Other Highlights For GNOME 2.31.1

As was mentioned this morning GNOME's Totem Movie Player is preparing for GNOME 3.0 by picking up de-interlacing support and a-synchronous play-list loading, among other improvements. Other packages are also being checked-in this week for the first GNOME 3.0 development release known as GNOME 2.31.1. Besides the updates to Totem and the major work going on to the GNOME Shell / Mutter / Zeitgeist, there is some other interesting new features too.

For example, Eye of GNOME 2.31.1 is now ready for this development milestone (it was announced here) and it offers many improvements over what's found in the current GNOME 2.30 stable release. Eye of GNOME now renders SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics) natively when zooming, can print SVGs as a vector image, the page setup options have been embedded in the print dialog, various user-interface improvements, and further GSEAL compatibility.

GSEAL is a GNOME-spawned macro being used that shows the programmers where any of the code is directly accessing a GTK+ object's variable so that instead they can switch to using an appropriate function. This is being done so that the GTK+ 3 API can be cleaned up and more details on GSEAL along with the GNOME modules that aren't GSEAL compliant are listed on the GNOME Wiki page.

The GNOME Games 2.31.1 update is also GSEAL compliant while also offering up more consistent menus between the different games, better HIG (Human Interface Guidelines) compliance, and a new look to the Sudoku game. Here is its announcement.

The Evince Document Viewer developers have been working on migrating their GConf keys to GSettings, there's now a "Save A Copy" menu item, and other changes. However, there is not any OCR (Optical Character Recognition) support in Evince yet or any of the other planned future work.

While most aren't looking for GNOME's Calculator to deliver anything groundbreaking for the GNOME 3.0 release, it will now start-up faster thanks to dynamic button loading and does offer up other changes, as mentioned in its release announcement. GNOME's Tracker also has many changes as it approaches a 1.0 release.

Stay tuned for more information on the GNOME 3.0 developments. The final release of this major update to the GNOME desktop environment is expected in September while there will be many test builds over the coming months.