Notes about the release notes

[Claus Schwarm <c schwarm gmx net>]

Hi, all!

This is my usual (yearly) request to restructure the way we present the
items in our relase notes -- after all, they should make clear why the
release matters.

A rationale for this kind of approach is available from Kathy Sierra,
see her "Crash Course in Learning Theory: "Use "chunking" to reduce
cognitive overhead.":

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2006/01/crash_course_in.html

Here it starts:


Front feature
-------------

 (This is a special class: If there's anything in the amount of changes
that could belong to a certain major topic, it should be featured here!

 For example, the last release had many changes that improved
performance, so these changes could have been be featured here. This is
a desperate way of justifying headlines such as "GNOME 2.14 improves
performance."

 A potential topic for this year could be "Eyecandy".)

 * Something happened with icons
 * Transperacy in the Terminal
 * Compositor stuff in Metacity
 * new wanda icon in gnome-panel

 (Another one could be 'C#')

 (OK, the following classes are basically standard: We should always be
able to put a change into one of them. In general, this should promote
GNOME as a whole, not each module. I've used a selection of items from
the wiki list to give you an idea how this could be sorted.)


Page 2: Extended funtionality:
------------------------------

If you're running a laptop, have problems finding free space on your
hard disks, loose overview on your menu items, or spend too much time
online to download videos (ehm, ok: the last one might lead to funny
jokes), you'll be happy to upgrade to GNOME 2.16:

There's a new module called GNOME Power manager that will let
you ... 

 // image about here

Menu editing just got even more easier. The old menu editor was
replaced with a new one, called Alacarte. Alacarte is already known to
Ubuntu users: ... 

 // image about here


(You get the idea.)

 * New in GNOME Utils! Baobab, a disk usage analysis tool.
 * Tomboy
 * Totem: Numerous Web Browser plugin improvements
          o Audio playback support
          o QuickTime, Windows Media Player and Real Player skins
          o Playlist support 
 * Totem: Subtitle encoding selection
 * Totem: Removed DXR3 and GStreamer 0.8 support (worth mentioning?)
 * Totem: Use HAL for CD and DVD detection
 * Totem: XSPF playlist support (read/write), Quicktime Metalink (read)
 * Nautilus CD Burner: Support for writing DVDs on the fly (without
ISO).
 * GNOME-Screensaver: fullscreen preview
 * Evince: Support for attachments in PDF 
 * gtk filechooser location button thingy
 * Evolution: Support for GroupWise Reminder Notes (Ehm, is that
   important?)
 * File-roller: Shows an emblem for password protected files 152039


Ongoing efforts to make GNOME easier:
-------------------------------------

 * Bug-buddy: interface cleaned up -- a lot
 * Nautilus: New permission dialog with recursion and selinux support
 * Gnome-panel: new dialog to edit launchers. It's really better.
 * Evolution : http://blogs.gnome.org/view/sragavan/2006/07/19/0 (?)
 * EyeOfGnome: Collection Panel and UI Rework (?)
 * Totem: Properties dialogue is now in the sidebar (Worth mentioning?)


Performance improvments
-----------------------
 * Nautilus has improved startup performance; uses less memory while
   thumbnailing
 * ?
 

Code cleanups and backend improvements:
---------------------------------------

 * C#
 * Improved printing support (Ephiphany, Yelp, any others?)
 * Unicode 5.0 support. 
 * GDM: No longer use popt in favor of glib's GOption command line
parsing. IMPORTANT: Users who depend on the single dash options will
need to change to use the non-deprecated double-dash options.
 * Unmaintained themes removed: rand-Canyon, Ocean-Dream, Simple &
Smokey-Blue, Traditional
 * Unmaintained engines removed: Lighthouseblue and Metal engines


Looking forward to GNOME 2.18
-----------------------------

 * The usual infos about 2.18 here but also include the paragraphs from
'Getting involved' -- there's no sense in 'Call to action' when people
can circumvent it by not clicking a link.


Feedback welcome. I offer to write the text down to a number of WDTM?
and WDID? [1], because I don't run a development snapshot. I can't make
screenshots, nor move it to docbook. Some changes need some explantion,
so I need a developer as well. And I'll probably need  someone to
proof-read from a factual point of view, as well as from a grammar
point of view.


Cheers,
Claus

[1] What does it mean? What does it do?