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The Notable Improvements of GNOME 2.22
Michael Larabel writes "Phoronix has up a list compiling eight of the most interesting improvements on track for GNOME 2.22. These improvements include the Epiphany browser switching to the WebKit back-end, transition effects inside the Evince document viewer, a new GNOME application for taking photos and recording videos from web cameras followed by applying special effects, a mouse tweaking module for improved accessibility, and a new GNOME VNC client. On the multimedia end, GNOME 2.22 has a few new features appended to the Totem movie player and the Rhythmbox player. Totem can now search and play YouTube videos and connect to a MythTV server and watch past recordings or view live TV. Rhythmbox now can utilize FM radio tuners, integration with new lyric sites, improved Podcast feed support, and even has support for communicating with newer Sony PSPs. There will also be a standalone Flash player and flash previewing support from the file browser in this release."
Please refrain from "What else Gnome has taken away?" thought of lane. There is no content there.
(Disclaimer: I am an avid KDE user - living on beta)
The main reason I like gnome is that its a fast window manager with a low cruft index. This looks to me like Gnome trying too hard, and adding too many capabilities to what is, so far as I understand it, just a window manager. Why, for example include vnc? It's not like seperate client/servers for this task aren't available, and most are pretty good.
Is all this new stuff going to slow it down, that's the thing that interests me. If the team have too many things to maintain, just how good a job can they do?
For the proverbial 'year of the Linux desktop' this is the sort of thing that we need. The flashy stuff might not matter to the slashdot crowd but to the average joe, the cosmetic improvements itself would be a reason to consider linux. We just had that article about better designed GUI's rating over better functioning programs, looks like the Gnome developers have taken that to heart.
Yeah, epiphany is great. Much faster and more stable than firefox, plus it has native widgets instead of XUL. It's support for extensions is not as good, so I still use firefox when I need Firebug, but 99% of the time I'm in epiphany.
Any chance that they've removed the dependency on Microsoft's patented .NET technologies via Mono?
(Yes, I know you can manually remove bits of the Gnome environment to get rid of Mono; but the Gnome environment by default includes Mono.)
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
There is also the idea that html is supposed to degrade fairly gracefully, so unlike say a C compiler, even if a browser doesn't fully support the standard, things may (and very often are) still okay. That is where testing comes in. XML based things mess up this graceful degrading a bit, but that is a whole other discussion.
I know I'm being unfair that way - I tried to make it clear what versions I was comparing, but you're right. The comparison is unfair.
But the thing is, I don't think either Epiphany/Gecko 1.9 or Epiphany/Webkit will be That much of a difference to existing Epiphany. It will render more sites better, and with less resource use. I don't feel very excited. I mentioned a bunch of advantages of Firefox 3 in the GP post.
The thing is, Firefox 2 is quite crap, Epiphany 2.20 is mostly great, and Firefox 3 is quite good. Fancy extensions can't turn crap into something great. Fancy extensions can turn something good into something great, though. The only reason I started using Firefox again was because I wrote webpages and needed to access Firebug, and eventually, I just didn't feel like restarting the browser anymore. I could probably code that search engine extension myself - I've played a bit with creating Firefox extensions, and it's quite easy to rewrite the entire UI. On the other hand, I still haven't found a way to make Epiphany's tabs shrink, which annoys the hell out of me.
Firefox 3 is, in my opinion, simply Good Enough to make Epiphany pointless. But I'm probably, and hopefully, wrong.
What I don't get with the VAST majority (I'd say "all", but there may be an exception I don't know about) is why clicking on a spot in the "progress bar" for a video or song doesn't take me to exactly the spot. The seeker just jumps forward or backward a little in that direction. I can take it and DRAG it to the exact spot, but it won't jump there on a click.
:() an I'll be tickled pink.
:).
This aggravates me to no end. Quicktime on my Mac gets it right. Windows Media Player even gets it right (though I instead use Media Player Classic on Windows, but it does it right too). I'm not even asking for this to be default behaviour - but for all the touted "customizability" of Linux apps, I sure as hell would like a little checkmark to enable this behavior somewhere in the program.
I've STILL not found a media player on Linux that I really like. Media Player Classic is the pinnacle of video player for me, but really all I want is a window, plays video, seek bar that goes to the location that I tell it, and I want my controls part of the same window as the video (I'll go full screen if I want to hide them). Get me that packaged into a program that doesn't crash when I play videos (a la VLC playing any WMV video on Mac
Rant off
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
Umm, newsflash, the kde (or windows) file chooser isn't 'intuitive' either - fuck, they're not even easy to use.
The gnome one is awful, but so are the rest. I mean for fucks sake, in windows you double-click too slow and suddenly you're renaming files! Who wants to rename a file when opening it?
_
\\/ are accustomed' - First Lensman
Maybe because he's used them. As somebody who was written (and maintained) large programs in both PyGTK and PyQt, I must say that these projects are a great argument in favor of using plain C.
The PyGTK project, for the past several years, has released an update to its bindings within a month of the corresponding GTK+ library. PyQt's last version lagged by about a year. (Not a good sign.) Long after the Qt people had gone to Qt 4.0, we were stuck with PyQt for Qt 3.3, because that's the latest stable release. (It was even hard to get PyQt fixes, because the few PyQt developers spent almost all of their time trying to get PyQt 4 out the door.)
PyGTK has always done just what I expected it to. In PyQt, we always seemed to have trouble with object lifetimes. Qt tried to be just a bit too clever with C++ destructors and object lifetimes and such, and it just didn't translate into HLLs. Between this, and needing to pass C++ method signatures (as a string!) to signal handlers, you really had to write C++-in-Python. It's not really possible to write PyQt code without constantly thinking about the C++ layer. In GTK, I never thought about C: I just wrote Python with a Python GUI library.
I also find the phrase "quirky C required for Gtk+" funny. The C used by GTK+ has always seemed perfectly normal to me. If you want quirky, take a look at the "meta-object compiler" (yet another preprocessor!) that Qt's C++ uses.