GNOME 3.8 is Nearly Ready

GNOME 3.8 is due March 27 and developer Giovanni Campagna says it's looking good. Campagna is proud of how many bugs and details were addressed this cycle describing the detail board color coding as eco-friendly because of all the green. This evening he spoke of several in particular.

Campagna reports that "OSDs and global keybindings work in the overview, the screen lock and when a modal dialog is up" in addition to addressing a number of little "annoyances and inconsistencies in the shell." Campagna also worked quite a bit on adding filters and toggles to Notifications, and with this the Panel can be tidied up a bit. He continues to discuss his work on a new application framework, so see the rest of his post for that.

 Top 10 New Features for Users:

1. Overhauled window layout in Activities Overview - bigger thumbnails, cleaner appearance

2. New Applications view - Frequent apps first, All applications now uses folders to tidy up

3. Smooth scrolling now implemented in the menu thingy

4. New Search controls and results from any app

5. Updated and new settings panels for sharing, network, power, region, etc

6. Updated alarm dialogs and clocks, new artwork

7. Switch to WebKit2 for browser - stability, responsiveness, and security; Flash and friends work again

8. Treeview is back in the file manager

9. New First Run, complete with videos

10. Classic Mode: uses extensions to build desktop experience, including classic menu, window list, traditional appearance (themeable with css)