fishsoup

Just wanted to quickly mention the three Google Summer of Code proposals that were accepted related to GNOME Shell.

David Jordan is going to work on Application-aware Window Management . This is a really interesting proposal to allow applications to expose more content to the desktop window switching than just a single toplevel; for example, to make it possible to look at all of the tabs of your web browser and switch directly to one of them. Marina will be the mentor the project.

Nathan Lo is going to work on Multiple monitor support for workspaces. The combination of multiple monitors and multiple workspaces has always been uncomfortable in GNOME. Switching all your monitors at once just isn’t what you normally want. It’s more likely that you want to keep one monitor fixed and switch another. This problem becomes more pressing in GNOME Shell where we’ve tried to make workspaces easy to use and intuitive. So the project will explore how it works to have separate workspaces on the different monitors and what the appropriate way is to present that to the user. I’ll mentor this one.

And finally, Siegfried Gevatter is going going to work on Zeitgeist Integration. Currently GNOME Shell has a very simple flat list of recent documents in the overview. We’ve wanted to move to a more time-base “journal” approach, and possibly add extra features like tagging. That is very similar to what the Zeitgeist project is about, so rather than duplicating effort, it would be very nice to just take the data that Zeitgeist is collecting and show it in the GNOME Shell user interface. This will be mentored by Seif from the Zeitgeist project.

It’s time for another GNOME Shell status report. Let me start off with a screenshot of what it looks like today:

The most obvious change visible here since my last post are workspaces. The static image doesn’t real do it justice. As you add and remove workspaces they slide in and off the screen with a slick animation. (It’s even better than that movie now.) You can drag and drop applications between windows or drag an application or recent document from the sidebar to a workspace to launch it. The workspaces are mostly Dan’s work, though I spent a day or so adding the window dragging. (And then Dan cleaned that up into a nice reusable DND framework that we can use all over the place.)

Marina added the recent documents section to the sidebar. As you can see, the documents get appropriate thumbnails:

More recently she’s been working on adding the ability to expand the sidebar sections to the full screen so you can browse More applications or files.

Colin, taking a break from saving the world for D-BUS, added a user menu to the right side of the panel, based on Jon McCann’s applet from GDM. Now you can actually log out, switch users, etc, from within gnome-shell.

Colin also did a quick hack to get the current GNOME taskbar to show up at the bottom of the screen so that you can see minimized applications and appications flashing for urgent attention. We’d like to do something better, or at least visually slicker, in the long term, but this fills in a big hole in the abiity to just use GNOME shell day-to-day.

Jonathan Matthew took visual effects that had been done upstream for Mutter and moved them to our Tweener and Javascript framework. This involved some Mutter patches to keep the different effects from stomping on each other. Again, it’s not something I really can take a static screenshot of… you’ll have to build GNOME Shell yourself to try it out, but there are animations now for windows mapping, maximizing, minimizing, being closed and so forth.

The largest number of contributions so far have been to a unsurprising place – to the build setup script: William Lachance, Mads Villadsen, Siegfried Gevatter, and Timbobsteve have all contributed to it. It now figures out what packages you need to install for your distribution ahead of time, instead of breaking obscurely halfway through, making it easier than ever to try GNOME Shell out. Thanks also to Achim Frase for testing and bug reporting.

There’s some more interesting work in the pipeline – enhancements to the “More” views, monitoring the applications that the user is using and so forth. See our Todo for ideas about ways you could help, or join us on IRC in #gnome-shell  and ask questions.