Eight Interesting Improvements In GNOME 2.22

Say Cheese: One of the newest GNOME projects is Cheese. No, it's not a project for creating an open-source cheese recipe for GNOME fanatics, but is a project inspired by Apple's Photo Booth software. Cheese is a GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a web camera and uses GStreamer for adding visual effects. Among the visual effects for Cheese 2.22 are vertical flipping, saturation adjustments, shagadelic, warping, noir/blanc, and vertigo. Once you have taken any photographs in cheese, there is support for exporting them to Flickr or F-Spot. Integration with other GNOME applications, such as Pidgin, GIMP, and Kino are also in progress. Further down on the Cheese idea list is a screen mode for the Asus Eee PC, moving to OpenGL, and support for multiple file formats. Cheese was one of the five new modules approved for GNOME 2.22.

Tweak That Mouse: Another one of the new modules in GNOME 2.22 is Mousetweaks. Mousetweaks was born as a Google Summer of Code project in 2007 by Ubuntu and it's not for adding new effects or "bling" to the cursor, but for making GNOME accessible to more users. This accessibility project has a contextual menu for those who are only able to control one mouse button, perform four click types by software, and locking the pointer to a portion of the screen. Mousetweaks also contains other functionality such as ignoring pointer movement unless it exceeds a defined threshold and delaying the mouse click event fir a certain period of time.

VNC Viewing Made Easy: Continuing with the new GNOME modules, Vinagre also made the cut for inclusion in GNOME 2.22. We first reported on Vinagre back in September after it made the public premiere and we had felt it was an excellent GNOME VNC client. It's now up to version 0.4 and contains new translations, stores VNC passwords in the gnome-keyring, supports clipboard copy and paste functionality, and other fixes. Vinagre is a great complement for vino, the GNOME VNC server.