The new version of the GTK+ GUI library, used, for example, by GNOME and GIMP, supports multi-touch gestures and smooth scrolling. It also offers a simplified colour selection function that's more suitable for touch screens. The release announcement for GTK+ 3.4 notes that this is "the first version of GTK+ 3 that works well on Windows," adding that official builds for Windows "are expected in the near future." The library's Mac OS X support has also been improved in a variety of ways.

The support of Wayland, the graphics system that will probably replace the X Server in the long term, has been updated to the current Wayland API. The Broadway backend, which was introduced with GTK+ 3.2 and is capable of displaying GTK+ programs as web applications in HTML 5-enabled browsers, now supports V7+ websockets. The developers say that they have also improved the theming code's CSS support.

In addition to GTK+, new versions of other libraries including GLib 2.32, Clutter 1.10 and Cairo 1.12.0 have also been released; these libraries offer basic programming functionality for graphical applications and are often used in combination with GTK+. They are the heralds of GNOME 3.4, which uses these components and is due to be released later today (Wednesday 28 March).

(crve)