I want to apologize for the lack of summaries for the past couple of weeks. Things have been busy with personal life and I've not been able to find the time to put due diligence to the summaries, which take a substantive amount of time finding original news.
Thanks again for your patience.
A big big congratulations to the GNOME Community for the release of GNOME 2.6!! GNOME 2.6 is the next evolutionary step in a continuing process of refining one of the most usable desktops in the market today. This is a culmination of 6 months of hard work by the various teams who have worked so hard and put in so many long hours in trying to make this release into something wonderful.
For next 6 months, we will continue to challenge ourselves with new initiatives like project Utopia, partnering with Freedesktop to finally take usability to the hardware level, and finally determining the future direction of GNOME in the weeks to come.
This is the first year that I've really participated in GNOME even though I've been mostly a lurker for the past 3 or so years and I just want to reflect in the past couple months and tell you what a wonderful group of people we have in our community.
It's simply inspiring to read planet, read the forums, hang out in IRC and watch people feeling so excited about what each other is doing. Never more than now can I recall the GNOME community being so animated and exhilarated.
In the midst of our exuberance, we've also seen our community come together in grief and sadness over lost friends. Chema, Mark, and Ettore, we're sorry that you aren't with us to share in the accomplishments that you've helped deliver. Wherever you are, we hope that you're watching and enjoying where we are taking GNOME and the challenges we face while we're doing it!
On that note, 2.8 is coming - lets kick some ass.
It's with great pleasure that I point you to an interview done in part by one of GNOME Summary's newest editors, Jorge "whiprush" Castro. Jorge and others do a wonderful review on 2.6 complimenting the one done by Sayamindu. Excellent, balanced article.
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/gnome-2.6/gnome-2.6-1.html
An independent wrote a nice article that focuses on usability between non UNIX desktops and GNOME and the strides that GNOME has made towards making a computer less daunting.
Under that topic, there are other interesting posts from Havoc and Luis about usability, and the evolution of the UNIX desktop - all are interesting reads.
http://www.nearwildheaven.com/GNOME/
http://www.advogato.org/person/louie/diary.html?start=87
It all started off with a blog from Havoc Pennington about future directions on what language we would (or should) use for core GNOME. This lead to some very interesting discussions with various people siding with Mono or Java or do nothing. The lack of a free (as in freedom) implementation of Java and Sun's refusal to create one is a shot against Java. And of course we all know the dilemma with Mono - how much control does Microsoft have over .NET still and will it ever clean house on *invalid* implementations.
In light of the recent cooperation of Sun and Microsoft, things look more murky on standardizing on a single language. One question to ask is how has the landscape changed now in light of this?
http://ometer.com/desktop-language.html
Ever gone to the Apple's icalshare site and wished you could somehow get those nifty calendars into evolution? Some time back I was one those people and I remembered that it would be great to be able to get some of these popular calendars into evolution. Well, I was pleasantly surprised when Rodney Dawes (Dobey) mentioned his webcal subscription project.
evolution-webcal requires the prerequisites for evolution. Once you have them it's as simple as going to the www.icalshare.com site and clicking on a subscribe button. A dialog box pops up asking you how often you want to refresh the calendar. Click OK, and you're done. Good stuff!
http://www.gnome.org/~dobey/evolution-webcal-1.0.tar.bz2
http://www.gnome.org/~dobey/evolution-webcal.png
For your reading pleasure, here are several GNOME related articles regarding the 2.6 release. The last one is a humorous read and is not GNOME related.
http://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3333591
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/index.php/id;1967916584;fp;2;fpid;1
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,115411,00.asp
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/05/1078378953706.html
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/03/31/1080544548030.html
Of recent, Eric Raymond started a debate on why Free/Open Source software is still not ready for Aunt Tillie. There have been a number of responses to this article, and in one of them, Brad Griffith shows us how GNOME scores over proprietary software (Yes!! OS X included) in terms of usability.
http://www.thecardinal1978.com/GNOME
There has been some fairly radical changes in the Evolution UI which should simplify calendar/contact/task management to a large extent.
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000195.html
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000194.html
Gossip is one of the cleanest and easiest to use IM clients in the GNOME world. However, support for only the Jabber protocol has been a major problem for this beautiful piece of work.... until now that is. The Gossip hackers, especially Mikael Hallendal has been actively working on adding support for the other popular protocols to Gossip. Some initial UI proposals are available in the Gossip hacker log.
http://gossip.imendio.org/hackerlog/archives/000036.html
People keeping track of GTK+ development via CVS will notice that the new file selector now has a context sensitive menu (right click above the file list) which lets you select hidden files and folders. The selector also displays a busy cursor while loading file/folder lists. This should be helpful while selecting files from large directories. There is also a patch in bugzilla which adds support for the ".hidden" file to the file selector. However, as of this moment, this only works for the vanilla gtk back end of the filechooser.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136077
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137520
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137520
The Inkscape developers wrote in that they have achieved their goals for their 0.38 release with a ratio of open to closed bugs at 33% representing over 160 bugs closed! Looking ahead they have a road map up to 0.58 with their immediate focus being pango and gtkmm support. This should solve some deep bugs in the software and also make the code more maintainable.
Thanks for Paul Warren for these lists.
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