GNOME 2.20 Released

GNOME 2.20 has been released, this is the version that will be included in Ubuntu 7.10.

The improvements in GNOME 2.20 include: Improved support for right-to-left languages; desktop search integrated into the file chooser dialog; convenient new features in the Evolution email and calendar client; enhanced browsing of image collections; simplified system preferences; efficient power management and incredibly accurate laptop battery monitoring. Developers receive more help with application development thanks to a new version of the GTK+ toolkit, improved tools, and a great new documentation web site.

Here are a few things that caught my eye from the release notes:

• GNOME’s Clearlooks theme has been totally redesigned, I think it looks pretty good.
• Pie charts for disk usage, similar to Windows’.
• Apparently, many application have been tweaked for better power usage on laptops.
• Totem can do automatic codec installation, just like in Ubuntu Feisty.
• Gedit can do syntax highlighting for code embedded in HTML, this bothers me all the time in GNOME 2.18.
• Nautilus rotates thumbnails by looking at camera metadata.
• I noticed that the screenshots on GNOME’s site include shadows and transparency effects. Is GNOME going to include a compositing window manager in the future, like KDE4?

It is interesting how GNOME is continuing to do incremental updates in their releases, while KDE is trying to change everything very quickly. Congratulations to the GNOME developers for a superb release!