GNOME 3.5.2 first sights :p

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Not the whole GNOME stack has reached version 3.5.2 so we can’t review it just yet. But we can share what Matthias Mclasen post in his blog -and enrich it a bit :)

User Menu, Font Viewer and accessible high contrast theme are some of the first changes.

Believe it or not, there is no Suspend option! One of the most controversial features of Shell, has gone away and we now have once again the standard Power Off by default. Suspend option will be still available with the < alt > ernative button.

The Online Accounts buttons is also hidden under the System Settings, and that is the position it belongs. You just need it once to setup your online accounts, I never understood why they had it on a quick menu.

A rewritten font application is landing and while most people don’t care much about it, is a welcome addition, as I personally need it :) What makes that app a bit special is that uses the next generation pattern of GNOME 3 applications, similar to boxes, contacts etc..

More and more applications are following that approach and while it feels a bit “strange” at first, we can benefit by that logic, with the full screen optimizations and a more comprehensive interaction interface for example.

The high contrast theme also received some love and improvements, but this is just a small step to GNOME’s accessibility goals. In three point six we’ll see a massive development to this area, including huge improvements to the Orca screen reader.

Input sources support has finally landed! This is just fantastic!

Input Sources is a project where input methods and keyboard layouts are integrated in an uniform, understandable way under GNOME 3. That will help the GNOME users to have a clear indication what is the system user interface language, keyboard layout, input method languages, locale formats etc.. and of course modify them!

This is a sensitive and hard to achieve goal mostly by design, and as far I can tell GNOME designers follow the Apple way -or vice versa :)

Finally Mclasen says “Application menus are now very well adopted”. Oh well I will definitely disagree on that. GNOMEs Application Menus so far is a catastrophe and while it is a great design idea, it is very bad implemented at the moment. We’ll have an extensive review on this when GNOME beta will be released, and I just hope they will greatly improve that area :)

That’s all for now, we will cover more three point five news soon!

Sources: blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/, live.gnome.org/ThreePointFive/Features

IgnatiusReilly

Why not both?

That’s really awkward. Why not having Suspend AND PowerOff in the menu?! Do we really need another extension for this to happen?!!!

Sicofante

The Gnome devs seem to believe there wouldn’t be any fun in doing so. They have made Easter Eggs a UI design philosophy: “Hide as much as you can. The user will have lots of fun hunting for basic functionality!”

simon

how about adding some GUI tools to give users the ability to configure/tweak their Desktop without having to learn a stupid gnome-shell.css configuration file in order to customize the shell! arghhhh!
http://www.facebook.com/Phail.J Jon Jahren

Any chance the MSN account will actually display your contacts anywhere this time?

Alexis Diavatis

I will try to find out more about online accounts future plans.

tubasoldier

Should we expect another ten more releases before Gnome might be usable?

Alex Diavatis

hmm, personally I found 3 more usable than 2. But yes there are some rough edges. I guess we have to w8 2 more release cycles.
Billy Larlad

GNOME 3 is perfectly usable right now. I installed Crunchbang on my laptop last night, found its openbox implementation to be pretty but it took forever just to do the simplest things. One aptitude install tasks-gnome-desktop later, I had GNOME 3.2, where everything “just works,” is prettier than Openbox, and gets out of my way as much as any DE I’ve seen.

David

“GNOME 3 is perfectly usable right now.” For an increasingly narrow definition of “user”. I don’t know what the GNOME developers think they are improving with all their GNOME 3 work, but it certainly isn’t the user experience. Hiding menu buttons away in obscure ways because a user, horror upon horrors, might actually dare to use them?

Billy Larlad

I hate to say it, but apaprently the GNOME devs _really_ missed the point of the suspend-shutdown controversy. It wasn’t that people preferred having a shutdown item in their menu (I don’t) — it was that it was nonsense that an option was only discoverable by holding down the alt-key, something one could have learned only by reading the documentation or being told. The current “fix” leaves this undesirable functionality intact.

For all the focus on uniformity, I don ‘t get why there’s one option in one menu that’s exposed only by depressing a key that isn’t used in the same manner anywhere else.

Just put suspend and shutdown in the damn menu, like SuSE is already doing, and be done with it.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100003021907705 Shanth Evilgenius

;-)
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http://profiles.google.com/gbatmarx greg batmarx

ΚDE is so much more advanced, customizable and functional than the current Gnome…

goldspy

no, Gnome is…

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