-class internationalisation and accessibility. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software. This means that all our work is free to use, modify and redistribute.
GNOME is released every six months. Since the last version, 3.0, approximately 1270 people made about 38500 changes to GNOME. Interested in what we do? Follow us on Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook.
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If you want to celebrate the release of 3.2 with others, check out whether a Release Party takes place nearby!
Based on user feedback, lots of small changes have been made to give a smoother experience in GNOME 3.2. Some noteworthy highlights:
Please keep the feedback coming.
Documents, contacts, calendars — They can be stored locally on the computer, but storing this type of information online is becoming increasingly popular. In GNOME 3.2, Online Accounts provides one place to manage these online sources. These online accounts are automatically used by Documents, Contacts, Empathy, Evolution as well as the calendar drop-down.
Certain web sites are used as if they are applications. Some sites are opened the minute the computer is turned on; the site is open all the time and checked periodically. Wouldn't it be nice if GNOME treats these sites as actual applications?
GNOME 3.2 makes it possible to use a site as an application thanks to Epiphany, our standard web browser. To do so, press Ctrl-Shift-A, or access the File menu and select Save as Web Application. Once the web application has been created, it can be launched from the overview.
The following is a brief list of the benefits:
Contacts is a new application focused on people. The goal is to provide one overview of people, whether the contacts are stored online, within Evolution or the chat application Empathy.
When dealing with a lot of documents, it can be hard to keep track of them. In GNOME 3.2, steps have been taken to make this easier.
Opening and saving files has been made easier. When opening a file in an application, GNOME will helpfully show a list of recent files. Similarly, a list of recent directories will be shown when a file is saved.
In GNOME 3.2, the Documents application is focused on providing a simple and effective way to find, organise and view documents.
Thanks to the Online Accounts integration, finding documents is the same whether they're stored locally or online.
File Manager can now quickly preview movie, music, picture and other files. The preview can be shown and hidden again by pressing space.
Due to differences in the way colours are shown, the same picture can look different between monitors. Similarly, when the picture is printed its colours might have changed again.
GNOME 3.2 allows you to calibrate devices to ensure the shown colours are representative.
You no longer have to open a separate application to sign in to chat and messaging services. In 3.2, GNOME will do it for you.
Wacom graphics tablets can be configured in System Settings.
The GNOME 3 login screen has been integrated with the rest of the user experience.
On tablets and similar touchscreen devices, rotating the device will automatically rotate the screen. Additionally, touchscreen devices will not show a mouse cursor unless a mouse is attached.
GNOME 3 now features integrated media hotplugging notifications.
The search box in the overview mode now lets you search through your contacts.
Traditional user documentation is written like a paper book; a good story, but it is very long and takes time to read through. It's not ideal if you just want to quickly find out how to perform a certain task. To address this, the following applications now include topic-orientated documentation:
There have also been large improvements and enhancements to the Desktop Help.
3.2 has received lots of visual polish, making it even more beautiful than before. This would not have been possible without the work done on the CSS support in GTK+, see Section 4.2 ― GTK+ 3.2 from the developer section for the changes.
The visual polish includes:
As well as big changes, there are also various small additions and tweaks that happen in every GNOME release.
Ability to access and modify documents shared via the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP).
Movie Player has a new plugin to allow videos to be rotated in case they're in the wrong orientation, such as those recorded on a photo camera or a smart phone.
Encryption and certification improvements:
Improved access of applications to certificates and keys and more consistent behaviour when dealing with certificate authorities, keys and smart cards by using PKCS#11. (Further improvements in this area are planned for version 3.4.)
A new viewer for certificate and key files so you can quickly inspect such files by double-clicking them in the File Manager.
Empathy's log viewer for previous conversations has a cleaner design. Empathy also supports sending SMS messages, and SIP accounts can be marked as being able to make PSTN calls. Such accounts can be used to call landline and mobile phones.
NetworkManager version 0.9 provides fast user switching, improved WiFi roaming, WiMAX support, flexible permissions and centralised storage of network connection information.
Evolution can now show the pictures of contacts stored in Google address books. Furthermore, to make clear that a port number of a mail server can be set, a separate field has been added.
The text editor Gedit offers new snippets for Mallard and Markdown files and refreshed Quickopen and Search dialogues.
Various performance improvements. Most noticeable improvement is with fullscreen 3D games.
Ability to set regional settings in Region panel of System Settings.
A redesigned font chooser dialogue.
GNOME 3.2 is the most beautiful accessible desktop to date, with an emphasis on being reliable and usable for everyone.
Until GNOME 3.2, assistive technology users have faced an unfortunate dilemma: It was not possible to dynamically activate accessibility support. Thanks to improvements to AT-SPI2, applications now have a cross-desktop way to determine if accessibility support is enabled and a way to enable it. GNOME is first to implement this, so more work needs to be done to really work across desktops.
Other improvements:
For those users who require an on-screen keyboard, a brand new one has been built in.
Using the overview mode with a keyboard works better than ever. In addition to being fully keyboard navigable, users of the screen reader Orca will experience much more reliable and accurate presentation while navigating.
Orca’s migration to introspection has made GNOME’s screen reader noticeably snappier. And now that the ATK bridge only listens for signals when assistive technologies are being used, enabling accessibility support in GNOME should no longer result in a significant performance degradation.
The accessibility service interface AT-SPI2 has been greatly stabilised: Crashes, memory leaks and a variety of other bugs have been fixed.
GNOME's Accessibility Implementation Library Gail has been completely merged into GTK+, bringing GNOME yet another step closer to accessibility that's built in, not bolted on.
The following changes are important for developers using the GNOME 3.2 Developer Platform. If you are not interested in changes for developers, you can skip forward to Section 5 ― Internationalisation.
Included in GNOME 3.2 is the latest release of the GNOME Developer Platform. This consists of a set of API- and ABI-stable libraries available under the GNU LGPL that can be used for the development of cross-platform applications.
For information on developing with GNOME please visit the GNOME Developer Centre.
GNOME's low-level software utility library GLib has seen various improvements: