The elections for the 2001 Board of Directors finished with the winners announced. The elections proceeded very smootly for which the membership and elections team must be congratulated. Looking at those who were elected there is a good mix of experienced hands that represent different interest groups within GNOME. There seem to be more people who focus on applications rather than the core libraries which probably reflects wider community better. for those worried about commercial interests it is worth noting that board members serve in a personal capacity serving the wider interests of GNOME. Finally, we must thank the outgoing board members who I think have done a sterling job this last year.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/foundation-announce/2001-November/msg00037.html
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/28/0754234&mode=thread
Galeon is a web-browser built on top of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine. It uses native GTK+ widgets to reduce its overheads making it fast and stable. Along with this it has introduced a host of features making it a favourite for many users. As the team says in their short announcement, they have finally hit their major release after a year and a half of hard work. If you haven't tried it now is the time too, the team is already proceeding with new features!
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/news/index.php#26
http://theregister.co.uk/content/4/23024.html
Telsa sent an update on the timetable pointing out that the first beta is due in under a week. This has caused everyone to consider how much work is left to do and realise that a date slip is very likely. On the good side Seth Nickell announced some screenshots of the current desktop - it looks amazingly similar to the current desktop which is the basic idea for the first release. Michael also announced a picture of nautilus up and running on the GNOME 2.0 desktop.
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-November/msg00603.html
http://www.stanford.edu/~snickell/gnome2.png
http://primates.ximian.com/~michael/nautilus2.png
Pat Costello announced an initial release of a User Guide for Gnome. Internally to Sun this is the guide that will be used for the Solaris version of GNOME, but Pat feels the content is suitably generic that it can be used elewhere. At this stage the documentation team would like feedback and comments so that they can improve it. This is great work and lets hope it will have a bit impact on the level of help users have when starting with GNOME.
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-doc-list/2001-November/msg00078.html
The Userability Project has been working really hard in the last few months. They've now released an initial version of the Interface Guidelines which will show hackers how to give their applications a consistent look and feel. The idea is that GNOME applications will increase the user experience by making them easy and intuitive to use. Lots of things are missing at this stage and the team is adding stuff all the time - so if you'd like to get your two cents of comment in now is the time to do it!
http://lists.gnome.org/archives/gnome-2-0-list/2001-November/msg00545.html
Jason Hildebrand announced a new Bonobo component that wraps vim via a number of the GtkHTML interfaces. This means that with a little bit of help Ximians Evolution can be made use use vim for editing emails rather than the current default editor. It is also a very nice example of the power of components.
http://www.opensky.ca/gnome-vim/
The LinuxSalute team is hoping to do for Slackware what Ximian has done for lots of other distributions by making GNOME easy to install and maintain. If you're interested in helping their effort by testing out the packages visit their homepage and send them an email. Good luck!
CSL is an effort to remove some of the problems in sound support for the desktop. Tim Janik explains it as being a wrapper around the hardware and sound daemons removing other dependencies. They have now released an API and would love for all interested parties to send comments in so that they can make whatever alterations are required at this point.
For eagle eyed readers you will note that this is out of date, I accidently missed it out a few Summaries ago after promising Tim I would include it!
http://www.arts-project.org/doc/csl-0.2.0.html
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
Most active modules:
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Most active hackers:
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It's a pretty quiet week on the Summary; partially this is time constraints on my part but judging by the lists everyone is working on the GNOME 2.0 rlease so not much else is going on.
Until next time,
Steve