Is GNOME Going To Duplicate The Efforts From Canonical?

Gnome Shell recently introduced a new notification system. Sadly it seems like GNOME Shell is going to duplicate a lot of the efforts from Canonical. Besides the notification system the application indicators also have similarities.

It looks like the Notify OSD of GNOME Shell is named the Message Tray. You can see a short screencast demo here: http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/mockups/20090630-demo

I was truly hoping that Gnome would continue the fantastic work Canonical is doing rather than starting over. The question still remains, what experience will Ubuntu 10.10 ship?

Source:
http://www.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf

GNOME 3.0 in September 2010

After collecting some feedback, the GNOME Release Team has finally decided on the release date for GNOME 3.0: It will be September 2010.
To take a look again at the GNOME 3 plan that was released in April 2009: Click here.

This may come as a disappointment to those that have been very much looking forward to major improvements on the GNOME desktop, but a six-month set-back won't be too bad if it will lead to a better quality release (especially after judging the initial KDE 4.0 release). Additionally, Canonical for instance was not planning on shipping GNOME 3.0 until Ubuntu 10.10 due to Ubuntu 10.04 being their Long-Term Support release and not wanting to ship a potentially buggy desktop, so many desktop Linux users would not even have encountered the 3.0 release until October of 2010.


New module decisions for GNOME 2.30 were also made of course.

On the Gnome devel-announce-list, Vincent Untz wrote:

GNOME 3.0 will be released in September 2010, and in the meantime, we
will release GNOME 2.30 in March 2010, continuing our long-standing
tradition of six-months releases.

Thanks to the input from the community, we were able to draw a clear
picture of where we stand today and where we will be next March. As
mentioned in the GNOME 3.0 planning document [1], the release date for
3.0 was not set in stone: while we're using a strict schedule that
allows us to release GNOME every six months, GNOME is above all using
quality-based release engineering. That's why our community wants GNOME
3.0 to be fully working for users and why we believe September is more
appropriate.

Note that this release date for 3.0 doesn't mean that 2.30 will be less
stable than usual. On the contrary, this will help us integrate the
changes that are ready for 2.30, while leaving the parts that are still
rough on the edges outside of GNOME, as used daily by our users, until
after 2.30 is out. This will solidify both our 2.30 and 3.0 releases.

The idea of doing GNOME 3.0 was first seriously discussed in 2008,
before focus areas were defined in 2009, alongside a plan to reach
3.0. Those focus areas include revamping the user experience,
streamlining the platform and improving the promotion of GNOME. Compared
to GNOME 3.0, GNOME 2.30 will see the iterative improvements and bug
fixes that people have now come to expect from our 2.x branch, in
addition to some preliminary work needed for GNOME 3.0.

The GNOME 3.0 planning document was answered by the community with a
tremendous amount of work, with various teams taking the opportunity to
set their own goals for 3.0. Such goals range from modernizing part of
our stack to proposing new UI models for our desktop: those broad
changes show our ambition to always offer the best to developers and
users, and this make our path to GNOME 3.0 most exciting!

Let's make 2010 a fantastic year for GNOME!

Vincent

[1] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan

A wise decision and I'm sure the Gnome 3 release will be fantastic ones it arrives.
If you want to test the developer preview of Gnome-Shell, you can easily install it in Karmic Koala via Synaptic.


Source: Andre Klapper (andre) and phoronix.com

Gnome Shell status

Jason Clinton (jclinton) has news from the GNOME Shell sessions (with Owen Taylor and Colin Walters) to everybody interested in the Gnome Shell development.

http://jasondclinton.livejournal.com/76065.html

GnomeShell and Complex Design Ideas

You've probably already heard about GnomeShell, which redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. The project is still in early stages of development. The plan is to have it be an optional feature in GNOME 2.28, and to replace the existing components for GNOME 3.0.

On the designer playground site you can find a list of descriptions of design ideas with links to the mockups or write-ups. If you're into usability, GUI design or just curious, surf by the http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesignerPlayground

On the site you'll find images, write-ups, videos and even an interactive mockup.

The image below is a mockup made by Máirín Duffy for the Navigating Applications Menu

Planning for GNOME 2.28 and 3.0

With GNOME 2.26 having been released a few weeks back, the GNOME development community is slowly beginning to ramp up work on the next release, which will be known as GNOME 2.28. The release schedule for GNOME 2.28 is out, along with a tentative schedule for GNOME 3.0! GNOME 3.0 will take off where GNOME 2.30 would have been, and will come with some significant improvements to compete in the age of KDE 4.

First though, with the GNOME 2.28 release schedule, its first unstable release (v2.27.1) will be out later this month on the 29th. For the next few months will be several more development releases in the GNOME 2.27 series and also minor bug-fix releases in the 2.26 series. Come this September, GNOME 2.28.0 is planned for release on the 23rd. Among many other features and changes to come, GNOME 2.28 will complete the migration from Mozilla/XulRunner to WebKit for its web rendering engine.

A month after the release of GNOME 2.28 will be the first GNOME 2.30 (3.0) development build and that will continue on in the usual GNOME development fashion until March of 2010. GTK 3.0 and Glib 3.0 are scheduled for release on the 22nd of February in 2010 while GNOME 3.0 is scheduled to be out on the 31st of March. In other words, we are just shy of being one year out from GNOME 3.0!

Landing in late August during the GNOME 2.28 development cycle will be the gnome-shell beta release. Throughout the GNOME 3.0 development cycle, various libraries will be stripped away such as libgnomeui, libglade, etc. The feature freeze for GNOME 3.0 will go into effect in late January.

The release schedule for GNOME 2.28 and GNOME 3.0 can be found on their GNOME Live web-site. Additionally, new details regarding GNOME 3.0 were also published today. From the revamping of the GNOME user desktop experience to streamlining of the platform to the promotion of the GNOME desktop, those details can be read about in detail here.

Source: www.phoronix.com

GNOME Shell Status

Owen Taylor has written another GNOME Shell status report. Here's a short version of his post:

The most obvious change visible here since my last post are workspaces. As you add and remove workspaces they slide in and off the screen with a slick animation. Marina added the recent documents section to the sidebar with the appropriate thumbnails. Marinas also working on adding the ability to expand the sidebar sections to the full screen so you can browse More applications or files.
Colin added a user menu to the right side of the panel, so now you can actually log out, switch users, etc, from within gnome-shell.



Colin also did a quick hack to get the current GNOME taskbar to show up at the bottom of the screen. We’d like to do something better, or at least visually slicker, in the long term, but this fills in a big hole in the ability to just use GNOME shell day-to-day.
There’s some more interesting work in the pipeline - enhancements to the “More” views, monitoring the applications that the user is using and so forth. See our Todo for ideas about ways you could help, or join us on IRC in #gnome-shell and ask questions.

For more information you can also visit the Gnome Shell wiki: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/
Source: http://blog.fishsoup.net/