GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 Released

damiam writes "GNOME 2.0 Desktop Beta 3 has been released. Changes include new versions of Nautilus, Yelp, and the control center, as well as bugfixes all around. Download it from gnome.org or one of the mirrors." Jeff Waugh adds: "The possibility of a complete beer freeze at GUADEC has inspired another kickarse release of the GNOME 2.0 Desktop. It's awesome stuff, definitely worth trying out. You should find GARNOME handy if there are no packages available for your distro."

Comments

The name of the release

[Nachtfalke]

This release is codenamed "La lluvia en Sevilla es una maravilla", which babelfish translates to "Rain in Seville is a wonder". Any spanish speakers here that can tell us, what it really means? :-)

Re:The name of the release

[changos]

The rain in Seville it's wonderfull. Although maravilla can also be interpreted as "a sight to see"

Re:The name of the release

[Charles Kerr]

The mention of Seville in the release title is a reference to the upcoming GUADEC (Gnome Users and Developers European Conference) in Seville, Spain on April 4-6.

Re:The name of the release

[ElMiguel]

It means "the rain in Seville is wonderful". It has been taken from the Spanish translation of the film "My Fair Lady". I think the original English sentence was "in Spain the rain falls always in the plain", or something like that, but the translators adapted it so the translation would also repeat a difficult phoneme ("ai" in the original, "ll" in the translation).

Screenshots!

[awptic]

Wow, I'm impressed nobody has posted links to screenshots yet!
Here you go: http://developer.gnome.org/dotplan/images/

Re:Fonts...

[Junta]

Yeah, the fonts pretty much suck, I use fonts from Windows, but better hinting in the fonts wont help much for most people's default freetype installations, as the proper bytecode interpreter by default is disabled, and the crappy auto-hinter is enabled by default. But don't blame the freetype people for this, blame Apple's patent. I would think by merely shipping freetype with the bytecode interpreter, enabled or not, is a big risk. Anyway, enabling proper hinting takes a recompile, the include file include/freetype/config/ftoption.h has the option specified on line 435 or thereabouts..

Re:Fonts...

[mmusn]

I'm looking at these screenshots on my Titanium PowerBook G4, and I just glance back and forth between the screenshots and Aqua, and I laugh.

Funny, I'm looking at it from my Titanium PowerBook G4 as well, and I see nothing wrong with most of the fonts in the screenshots. Some people picked what I would consider ugly fonts in some screenshots, but that's their right. OSX, in comparison, for better or worse, gives people very little choice.

I see plenty wrong with your attitude, however. Apple has only been able to spend that much time and money on graphic design because they got much of the nitty-gritty work done for them by open source folks. If it weren't for open source, OSX wouldn't be here and Apple would likely be out of business soon.

And maybe Apple should spend some time on their own font rendering as well, because, frankly, Apple's anti-aliasing on PowerBooks sucks.

I just have trouble believing that in the year 2002 you guys still don't have nice hinted fonts shipping and in-use by default with X.

In part, that's Apple's fault, actually. Their software patents on the particular hinting methods used in TrueType have held back the development of open source renderers for TrueType.

And X11 actually has had good hinting technology for years, but because Apple and Microsoft managed to push their own, new, proprietary font standards, the X11 folks had to start from scratch.

So, be nice. Apple has plenty of bad history to make up for with the open source community, and they need all the help they can get.

Re:Screenshots!

[Skeezix]

Some recent shots of beta3 I made:

http://www.gnome.org/~jamin/screenshots/beta3/