Time has passed and we finally made it: GNOME 3.20 just got released. I’m writing this post in a full GNOME 3.20 + Wayland session (thanks Arch folks, [gnome-unstable] is amazing).

I’d like to take some time to reflect about this release, what happened and what didn’t happen.

Calendar

While this certainly wasn’t the biggest feature release of GNOME Calendar, I’m very satisfied with it. Not only it went through a major rework that will make future development much easier, but also 4 new contributors had their patches in. 4 new contributors.

This is truly beautiful.

They polished lots of rough edges. Thanks to these contributions, past event are now less proeminent, year view is much more visually appealing and respects GNOME Shell’s setting to show week dates.

Not only that, but Month view also received subtle improvements. The rendering code now ensures a pixel-perfect selection, more proeminent background for selected days and navigating to beyond the last days switch the month.

Good news? I didn’t do any of these features! They were all contributions from independent, warmhearted people spread all around the world.

To Do

This release made GNOME To Do shine. I spent most of my time working on the new plugin support, and learned a lot to make it work correctly. Thanks to Garret Gregier, Patrick Griffis, Christian Hergert and many other supportive and warm people, the engine works good and soon I’ll write a small series to demonstrate plugin development.

Let’s see what will be created from now on 🙂

Nautilus

Oh, dear Nautilus. I’ve worked on you as a Summer of Code project, then as a free-time project, now it’s a paid-time project. I love you, but I disdain you. Your old codebase with loads of obsolete code makes my spine chill, and yet I can’t leave you crying in the rain.

This cycle, I worked on the new Search feature. Then Carlos finished what I’ve started, so he deserves all the credits. Check his post about it.

What’s coming next?

Maybe that’s not the only big thing that will come. Who knows 😉

News

Poor GNOME News, almost dying. I managed to push some changes on it, but it’s far from perfect. Maybe I’ll manage to sneak more improvements during 3.21 cycle?

Conclusion

This was a good cycle. I’m very proud of how much better GNOME got during the last releases. It’s definitely getting to a stability and usability points that we saught since the first 3.0 release. The apps are slowly (no so slowly anymore) getting mature and useful.