What to expect in Gnome 3

Gnome 3 is expected to be released in September 2010. From the days of Gnome 2.x.x it was decided amongst the development team that the future was to go to the next level which is Gnome 3. The Gnome development team have three main aspects that they want to focus on, that is, revamping the user experience, streamlining the platform, and the promotion of Gnome.

Changing a users experience is definitely on the minds that will develop Gnome and this brings up 3 important factors to expect: Improving the Gnome Shell, which refers to the way a user interacts with the desktop environment. This doesn't necessarily mean changing the architecture of the window manger that it uses but simply to change the way a user can switch between various applications, viewing incoming information such as chat messages or the way system notifications are displayed on the user-interface (UI).

Expect to see a change in the way a user can access their documents, typically a user had to browse for a file using hierarchy list of the filesystem like / /home, this use to take some time, so a change in speeding up the process of accessing data is definitely something to expect. It will greatly improve the way a user interacts with the filesystem structure.

Streamlining the Platform is a big area for developers to to consider when changing to Gnome 3 because this means most applications built for Gnome will also have to update their source code to cater for a new user-interface (UI). What this means is getting rid of old libraries and API's for developers and upgrading skills to cater for new source code to be developed. Some new exciting technology will emerge like geolocalization (with the use of GeoClue and libchamplain). Also there is a tendency to move the bindings closer to the platform which will attract developers that use different programing languages.

Promoting Gnome is the idea of marketing it, whether it would be for a different operating system or simply a new program that is out, it just highlights the idea of telling other users or developers of why they should use it.