Looking in at GNOME 3.8

On March 27, the GNOME project announced the release of GNOME 3.8. It has a variety of new features, including new privacy settings, desktop clutter reduction, improved graphics rendering and animation transitions, new searching options, and, perhaps most significantly, a Classic mode that restores some of the appearance and usability features of GNOME 2. With these additions, the GNOME team is attempting to broaden the appeal of GNOME 3, so that it will be more attractive to old-time GNOME 2 users, while also being a viable alternative to proprietary systems in the business and professional world.

GNOME 3 was designed to be flexible and highly configurable. As part of that effort, the GNOME extensions web site was introduced six months after GNOME 3. The new Classic mode bundles some of those extensions to give users a way to configure their desktop to look more like GNOME 2. In Classic mode, there are menus for applications and places; windows have minimize and maximize buttons; there is a taskbar that can be used to restore minimized windows and to switch between them; and Alt-Tab shows windows instead of applications.

A video of Classic mode shows some of these features from a pre-release version of GNOME 3.8. Some rough spots in the interface are on display, but have likely been fixed in the final release. The general availability of the release will be governed by the release dates of underlying distributions. GNOME 3.8 is released, but not yet available except by either using a testing distribution or building it yourself.

As part of the goal of increasing its attractiveness to the business world, GNOME 3.8 continues to work to keep the desktop uncluttered and streamlined. To this end, the applications launching view has a new "Frequent/All" toggle that will display either recently used programs or all of those available. In addition, some applications are grouped into folders. Each folder icon is a black box that displays mini-icons representing the folder's contents. The effect is to see all the available applications at a glance.

This interface choice can produce a few problems. The initial state of the Frequent/All toggle is "Frequent", but new users won't have any entries there. Since there is insufficient contrast between the toggle and the default wallpaper, a person who just wades in to use the system can easily miss it, and then no applications will display.

Another problem is that "Help" has been moved to one of the new groups of programs, in this case the "Utilities" group. For former users of GNOME who know what Help looks like and that it is considered an application, it does not take long to search for. There are, at the moment, only two groups. However, for a new user, there is insufficient information to suggest where to look for Help when it is needed most.

Searching from the "Activities" overview has been improved in several ways, both in the way the results are presented and in the new settings available. These allow you to specify a subset of applications and limit your search to that subset. This is useful because it allows you to quickly narrow in on an application of interest.

One of the bigger new items in GNOME 3.8 is the privacy settings. These are designed for people whose desktop is not in a physically private space, allowing a person to keep her name, activities, and viewing history private. There are a number of practical uses for this. If you are in a public space, such as working in a coffee shop or on an airplane, you might want to preserve your anonymity. There is a new setting that ensures that your name is not displayed on the computer. When "Name & Visibility" is marked "Invisible", the name in the upper right corner disappears. Beyond that are settings for web and usage history retention, screen locking, and Trash and temporary file cleanup.

There are many other new usability features. For example, better rendering of animated graphics provides smoother transitions in the interface. There is also greater support for internationalization. First, many more languages supported. Second, there are also improvements to, and expansion of, GNOME's input methods. And, of course, there were numerous bug fixes throughout.

In an interview with GNOME 3 designer Jon McCann that appeared on GNOME's website along with the release announcement, he said the overriding goal of GNOME, starting with GNOME 3, is to make it more accessible to application developers. To that end, GNOME 3.8 uses a number of new interfaces and widgets for GTK+ that were not present in 3.6, Allan Day of the GNOME team explained. "These widgets are not available to application developers yet, but will become available in future releases." The new widgets also take advantage of GNOME's improved graphics and animation.

There is a new Weather application for viewing current weather conditions and forecasts for various locations. Weather, per the decisions made at the February hackfest, is written in Javascript.

The GNOME developers have also begun work on future plans, including creating a testable development environment, so that application developers can develop for and test against soon-to-be released versions of GNOME. In the medium term, adding application bundling and sandboxing is in the works, and, in the long term, providing better coding and user interface development tools is planned.