What the future holds (or plans for GNOME 3.20)

We did it. Yes, we finally made it. We’re having the 3.18 release, and is the best release ever – just like every GNOME release. We saw many cool features landing, a number of awsome project which the GNOME interns (hey, I was one of them too!) worked on this summer and lots of exciting news going around.

Every new GNOME release, however, actually just an excuse for the next one. There’s always room for improvements and the work never ends. I personally like the beginning of new release cycles so that I can plan ahead what I’ll probably work on. And why not share it?

Calendar

Oh, poor Calendar. Received so little attention for 3.18 release… fear no more! Calendar will receive it’s well deserved love. Here’s what’ll happen:

  • Calendar theme will get some attention. Minor details will be fixed.
  • Every single struggle pointed by Gina’s usability tests is going to be fixed.
  • We’ll finally have Drag n’ Drop support!
  • Hopefully, Week view will be ready.
  • A new view will be available too – but that’s a surprise! 😉
  • Much like To Do, Calendar will receive some error reporting UI too.

To Do

The new kid in town will also receive some love. Since it’s very fresh and young, there’s plenty of ideas to try here:

  • A new flow grid view will land (see Google Keep’s grid view to have an idea).
  • Support for subtasks (and the many cool things we can do with that).
  • Full GOA support (actually depends on Evolution-Data-Server work).

Nautilus

I started working on Nautilus as part of my Summer of Code internship, and – guess what – I won’t abbandon it! Such a core component of GNOME stack must receive as much attention as it possibly can. For this cycle:

  • Improve the way we do bookmarking on Nautilus (possibly will reflect on Gtk+ too).
  • Rework the search UI.
  • Remove the duplicated GtkPlacesView code.
  • Many bugfixes.

Gtk+

Together with Nautilus, I managed to inject some code in Gtk+ as part of my GSoC internship too. And I just realized that I’m the official(?) maintainer of a Gtk+ widget! As such, that’s what I’ll do on Gtk+:

  • Show the free space of local disks, as shown in the mockups.
  • Cleanup & document the code.
  • Expose it as a public widget (and also remove the duplicated code from Nautilus).
  • Improve the places sidebar.

I’m also hoping to work on smaller things with Music and Maps. And last week, I made my first patches for Grilo! Stay tuned for updates on that.

There’s not much to say besides that. I sincerely hope you guys enjoy using the new GNOME 3.18 release, just as much as I enjoyed working on it! See ya!


14 responses to “What the future holds (or plans for GNOME 3.20)”

  1. Thanks! Maybe you can try to make Gnome Music use fewer clutter/Xorg cycles when it’s idle? I assume that’s more of an issue with PyGtk than anything else but right now it’s the only thing that makes me want to keep using Rhythmbox instead 🙂

    1. Music doesn’t use Clutter or Xorg directly. The problem is the album view, which uses a GtkIconView-like widget, which has long-known performance issues.

      Gladly, Vladim Rutkovsky (the Music maintainer) is a very active GNOME contributor and already has a long-term fix proposal for the issue, which hopefully we’ll see for 3.20!

  2. Thanks for your work and keep on 🙂

    1. Sooooo… is Books getting any love? Because Books is of importance to me.

  3. […] “Every new GNOME release, however, actually just an excuse for the next one. There’s always room for improvements and the work never ends. I personally like the beginning of new release cycles so that I can plan ahead what I’ll probably work on. And why not share it?” said Georges Stavracas, a GNOME developer. […]

  4. Great work, any chance a future nautilus will have integration with bluetooth again – maybe similar to “network places” ?

    There used to be send to->bluetooth which was useful for getting stuff on phones without using a seperate app – which is dead handy when you need it.

  5. Hello, thank you very much for your work.
    Is there any way to install gnome-todo in fedora 22?
    The link “download & install” on the wiki, not headed anywhere.

    Cheers

  6. […] antecedência em que eu provavelmente vou trabalhar. E por que não compartilhá-lo?” disse Georges Stavracas, um desenvolvedor do […]

  7. Stefan Held Avatar
    Stefan Held

    Please think about implementing synchronisation for Todoist with Gnome Todo.

    This would be an absolut hit. 🙂

  8. Now if only:
    1. white space padding above and below the calendar events in the month view could be removed making me able to show more entries per day (I have a lot of those… and yes week view, but I like the overview of month view.)
    and
    2. the system language could be split in to typing and showing (Or have an advanced button for that?).

    Then I would be content… for about a day. 😛

    Regardless of that, congrats on 3.18! I’m sudo pacman -Syu:ing like a mad man in anticipation.

    I’m trying to build up time and courage to start contributing myself, and maybe fix the things I think is missing, but the time part is really hard right now.

    / V

  9. This is not an advertisement, but you probably want to check my thoughts (plus and minus) about the already released GNOME 3.18 here in my homepage: https://hakamybs.wordpress.com/2015/11/06/my-couple-of-thoughts-of-fedora-23-and-gnome-3-18/

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