It's just 5 more days to go for Fedora 16 release which is named "VERNE". Features of F16 states that it will ship with GNOME 3.2. And Release Notes of GNOME 3.2 lists pretty good features that I longed for so long.
When I go through "What's New for Users" on GNOME, it seems that the developers are more concentrated on making the user easier to interact with his/her online data. In other words making the user interact with his/her online data in a more convenient way.
There are couple of new features that I longed for,
"Notifications in the lower-right corner now include a counter. This makes it easier to see how many emails are waiting for you without having to open your email program, or to determine how many messages you have missed in a particular chat."
I really love the chat notification system implemented with GNOME 3 but if we didn't see the notification it disappears after few seconds where it is gone for ever. We have to point the bottom of the screen, click on individual chat and see it there are any new messages which is tedious specially when there are few chats going on. Now it seems better, where I only have to point to the bottom of the screen and it will show me how many new messages are there. I wish that the notification (at least the new number of chat messages) are displayed in the top most bar where it is visible all the time. Moving on, here is the next feature I like the most,
Online Accounts - "Documents, contacts, calendars — They can be stored locally on the computer, but storing this type of information online is becoming increasingly popular. In GNOME 3.2, Online Accounts provides one place to manage these online sources. These online accounts are automatically used by Documents, Contacts, Empathy, Evolution as well as the calendar drop-down."
When somebody ask me "are you free on next Monday (let's say)", I really wished I could click on the drop down calendar on my desktop and look for for the schedule for the day. For the time being, I have to fire up google calendar or gmail and see. Now it's going to be possible, one step less, life a lot more easier.
Apart from that I'll be able to go through my online docs locally the same way I do with my local documents. Hopefully I'll be able to modify them locally and they will be reflected online. Sort of synchronization.
There are some more pretty cool features lined up with GNOME 3.2. It's just 5 more days hopefully and after that I hope to do a fresh install. F16 with GNOME 3.2 and other features like introduction of GRUB 2 will mark a more user friendly and stable release.
There's a lot more to explore. Waiting to see how it goes...
I'm using F16 and have for about two weeks. I really love it, having been away from Fedora since about 2004.
ReplyDeleteOnline accounts is awesome, and works the way you'd expect it to, except for online documents, which don't seem to register with the system (or, at least I can't figure out how to call them up).
That's a shame, because work is a Google Apps shop and the added integration would be great.
well there's only 4 more days to go and I'm waiting for the official release :-)
ReplyDeleteHopefully they will be improved as time pass by :-)