Gnome Control Center 3.7.3 released today and of course ships the new three panels (Notifications Filtering, Privacy Settings, Search Providers) and plenty other improvements.
And if that is not enough, many new things are planned to come, like a new Power Panel (which isn’t completed yet), a Pin Locker, OwnCloud in GOA and much more!
GNOME Control Center ~ 3.8
This is how GNOME CC 3.8 will look, as I think the upcoming new features won’t use any separate Panel. However Brightness and Lock will merge to Privacy and Power Panels, so this Panel will be removed.
The latest Panel that added (today) was Notifications Filtering.
Notifications Filtering
Notification Panel helps us to select from which Apps we want to receive messages and how the messages will be displayed. Also we can select if we want to receive notifications on Lock Screen.
My Notifications Box is empty and that is because Panel is filled with X-GNOME-UsesNotifications apps (currently, none), or all applications that notified at least once. So I guess we have to wait a little while to test this. If you are interested to port your Application to use the Notification Filtering you can have a look at Giovanni’s email.
For now I can use Giovanni’s Screenshots.
The set of applications shown include all applications that ever showed a notification in gnome-shell and all applications that have a boolean X-GNOME-UsesNotifications key set to true in their desktop file. I am not sure if all the options (ie sounds) will arrive in stable release.
Except the fact that Notifications Filtering is useful for all the obvious reason, it also closes a Privacy Issue, specially with Notification that appear in Lock, while we are away and someone else can view them.
Privacy Panel
This is another nice feature we will get in GNOME 3.8, that enables to clean history, hide our real (full) name and other.
What is a success here is the simplicity. While there are many options, there are easy discoverable and well defined from the very first look. I think that GNOME designers made a really good work there, better from other commercial desktops with higher budgets.
Screen Lock
The first option is Screen Lock that we can set the time (if) we want to have an autolock.
The available times in min are:
{0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 30, 60}
The drawback here is that we cannot set a custom time. And we can’t set custom time in any other such menu. It would be much better if they had used a time-line scroll, rather a drop down menu, that limits our choices, and isn’t look nice anyway.
Name ‘n’ Visibility
Here we can hide our full name from either Lock or Normal Screens. When we hide full name, the user name is displayed instead.
The “Stealth Mode” looks cool and gives some sense of hi-tech stuffs, I like it ;)
Usage ‘n’ History
Through History Panel we can set the time system will track our files as “Recently Used”.
The available options are:
{Don't Retain History, 1d, 7d, 30d, Forever}
Purge Trash ‘n’ Temporary Files
This needs some work, it is a bit confusing and it doesn’t track temporary files per application. What if I want to delete Empathy’s logs but not Firefox temp files? Does actually delete Temp files from browsers? What are the temp files anyway?
The available times are:
{immedietely, 1d, 2d, 3d, 4d, 5d, 6d, 7d, 14d, 30d}
Search Providers
Set the locations and types of “files” that Search Search Overview wants to search for and display.
You can add any location with “+”, and maybe there will be some kind of caching in searches, which I am not sure how is going to work, so I skip it for now.
There is much more!
There are, or they will be many many changes in every Panel of Gnome Control Center, and I can make a screecasting when are ready, probably in 3.7.5. A nice feature that hasn’t been landed, and I am not sure if will make it (although there are some patches) is the “History View” in User Accounts.
A new Feature that has been added here is the Last Login label. The “History” which is missing is a different story ;)
With this option the admin can track “weird” behavior in a multi-user machine, so it’s a primary Security Feature. Other than this, is useful to know how often you use your computer. This is a mockup, however the real code exist somewhere in Gnome Bugzilla. Not sure if this feature will land in GNOME 3.8.
Also there is another Feature that has been forgotten lately, but according to Giovanni who’s the author, Pin Locker is planned for 3.8, but not as first priority.
Pin will be set somewhere in GNOME Control Center. The above figure is just an old design, but it is enough to show how things will be.
GNOME Control Center 3.7.3 Changelog
Many many nice changes ;)
- Remove fallback session handling code
- Add search panel
- Add privacy panel
- Add notifications panel
- Use the proper Unicode ellipsis (…) instead of three dots
Shell
- Remove the previous panel when switching to a new one
- Don’t remove old panel if new one is broken
- Add F1 shortcut to show the help
- Rename to Settings
- Ensure the home button is the correct height
- Fix alignment of home button in RTL languages
- Make all the plugins static
Background
- Fix not having 3 columns in high contrast
Color
- Do not use a combobox when listing profiles to add to devices
Bluetooth
- Avoid possible loops when Connection fails
- Fix main switch acting bizarrely
- Use spinner when connecting
- Align the device list with the all settings button
- Remove ObexFTP browsing from the UI
Network
- Make sure flight mode is always visible
- Make sure Airplane mode switch everything off
- Ensure IMEI is displayed and reload Operator Name when it changes
- Also load IMEI and Operator Name for LTE-only modems
Date & Time
- Do not offer the 12 hr clock in locales without AM/PM
Keyboard
- Point to a more specific help page
- Add support for msgctxt in keybindings
- Improve shortcuts tab keynav
Printers
- Show in Unity
- Fix problems when adding new printers
Background
- Hide in Unity
Region
- Show in Unity
- Fix possible crasher on startup when the X11Variant are empty
- Offer logout options after changing language
- Add Japanese to the popular languages
- Show popular languages in their own language
- Fix other user’s languages never getting added
- Make ‘Add’ dialogs consistent
- Reinstate the separator in the languages list
- Fix button alignment problem
- the language chooser resizing during load
Sound
- Clarify “sound events”
- Fix possible crasher
- Use libgnome-volume-control
Info
- Set the hostname only after a small delay
Users
- Rename from User Accounts
- Show the password by default once generated
- Fix resetting one’s avatar
- Add “last login” field
Online accounts
- Don’t preselect the first item when adding an account
- Align the accounts list with the all settings button
- Only allow adding accounts if the network is available
Universal Access
- Set the dialog hint on the zoom options
- Also set the WM HighContrast theme when the switch is flipped
Details
- Add distro information
- Add CPU model on ARM
- Avoid adding phantom “Unknown model” CPU on PPC64
Wacom
- Add support for the new OSD help display
Not bad ;)
Something Irrelevant
I came with an article in Phoronix “The Future Of Fedora Gets Debated, Again” and from the title I thought they are going to shut down Fedora or something similar. The reality was totally different, and all the post was based on an email from Tomas Radeja a Redhatter engineer. The post is so negative, that I doubt if Phoronix has read the rest of ML threads. If you do, they just discuss the common issues of Fedora (stability, long term support, etc), nothing new there.
Ok, no need to be harsh with Phoronix, so a good thing he did was to publish the user surveys for GNOME, and you can check them 2012 GNOME User Survey Results and The Best Features Of GNOME In 2012. No time for me to export these, but since Phoronix did the job .. :)