[gnome-summary] This weeks summary

[Sayamindu Dasgupta <sayamindu clai net>]

I have tried to come up with something. See attachment. It is not yet
xmlized - I'll do it by tomorrow :-)
In case anyone has some other news, and if s/he does not have cvs, feel
free to append the news (along with url) to the end of the file, I'll
xmlize it and commit it.

-thanks-
Sayamindu

GNOME 2.6 released. 

GNOME 2.6 was released this week amidst wild cheering. GNOME 2.6 features improved usability, more user-friendliness, and yess!! A brand new file selector that rocks! In short - this is best release of GNOME ever. This version of GNOME also sees the highest languages support - do the translators never sleep ?
http://www.gnome.org/start/stable/

No surprises in GNOME for Grandma

Matthew Newton of PC World looks at GNOME 2.6 for grandma, and his comments ? ?
"Grandma is never going to learn about "opening a file manager" to "navigate her way" to her documents. They are all going to live in plain view in folders on her desktop. And when she opens them, there won't be any surprises."
Spatial Nautilus rules!
http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,115411,00.asp

Usabilty of Free/Open Source Software - GNOME leads the way

Of recent Eric Raymond started a debate on why Free/Open Source software is still not ready for Aunt Tillie. There have been a number of responses to this article, and in one of them, Brad Griffith shows us how GNOME scores over proprietary software (Yes!! OS X included) in terms of usabilty.
http://www.thecardinal1978.com/GNOME/


GNOME goodies from Ars Technica

The people from Ars Technica have written a rocking review of GNOME 2.6 in an article titled "Inside the GNOME 2.6 Desktop & Developer Platform". Quote from the article: "GNOME as a desktop environment has come of age, and current directions in its development promise to make it one of the most usable and most functional GUIs made." Yay!!
http://www.arstechnica.com/reviews/004/software/gnome-2.6/gnome-2.6-1.html
The Ars-Linux staff have more goodies for us - a list of gconf hacks for all those tweakers out there. 
http://www.arstechnica.com/etc/linux/linux.ars-20040331-2.html

Evolution Updates

There has been some fairly radical changes in the Evolution UI - which should simplify calendar/contact/task management to a large extent.
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000195.html
http://codeblogs.ximian.com/blogs/evolution/archives/000194.html

Gossip Updates

Gossip is one of the cleanest and easiest to use IM clients in the GNOME world. However, support for only the Jabber protocol has been a major problem for this beautiful piece of work.... till now, that is. The Gossip hackers, especially Mikael Hallendal has been actively working on adding support for the other popular protocols to Gossip. Some initial UI proposals are available in the Gossip hacker log.
http://gossip.imendio.org/hackerlog/archives/000036.html

File selector Updates

People keeping track of GTK+ development via CVS will notice that the new file selector has now a context sensitive menu (right click above the file list) which lets you select hidden files and folders. The selector now also displays a busy cursor while loading file/folder lists. This should be helpful while selecting files from large directories. There is also a patch in bugzilla which adds support for the ".hidden" file to the file selector. However, at this moment, this only works for the vanilla gtk backend of the filechooser.
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136077
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137520
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137520