הערות השחרור עבור GNOME ‏2.26

למרות שבגירסאות קודמות של GNOME כבר קיימת דרך פשוטה לצריבת תקליטורים, החל מ-GNOME ‏2.26 אפשרות הצריבה הורחבה ליישום מלא ומסור ליצירת דיסקים: Brasero.

Brasero delivers new features that were not supported by the CD burner, such as audio CD burning with audio track preview, track splitting, and volume normalization; full multisession support; integrity checks; a cover editor; and support for multiple burning backends.

איור 2 ‏Brasero

People who appreciated the way CD burning used to work will not have to relearn their habits; the existing interfaces are also available. Applications ◂ System Tools ◂ CD/DVD Creator in the menu still brings up a folder you can drag into. CD (ISO) image files can still be burnt directly from the file manager by right-clicking on them.

Brasero allows other GNOME applications to add disc burning capabilities. For example, the Media Player now allows you to burn the home movie you're watching to either (S)VCD or DVD.

‏GNOME ‏2.26 כולל כעת תוסף למנהל הקבצים שמאפשר שיתוף פשוט של קבצים אישיים בעזרת WebDAV, ‏HTTP ו-Bluetooth.

איור 3 שיתוף קבצים

GNOME's email and groupware suite, Evolution, has gained two important features for helping users who are migrating to GNOME from Microsoft Windows environments.

First is the ability to import Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders (PST files) directly in Evolution. Email, contacts, appointments, tasks and journal entries are supported. Previously, the files had to be imported via a third-party utility, such as Thunderbird on Windows.

Second is support for Microsoft Exchange's MAPI protocol. This is the protocol that Microsoft Outlook uses to communicate with Exchange. Previously, Evolution only supported Exchange's SOAP protocol, which is not available on all Exchange servers. This support significantly improves Evolution's integration with Exchange servers.

‏נגן המדיה של GNOME ממשיך להשתפר עם מספר תכונות חדשות.

Many media player appliances now offer the option to share the stored content via either the UPnP or DLNA protocols. With the new Coherence DLNA/UPnP client, it is possible to browse and play this content from within the GNOME Media Player.

While GNOME's Media Player already has the ability to display subtitles for a movie, this still required you to have the subtitle data available. As of GNOME 2.26, this restriction is gone. Using the new subtitle downloader plugin, the Media Player will automatically find subtitles for you.

PulseAudio is the new audio input/output routing and mixing framework that is being adopted by many free software platforms. It has support for features like per-application volume and dynamic plug-and-play and rerouting of sound devices (e.g. USB soundcards).

GNOME 2.26 can take advantage of these features with its new volume control and new Sound Preferences tool.

איור 4 הגדרות קלט של בקרת העוצמה

The Sound Preferences tool integrates the choice of sound devices, application volumes, alert volume and alert theme in one place.

For those without PulseAudio, the old (GStreamer) mixer will still be available and has even been augmented with a sound theme tab to match the new interface.

The Display Settings tool now has a better view of which monitors or projectors you have plugged in, and makes it easier than before to set up your monitors in various configurations.

איור 5 Display Settings

The Display Settings tool is also more reliable even with unrobust graphics drivers, as it now presents a confirmation dialog after making changes to your monitor's settings. Your settings will be restored to a known-good configuration even if your machine crashes while changing the monitor's settings.

The Empathy instant messaging application, which uses the Telepathy communications framework, has taken another step forward with features including file transfer where supported by Telepathy (currently Jabber and link-local XMPP), chat room invite support, sound themes and notifications, and an improved VoIP experience.

איור 6 שיחות וידאו ב-Empathy

VoIP using the free Theora and Speex codecs is now possible over Jingle to clients that support them.

Support for sound themes and notification bubble has also been added.

GNOME's web browser, Epiphany, gains an exciting new feature of an improved location bar, similar to the Awesome Bar popularized by Firefox 3.0.

איור 7 סרגל מיקום חדש

GNOME 2.26 now integrates with the fprintd fingerprint service to allow users to enroll fingerprints for use in authentication.

If a system is configurated for allowing fingerprint authentication, users can enroll their fingerprints via Desktop ◂ Preferences ◂ About Me from the panel menu.

בנוסף לשינויים גדולים, קיימים גם תוספות ושינויים קטנים שמלווים כל שחרור חדש של GNOME.

The Orca screenreader has had significant work done to reduce program bugs and improve performance, with over 160 bugs fixed for GNOME 2.26. Some of the improvements include:

‏+GTK ‏2.16 הוא השחרור האחרון של ערכת הכלים +GTK, אשר היא בליבו של GNOME. ‏+GTK ‏2.16 כולל מספר תכונות חדשות עבור מפתחים, ובנוסף כולל תיקוני באגים רבים וניקיון עבור +GTK ‏3.0 המתקרב.

GtkEntry widgets can now display icons at the front or back of the entry widget (depending on your locale's text direction). These icons are optionally prelightable and clickable.

איור 8 איקונים ב-GtkEntry

GtkEntry widgets can now also be used to display a progress bar.

איור 9 ‏GtkEntry עם פס התקדמות

A new interface, GtkActivatable, has been added for widgets that can be connected to a GtkAction.

libbrasero-media provides an API for accessing the disc burning infrastructure in GNOME. An example of its use can be found in GNOME's Media Player, which includes a plugin to burn DVDs and VCDs from a video.

A new library, libevview, has been created to provide the EvView widget used in Evince. This allows other applications to embed Evince's document viewing component.

libevdocument is a library that makes it possible to develop third-party document backends for use with Evince without having to add them to the Evince source tree.

Both libraries already have available Python bindings included in gnome-python-desktop.

The Anjuta integrated development environment has gained some great improvements in GNOME 2.26. Most important is a completely rewritten symbol management engine that, together with the new bookmark system, allows for much faster code navigation. Auto-detection of any libraries using pkg-config for code completion and calltips is now possible.

In addition, the integration of version control systems and the Glade interface designer have taken a major step forward. The file tree now shows status icons for all files in projects using the Subversion or Git version control systems. It is possible to automatically generate callbacks from Glade, and GtkBuilder files are now supported.

For better support of the GNOME Mobile platform, remote debugging using gdbserver and support for Scratchbox (version 2) have also been added.