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Future foundations

ho: You will be laying the foundation for some of the GNOME 3.0 stuff in the upcoming version 2.28 for which the Feature and Module Freeze is now in effect. I'm thinking about things like the new Clutter based window manager Mutter, for example, which will be presented as an alternative to Metacity in 2.28 if I'm not mistaken. Any other visible changes in 2.28 that herald the coming of a new era?

VU: Indeed, GNOME 2.28 has been thought of as a step towards GNOME 3.0. People working on new modules that we hope will be part of GNOME 3.0 (like GNOME Shell) are already releasing tarballs so that people can try out today what will become the future GNOME.

You mentioned Mutter as an example, but the interesting thing there is not really Mutter itself (which is a fork of our current window manager, Metacity, but using Clutter): it's really GNOME Shell, which is based on Mutter. While Mutter is "just" a window manager, GNOME Shell is building on top of it to provide the core of the desktop experience. And we do have releases of GNOME Shell already. There are also releases of the Zeitgeist project.

Some modules like the GNOME games have also taken some big steps forward, adopting technologies early: various games were ported to Clutter and some are now coded in JavaScript.

A lot of work has been done towards cleaning up the usage of our platform so that modules are ready to work with the streamlined platform that will be in GNOME 3.0. While this is a work that might not be visible to all, it results in usage of less libraries, more consistency between applications, but also a more solid platform for developers. There's a vibrant ecosystem of applications using the GNOME platform, and all the improvements we do there will benefit those applications.

ho: The KDE project is steering in the direction of a "social desktop", with features like Geolocation making an appearance in the KDE 4.3 which was released this week. What does GNOME have in the pipeline in that respect?

VU: We don't really talk about a "social desktop" in GNOME (I guess some people don't like this expression), but we certainly integrate various technologies that are hiding behind this expression. For example, people have been working on geolocation or integration with some web services: sharing your position with your contacts in the Empathy instant messenger, or showing where a photo was taken, or browsing YouTube videos in the Totem movie player, for example.

Some results of this are already available in current versions of GNOME, but more is coming with GNOME 2.28, and I imagine this trend will go on. We actually have people looking at how to best integrate the usual online services in the applications that people use.

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