GNOME, Its State and Future

In addition to the file manager, another highly visible part of the desktop is the panel. It is a place to put icons to launch applications, access application menus, manage open windows and run small utility applications that display the status of the machine, play CDs or display time. We recognize that people are not the same, and different people like to work differently. That is why the panel is highly customizable, and this customization has been greatly extended in the new version. The panel supports many new and different modes of operation. For one, you can select a size for your panels depending on your tastes and screen size. There are also new modes to place panels anywhere along an edge, and even anywhere on screen. In addition, all icons on the panel are now anti-aliased, and external applets have the ability to use anti-aliasing for their display. Many other smaller additions make the panel more configurable and easier to use, and your GNOME experience more pleasurable.

Another noticeable improvement coming to GNOME is GConf, a new configuration API and back end. This will add the features not provided by the simplistic configuration API in GNOME 1.0. It will make it easy to plug in different back ends for the actual storage, so you can change how and where the data is actually stored without touching the applications themselves.

Since many GNOME applications utilize CORBA, a framework for locating and activating these applications is necessary. OAF, the Object Activation Framework, provides a simple method for finding and running the CORBA objects available on a computer system. Distributed operation is supported, allowing activation of objects on a network of computers being used in a GNOME desktop. The flexibility of OAF enables it to be used outside of GNOME programs, allowing non-GNOME CORBA applications to be utilized alongside GNOME applications.

Supporting the various human languages is a complex task, not because of the difficulty, but because of the wide range of communication systems humans have came up with in the last few thousand years.

Since our goal in the GNOME project is empowering users and giving them a chance to run free software, we have to make sure everyone on this planet can use our tools with their language, and that our applications can be used by all people.

Gtk+ is the toolkit used by GNOME and the various GNOME applications. The Gtk+ team led by Owen Taylor and Tim Janik is making steady progress towards the Gtk+ 1.4 release.

The major highlights of Gtk+ 1.4 include flicker-free drawing, better internationalization support (through Pango), and integration of the BeOS and Win32 ports.

Applications written against the Gtk+ 1.4 and GNOME APIs will be portable to Windows and BeOS. (Keep in mind that GNOME/Gtk+ applications talk to a windowing system layer called Gdk, which is independent of X11. This is why it is simple to port them to other architectures.)

The people who brought you GNOME are programmers, and most are not graphic designers. They do not have all the experience required to make the best user interface possible. It is hard to write good user interfaces, and we are trying to address this. The GNOME User Interface team is responsible for redesigning the look and feel of various GNOME applications by studying the current application failures and using what is good from other applications and systems.

GNOME is part of the GNU project, and it is free software (some people call this open-source software), created for the people by the people. We want to make software that grants users various freedoms.

It is not software owned by some large faceless company. You, therefore, are the person best qualified to contribute to its improvement. Although programming help is extremely welcome, you don't need to be able to program in order to help. Documentation, translations, web site maintenance, packaging and graphic design are just a few of the many areas where people are already making contributions. If you dislike an aspect of GNOME and want it improved or want a totally new feature added, the way to make this change happen is to start contributing.

You might think any contribution you could make would be unimportant, but if many people make small contributions, the result is a large increase in the progress being made. Your efforts for GNOME will continue to make the power of UNIX easily accessible to average users.

Resources

Thanks

Contributing to GNOME