The first development release of GNOME 2.28 was supposed to be out at the end of April per its release schedule, but it's now slowly coming together. There are many bug-fixes and translation updates in the packages checked in so far for this first GNOME 2.28 development release (a.k.a. GNOME 2.27.1), but there are a few items worth pointing out.

Starting out with GNOME's Cheese program for controlling web-cameras, it now has support for brightness, contrast, saturation, and hue adjustments. Cheese also has an improved preferences dialog. For photographs, Eye of GNOME has a slightly improved user interface as with GCalctool, which has switched from a Glade UI to GtkBuilder.

When it comes to games, GNOME Games now has a hard dependency on Clutter as these desktop games begin to use this API to interface with OpenGL and OpenGL ES. The Lasem library has come about in GNOME to replace GMathml and also serve as an SVG renderer.

Some of the planned changes for GNOME 2.28 but not fully implemented yet include OCR (Optical Character Recognition) support for the Evince Document Viewer, web-camera support in GNOME Media, and several new themes.

Besides these changes there is also other ongoing work that can be read about on the GNOME mailing list with the different release announcements. Tomorrow will likely be the official release of GNOME 2.27.1.