gnome 3

Months ago, the GNOME developers started a serious work on refining the overall GNOME experience, aimed at redefining the upcoming (presently, work in progress) GNOME software stack.

Following a simplistic philosophy, "to provide a better way to access and work with content", the GNOME developers have just announced the near-future development goals, goals created and followed with hassle-free content managing, exposing and digesting in mind.

GNOME 3.4 final has been released, marking, in this version, 41000 changes done by 1275 people (since GNOME 3.2).

The new 3.4 updated packages have already started to land in Ubuntu 12.04, although there are packages left behind due to Precise's LTS nature.

What is new in GNOME 3.4?

According to various GNOME developers, Epiphany web-browser is to be transformed and radically changed into a modern UI, design that is to follow GNOME's new design direction.

The latest version of Epiphany, 3.3.4 version, is definitely a bold step towards the above goals, marking the first iteration that features the new UI.

Simplicity is an attribute applied to the top part, at the moment, the navigation, refresh and accessing the menu are available via four small monochrome icons (they don't follow one's icon theme).

Although they are relative small, GNOME Games have been entertaining us in the last years, but "unfortunately over time the games have struggled to keep up with the latest GNOME technology due to the time required to do this".

Few days ago, we presented the new GNOME's Application Web mockups that are to probably be implemented in the near future, carrying the new GNOME Design approach.

Zeitgeist's Seif Lotfy, shortly after the Application Web mockups landed in the wild, has started and finished an early prototype, implementing in code the mockups' main "lines".

GNOME's default web-browser, Epiphany, is known as a lightweight but decent in features application.

With the new GNOME design approach, it seems, that Epiphany will probably have a new successor, Web application, that is to enhance GNOME's web experience.

Ubuntu 11.10 was launched with GNOME 3.2, but, due to their late arrival, some newer GNOME packages didn't land in Oneiric.

As for Oneiric Ocelot, for these new packages a PPA has been created that offers mainly GNOME 3.2 packages, like Epiphany Web Browser 3.2.1, Totem Movie Player 3.2.1, GNOME Documents 0.2, Tracker 0.12 (app useful for indexing files), Xchat GNOME, as well as various updated libraries.

GNOME Boxes is a great tool that allows you to use another virtual or local OS via a fancy interface with easy-to-use steps to be followed in order to connect to an existing machine over the network or just to create a virtual machine that runs on your computer.

As seen in the bellow clip, creating a virtual machine is quite easy, all you need to do is to select an ISO and follow some simple steps due to its express mode (fully automated/unattended process).

Blender is a full-fledged 3D suite for modelling, animation, rendering, interaction creation and much, much more that comes with consistent documentation, but it seems that video tutorials are sometimes easier-to-digest.

GNOME Design's Jakub Steiner has started a "campaign" to expose various tricks and tips about Blender in a design-oriented appraoch.

GNOME applications are to receive major updates probably in GNOME 3.4.

GNOME 3.2 introduced GNOME Documents and GNOME Contacts, places that globally incorporates in a fancy interface one's documents and contacts.