GNOME, Its State and Future

The GNOME Project is aimed at making UNIX attractive and easy to use. To help achieve the goals of the GNU project, we want to make sure that users are presented with a full suite of applications, as well as a desktop that enables them to manage their computers effectively. The GNOME team has been focusing on creating a reusable infrastructure of development libraries and tools, along with productivity applications based on this infrastructure.

The goals of the GNOME Project can be divided into three areas:

The desktop environment is not the set of applications, such as a web browser or a spreadsheet, with which a user interacts with the system to do useful tasks; rather, it is the utilities which provide the user with control over the working environment. As the most immediately apparent part of GNOME, the desktop environment includes the file manager, panel and help browser, as well as other utilities necessary for the day-to-day maintenance of one's computing environment.

The GNOME session begins with the GNOME Display Manager which grants access to the system. The beauty of this process is that the author of GDM rewrote the whole login sequence to be secure and extensible. The GDM code base is designed to be robust and secure.

Figure 1. GNOME Screenshot

From there, the GNOME panel and the GNOME file manager provide the desktop functionality to let users launch applications and manage their information see Figure 1).

The GNOME desktop was the first desktop to include application themes. Application themes are a way to make applications look different. People can choose to make their desktop look like other popular systems, or tune it to suit their needs and personal interface desire. The next major release of GNOME will include a new, updated and better integrated theme mechanism, and also theme packages that will affect the entire desktop, not just the applications.

We also integrate the GNOME personal information management system (calendar, address book, task list) with the Palm Pilot, and more systems can be plugged into the system. To learn more about this feature, visit http://www.gnome.org/gnome-pilot/.

Just being able to choose a screen saver, organize icons, browse application menus and move files doesn't mean you are a productive member of society. What users want is a set of applications to help them accomplish actual work. This is where the GNOME Workshop project comes in. Many applications not done by the core GNOME team are available, but would be much more useful if they were integrated with each other and the desktop. The GNOME Workshop project wants to make a set of highly integrated applications to do what you need, whether it is managing finances, writing letters or editing a picture. Components of GNOME Workshop that have already reached a functional state include a highly capable spreadsheet (Gnumeric), a word-processing application (AbiWord), and an image-editing application (the famous GIMP). Other component applications are coming along quickly, and news of their releases will be listed on the GNOME Workshop home page.

Figure 2. Gnumeric and Bonobo

Another important part of GNOME is the development environment. UNIX has not had a history of applications with a consistent and powerful graphical interface. The few graphical applications that existed all behaved and looked a little differently, usually did not have a powerful interface, and were not easy for their developers to write. GNOME addresses this last need by simplifying the development of applications, allowing the creation of easy-to-use and powerful graphical interfaces.

GNOME provides a high-level application framework which frees the programmer from having to worry about the low-level details of graphical application interfaces, allowing him to concentrate on the actual application. Glade, a tool for user-interface design used by many GNOME applications, takes this concept a step further by allowing graphical creation of a program's user interface. The Libglade library allows user interfaces to be created at runtime from the XML interface description files saved by Glade. GNOME also recognizes that not every programming language is useful for every kind of job. We paid special attention to making the GNOME APIs easy to wrap and export to other programming languages, to let people develop their GNOME-based applications in their language of choice.

In addition to C, which the core GNOME libraries are written in, there are bindings for many languages, including C++, Objective C, Guile, Python, Perl, Ada95, Tom, Pascal, Haskell and others. Java bindings are in development; when coupled with gcc's ability to compile Java code, Java may become a viable alternative for GNOME programming.