GNOME 3.2 Release Notes

1. Introduction The GNOME Project is an international community that works to make great software available to all. GNOME focuses on ease of use, stability, first-class internationalisation and accessibility. GNOME is Free and Open Source Software. This means that all our work is free to use, modify and redistribute. GNOME is released every six months. Since the last version, 3.0, approximately 1270 people made about 38500 changes to GNOME. Interested in what we do? Follow us on Identi.ca, Twitter or Facebook. If you would like to help make our products even better, join us. We always welcome more people who can translate from English, assist with marketing, write documentation, test, or do development. You can also support us financially by becoming a Friend of GNOME. If you want to celebrate the release of 3.2 with others, check out whether a Release Party takes place nearby!

3. What's New in Accessibility GNOME 3.2 is the most beautiful accessible desktop to date, with an emphasis on being reliable and usable for everyone. Until GNOME 3.2, assistive technology users have faced an unfortunate dilemma: It was not possible to dynamically activate accessibility support. Thanks to improvements to AT-SPI2, applications now have a cross-desktop way to determine if accessibility support is enabled and a way to enable it. GNOME is first to implement this, so more work needs to be done to really work across desktops. Other improvements: For those users who require an on-screen keyboard, a brand new one has been built in. Figure 15 On-Screen Keyboard

Using the overview mode with a keyboard works better than ever. In addition to being fully keyboard navigable, users of the screen reader Orca will experience much more reliable and accurate presentation while navigating.

Orca’s migration to introspection has made GNOME’s screen reader noticeably snappier. And now that the ATK bridge only listens for signals when assistive technologies are being used, enabling accessibility support in GNOME should no longer result in a significant performance degradation.

The accessibility service interface AT-SPI2 has been greatly stabilised: Crashes, memory leaks and a variety of other bugs have been fixed.

GNOME's Accessibility Implementation Library Gail has been completely merged into GTK+, bringing GNOME yet another step closer to accessibility that's built in, not bolted on.

5. Internationalisation Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.2 offers support for more than 50 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated, including the user and administration manuals for many languages. Supported languages: Arabic

Assamese

Asturian

Basque

Brazilian Portuguese

British English

Bulgarian

Catalan

Catalan (Valencian)

Chinese (China)

Chinese (Hong Kong)

Chinese (Taiwan)

Czech

Danish

Dutch

Estonian

Finnish

French

Galician

German

Greek

Gujarati

Hebrew

Hindi

Hungarian

Indonesian

Italian

Japanese

Korean

Latvian

Lithuanian

Norwegian Bokmål

Polish

Portuguese

Punjabi

Romanian

Russian

Serbian

Serbian Latin

Slovenian

Spanish

Swedish

Tamil

Thai

Turkish

Uighur

Ukrainian

Vietnamese Many other languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated. Detailed statistics, how you can help make GNOME available in your language, and more information are all available on GNOME's translation status site.

6. Getting GNOME 3.2 To install or upgrade your machine to GNOME 3.2, we recommend you install the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.2 available very soon, and some already have development versions with GNOME 3.2 available. If you want to try out GNOME, download one of our live images. These are available on our Getting GNOME page. If you are brave and patient, and would like to build GNOME from source, we recommend you use JHBuild, which is designed to build the latest GNOME from Git. You can use JHBuild to build GNOME 3.2.x by using the gnome-3.2 moduleset.

7. Looking Forward to GNOME 3.4 The next release in the GNOME 3 series is scheduled for April 2012. Many new features and enhancements are planned for 3.4. 7.1. User-visible changes

User-visible changes 7.2. Accessibility changes

Accessibility changes 7.3. Developer-related changes 7.1. User-visible changes Continued work on evolving GNOME 3, for instance by improving “focus follows mouse” , making it easier to start multiple applications at the same time, and more.

Better installing, enabling and disabling of GNOME Shell extensions, which can provide tweaks, adjustments and enhanced functionality.

Easier input of certain characters and symbols that are not directly supported by the keyboard via better integration of IBus .

Social network integration via libsocialweb .

A new design for the Call user interface of Empathy that allows users to select the webcam and microphone used during the call, to move the video preview around, and might also include support for video effects.

systemd . Automatic multi-seat support using

Improved rendering of HTML messages in Evolution by using WebKit instead of GtkHtml . 7.2. Accessibility changes An extensive set of Symbolic and High Contrast icons is being worked on. These icons will enable brand new accessible and complete High Contrast and High Contrast Inverse themes.

Further enhancements to GNOME Shell Magnifier, including caret and focus tracking along with additional options for customising brightness and contrast.

Continued work on GNOME Shell’s accessibility and the tools used to access it. 7.3. Developer-related changes Continued cleanup of the platform (for example moving from dbus-glib and libunique to GDBus / G(tk)Application , and migration of Evolution-Data-Server 's storage backend from Gconf to GSettings ).

Source code tarballs will only be made available using the .xz compression method.