Technology Lab / Information Technology

One step forward: a review of GNOME 2.22


New features

International clock applet

In GNOME 2.22 the clock applet now displays a graphical world map and includes support for displaying the time and weather information for multiple locations. Clock applet enhancements were originally developed by Novell and then adopted and improved by both Fedora and Ubuntu. Unfortunately, all of the development work was done downstream, which made it difficult for all of the changes to be reconciled and merged back into the official GNOME source code.

The international clock applet

The challenges created by such fragmentation demonstrate the need for improved upstream collaboration between the various distributions that have a vested interest in guaranteeing GNOME's success. Fredrico Mena Quintero, the GNOME developer who eventually merged all of the code, pointed out in a blog entry that using a distributed version control system would have simplified the process and avoided the need for distribution-specific patches.

Deskbar improved

The Deskbar panel applet, an extensible launcher tool, got a few minor improvements in GNOME 2.22, several of which were implemented as part of Google's Highly Open Participation project. An option has been added that will make the search window drop down from the panel much like it did before the user interface rewrite that occurred for the previous release. Unfortunately, it still isn't possible to embed the search text box itself directly into the panel.

Deskbar in panel mode

Deskbar system integration continues to improve in very clever ways. For instance, the new version will automatically detect when a user changes default browser and then switch to the appropriate Deskbar modules for history, bookmarks, and other browser-related features.

Deskbar also got support for a handful of useful new actions, like an execute in terminal operation that will pop up a window to display the text output of a command. A new Templates plug-in module makes it possible to create new files based on items in the user's ~/Templates directory. The new Tomboy module supports searching, creating, and deleting notes.

Plans for the next release include performance improvements, adapting the module so it uses the official API rather than RSS feeds, and adding tighter Evolution integration.


GNOME's Evolution e-mail client sees significant improvements in this release and now has extensive support for Google Calendar integration. Other new features include an external editor plug-in, message tagging, and better junk mail detection. In a blog entry, developer Srinivasa Ragavan notes that over 450 bugs have been fixed, including 50 crashers.

Evolution's Google Calendar support


The Tomboy note-taking application stopped just short of adding full user-interface support for tags. The new version of Tomboy in GNOME 2.22 supports "notebooks" which are like note categories. Tomboy only allows one notebook category to be associated with each note, which makes the feature significantly less useful than real tagging.

Tomboy's notebook feature

Tomboy's new search interface

The full tagging system is fully implemented in the Tomboy infrastructure (you can access it with D-Bus pretty easily) but it isn't exposed through the user interface because several attempts to do so added too much complexity. The notebook feature in GNOME 2.22 is an acceptable compromise for now, but there is still a lot of demand for full tagging support and the developers have said that they are open to revisiting the issue in the future. It's worth noting that the full tagging system is still accessible programmatically and can be used by plug-in developers who want to try building a better tagging UI. Additional details about the notebook feature can be found in the GNOME Live wiki.


In the previous GNOME release, the default Clearlooks theme had improved so much that I happily adopted it myself instead of using an alternate theme. You can see it in action in some of my recent reviews. Clearlooks is the recipient of additional improvements in GNOME 2.22 that continue to refine the GNOME look and feel.

The active tab gradient used in the previous version has been removed and replaced with a thin stripe that runs along the top edge of the tab. The Clearlooks engine has also gained support for themed focus rings, a feature that allows focused elements to indicate their status with highlighting rather than a dotted line.The following images show the changes between the current and previous versions:

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.20

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.22

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.20

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.22

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.20

Clearlooks in GNOME 2.22

I have always thought that the traditional, dotted focus ring is a terrible eyesore that looks incongruous in a modern user interface, but I also really need the visual cue because I tend to use the keyboard rather than the mouse when I'm working with desktop applications (using the keyboard to cycle through widgets would not work very well without some kind of focus indicator). The new version of Clearlooks offers a very good solution to this problem by replacing the dotted line with colored highlighting that is much more visually consistent with the Clearlooks style. I was initially skeptical of this change but it didn't take long to see that it is really a big improvement, especially on toolbar buttons and checkboxes.

As usual, a few vocal detractors have emerged to express displeasure, but I suspect that the focus ring changes will be widely appreciated by a vast majority of the users.

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