Upcoming GNOME 3.4 Previewed

Allan Day, interface designer for Red Hat, recently posted some screenshots and information about the upcoming GNOME 3.4. The first beta of 3.4 was released a few days ago and Day's post gives users a glimpse into some of the new features.

Day explains that the beta release marks the beginning of the UI freeze, so "now seems like a good time to check out the cool stuff that's coming in 3.4." Day begins his tour stating that applications are "where many of the big changes can be found for this release." Documents and Contact will now be joined by Boxes but more importantly, they will sport a sleeker new look.

For example, "GNOME Documents no longer has a sidepane, and instead features inline collections and a big thumbnail grid that fills the entire window. The searching and filtering experience has also been greatly improved."

A closer look reveals that even the minute details were given some attention. Day said, "Smoothing rough edges and improving polish has been a big focus for 3.4." This shot of new style Spin buttons shows how clean and tidy things are shaping up to be.

There were base GNOME improvements as well. One Day mentions is a change in which search is provided. He explains:

One of the most important of these is the new ability for applications to act as search providers for the Activities Overview. GNOME Documents is already taking advantage of this, meaning that you will be able to search your documents directly from the overview.

These changes to the way that GNOME 3 does search means that any application will be able to provide search results for the overview. Eventually we hope that searching from the overview will allow you to tap into virtually all of your applications from a single place.

See Day's blog post for lots more detail.