Legend says that the best GNOME release is always the next one. Here’s a quick selection of features I’ll work on for GNOME 3.18. Hope you all enjoy!
Calendar
Calendar was my gatweay to GNOME, thus it’s my cherished project. Some good news: the always-awsome Erick Pérez Castellanos kindly shared the maintance duties of GNOME Calendar with me. Yay!
For Calendar, we’re preparing an exciting 3.18 release:
- A new, experimental calendar manager, where users will be able to add, modify and remove calendars from it’s system. (in calendar-editor branch)
- A first tentative implementation of keyboard navigation, to help power users save their time & energy when using Calendar. (in wip/keyboard-navigation branch)
- The highly wanted week view, redesigned and unbelievably amazing – thanks to Lapo Calamandrei again.
- A new event editor, now able to handle attendants, attachments, different timezones e much more.
- Many bugfixes and code cleanups.
Files
As part of my Summer of Code project, I’ll work Files’ (a.k.a. Nautilus) new Network & Drives page. Yaay!
Files will receive a bunch of improvements this cycle too:
- The new Network & Drives page – mockups are mature enought, thanks to Allan Day.
- A better sidebar – and Gtk+ will receive it too – thanks to Carlos Soriano’s work.
- Improvements on bookmark management.
- New dialog for renaming & creating folders and files.
- Many bugfixes and cleanups.
Other projects
While I’m not directly involved, I’m personally very excited for the new features landing around. We’ll see some improvements on Totem (a.k.a Videos) and Shell. GNOME Builder is growing extremely fast, and Hergert’s contributions overflowed to other projects like GtkSourceView, gEdit and even Gtk+. It’s so good to have such an active and generous contributor as Christian Hergert working full-time on GNOME stack, we see a non-stopping flow of contributions everywhere!
This year’s Summer of Code’s accepted projects are looking very promising. The ones that really caught my attention were:
- The new Gtk+ image viewing widget, from Timm Bader.
- New event sources for Shell’s drop down menu, from Shivam Mishra.
- A better chatting experience for Polari, from Bastian Ilso.
- Improvements on Android interaction with GNOME, from Ronan Timinello.
I’m looking forward to see the results. And, by the end of this cycle, we’ll have a better GNOME desktop, which (I hope) users will enjoy to the last bit!
Georges Stavracas 
Whats the conditions for a drive being in the sidebar vs a drive being in the Other Locations page? Also, with the other locations page would there be a used space counter?
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Drives will always stay in “Other Locations” page. Only bookmarks and non-fixed locations (like USB drives, removable devices, mounted network points, etc) appear in the sidebar.
The current mockups doesn’t show the used/free space of the drives, but this can be reviewed – I personally think it’s very helpful to have this indicator there too.
Remember that it is an ongoing effort, and we’re very open to constructive suggestions and discussions. Don’t hesitate to get in touch!
Best regards.
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Does that mean ‘batch-renaming’ or files is coming to Gnome?
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Oops, I meant ‘batch renaming ‘of’ files..
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Any chance we could see a proper tree view in the sidebar? I’m glad to see improvements being made to nautilus, but I have to admit for giving up on it in favor of the nemo fork.
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NAUTILUS:
Please put the buttons back for folder/list view or make it a toggleable option.
Put “open terminal here” in right click context menu.
Put “copy path” in right click context menu for files, and folders, and empty space.
Make an unlock button that changes the terminal to root.
Have a pinned section in directory tree.
IMO Gnome needs a native dock similar to DockbarX that can be dragged around the screen border.
Improve Classic shell by dropping overview.
You should be able to save a list of addons for 1 click install on Gnome.org. Should also save preferences and be able to share the 1 click install.
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For feature proposals and bug reports, please use bugzilla.gnome.org.
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Is Gnome calendar related to California calendar by Yorba?
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We’re parallel project. While aiming the same target, California uses different technologies and has different plans.
In the end, it’s up to you to decide which one fits you better 🙂
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I hope that the improvements to Files include the possibility to easily see how much space is left on a drive/network share. Previously, this was shown in the statusbar, but now there is no instantly visible option in Nautilus. Please bring this option back, whether it shows the space left in the status bar or in the device list (with a green bar under the device like in Nemo), that doesn’t matter, but for people juggling frequently with different flash disks, hard disks, etc. this is a problem. Thanks in advance!
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I totally agree with this
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I agree with most of your ideas, even though the current mockups does not show any indicators of disk usage. Time for some small improvements here.
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I got a review about GNOME calendar, that it doesn’t support Adwaita Dark Theme variant (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1217167).
Will this happen in 3.18? I didn’t switch to GNOME 3.16 Just because of this, but planning for a switch to 3.18 if this happens.
Thanks for your work on such great piece of free software.
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It’d be nice to have this bug opened upstream (at bugzilla.gnome.org), and I’ll appreciate if anyone do it.
As mockups are designed for using the light variant of themes, we force Calendar to not use the dark one. Once we have mockups (or even reviews) about a dark-variant Calendar, we’ll push it to production.
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hooray! https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758057
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Re-add type-ahead search in Nautilus.
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Will there ever be a way to use alternative calendars (e.g. Hijri, Hebrew, Jalali, Chinese) in Gnome? These calendars are actually used everyday in many parts of the world and being able to use them in Gnome would make life easier for the users living in countries that use one of these as their official calendar.
By the way, thanks for your hard work 🙂
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Not for 3.18, nor 3.20. After the Gregorian calendar is very polished and tested, it’d be very nice to support other calendar systems like the ones you mentioned.
Since I particularly don’t have enought knowledge about these other calendars, it’ll take a longer time to study and implement them – unless someone kindly enought contributes here 🙂
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