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Welcome to GNOME 3.14

3.14 is the latest GNOME release, and the result of six months' work by the GNOME project. It includes new features and a large number of smaller improvements and enhancements. The release contains 28859 changes by approximately 871 contributors. New features and improvements being introduced in GNOME 3.14 include:

Weather, Redesigned

GNOME's weather app has been redesigned for 3.14. The new version makes use of GNOME's new geolocation framework to automatically show the weather for your current location, and a new layout provides an effective way to read weather forecasts. Together, this makes for a quicker and more convenient way to check the weather.

Captive Portal Handling

GNOME 3.14 comes with improved support for Wi-Fi hotspots. When connecting to a Wi-Fi portal that requires authentication, GNOME will now automatically show the login page as a part of the connection process. This ensures that you always know when you are connected, and helps you to get set up as quickly as possible.

Online Accounts for Photos

Photos has gained access to major new online sources of pictures in 3.14, with the addition of Google and media server support. This means that you can easily view Google photos that have been uploaded through Picasa, Google+, or Android devices. Media server accounts provide access to home media servers, via DLNA.

Both of these online sources can be added using Online Accounts.

Multitouch

Multitouch gestures can now be used on touchscreens for system navigation, as well as in applications. Gestures can be used to open the Activities Overview, applications view, and Message Tray. You can also use them to switch applications and workspaces. See the gestures page for a summary of these system-wide gestures.

Several applications make use of gestures in GNOME 3.14: in Evince, documents can be zoomed and swiped with gestures, and Eye of GNOME allows you to zoom, rotate and pan. More applications are expected to start introducing these touchscreen gestures in the future.

Network-Based Sharing

Personal File Sharing (WebDAV), Media Sharing (DLNA) and Screen Sharing (VNC) will now remember which network you want them to be active on, and Settings provides the ability to control which networks to share on. This provides an important privacy function, and prevents sharing content and services in public places (such as your local internet cafe).

Modern Evince

3.14 includes a redesigned Evince. The new version of the document viewer uses a header bar to give more space to your documents. When it is launched without a document being specified, Evince will also show a useful overview of your recent documents.

The latest Evince version also includes high-resolution display support and enhanced accessibility, with links, images and form fields all being available from assistive technologies.

And that's not all

There's much more to GNOME 3.14. Read on to find out...

Getting GNOME 3.14

GNOME's software is Free Software: all our code is available for download and can be freely modified and redistributed. To install it, we recommend that you wait for the official packages provided by your vendor or distribution. Popular distributions will make GNOME 3.14 available very soon, and some already have development versions that include the new GNOME release.

About GNOME

The GNOME Project is an international community supported by a non-profit Foundation. We focus on user experience excellence and first-class internationalization and accessibility. GNOME is a free and open project: if you want to join us, you can.

Developer Information

GNOME 3.14 introduces a number of new features and enhancements for those working with GNOME technologies.

GTK+ Inspector

With 3.14, GTK+ includes an exciting new interactive inspector. This allows live examination of a running GTK+ application, with interactive selection of widgets and interface elements. Properties and CSS can be viewed and edited live, and the inspector also provides access to testing and inspection settings, such as touch screen emulation, window scaling, theme and font settings, text direction and more.

GTK+ Inspector is an incredibly useful development and testing tool. It can be invoked anywhere, with the Ctrl+Shift+I keyboard combination.

CSS Integration for Icons and Assets

GTK+'s CSS support has continued to expand with 3.14, and now features closer integration with icon themes and SVG assets. Icons from the icon theme can be called directly from CSS, and SVG assets can be used to style spinners, arrows, checkmarks, radiomarks and expanders. This can be used to integrate a GTK+ theme with an icon theme for a consistent look and feel, and provides a convenient way to style symbolic theme elements.

SVG icons and assets can also be styled and transformed with CSS. Symbolic icons can be recolored, and can have shadows and animations applied. A theme can also specify where regular or symbolic (monotone) icon variants should be used.

More details can be found in Benjamin Otte's post on the subject.

Another Wayland Milestone

3.14 is another significant milestone on the path to full Wayland adoption for GNOME. Critical pieces of missing functionality have been filled in, including keyboard configuration, touch screen support, drag and drop support, functional context menus, tooltips and comboboxes, high-resolution display support, and window move/resize.

Stability has also been greatly improved over the 3.14 development cycle, and a large number of bugs have been fixed. As a result of this work, GNOME now provides a usable Wayland experience, which can serve the basis of further testing and stabilization work.

Developers are encouraged to test GNOME and their applications with Wayland. Further details about this, and about GNOME on Wayland in general, can be found on the GNOME Wayland wiki page.

Gestures

GTK+ now includes support for gesture interaction. With 3.14, the majority of common multitouch gestures are available for use in GTK+ applications, such as tap, drag, swipe, pinch and rotate. Gestures can be added to existing GTK+ applications using GtkGesture.

Gestures are currently only supported with touchscreen devices - touchpads are not yet covered.

New Default GTK+ Theme

From 3.14, Adwaita has replaced Raleigh as the default GTK+ theme. This ensures that GTK+ has an attractive, complete, and up-to-date default theme for all platforms. Adwaita utilizes all the latest GTK+ CSS features, and supports all of GTK+'s new widgets.

To support this move, Adwaita has been rewritten from the ground up for 3.14. The new version is more compact, maintainable and flexible, and makes use of more CSS features, such as animations.

Human Interface Guidelines

GNOME 3.14 includes a new and updated set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). These provide thorough design guidance for the latest GTK+, enabling developers and designers to make the most of the toolkit. The HIG includes guidelines on layout, writing style, icons, typography and input. It also incorporates a collection of design patterns, which you can use to construct a fully-featured application design, as well as design notes on the various GTK+ widgets.

The new version of the HIG is designed to provide guidance for all GTK+ users, including authors of cross-platform applications, as well as those targeting GNOME 3.

Other GTK+ Improvements

GTK+ 3.14 includes an assortment of other improvements and bug fixes. This includes:

GLib 3.14

GLib 3.14 includes:

Internationalization

Thanks to members of the worldwide GNOME Translation Project, GNOME 3.14 offers support for more than 40 languages with at least 80 percent of strings translated. User documentation is also available in many languages.

Numerous other languages are partially supported, with more than half of their strings translated.

Detailed statistics and more information are all available on GNOME's translation status site. You can also find out how to help translate GNOME.

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