Christmas is in the air! Why, only yesterday, I sat by a roaring fire, taking in the scent of pine while sinking a couple of pints of ale. Good times.
It being the festive season, I’ve been thinking about what I would like most from GNOME in the coming year. This is rather greedy of me, since there are many exciting things afoot, like GNOME Shell and Zeitgeist. I’m not including them in my list, simply because they are already on their way. My Christmas list is a list of things that aren’t on people’s agendas quite so much, but which I’d love to see.
- A synchronisation solution that works and is easy to set up. I’d like it to work with Evolution, Tomboy, Empathy and Epiphany, as well as with files. I’d also like it to synchronise my histories and logs as well as things like address books and bookmarks. Anybody know what’s happening with Conduit nowadays?!
- A solution to the tab overflow problem. This is something that I’ve done a bit of work on in the past. I’m hoping to return my attention to it soon.
- Fewer popup windows and modal dialogs. Mikkel Kamstrup has blogged about this. I’d like it very much if GNOME got something similar to OS X’s sheets.
- Fast integrated desktop search.
- A way to manage documents other than the file-system and Nautilus. This is something that came up at last year’s User Experience Hackfest, but which hasn’t received much attention subsequently.
- A fast email client with a clean user interface.
- Desktop-wide connectivity awareness. GNOME’s applications aren’t very helpful when you’re offline and you try to do something that requires an Internet connection. Epiphany: ‘Unable to load page’. Evolution: ‘Unable to retrieve message’. Empathy: ‘Network error’. What I want is: ‘You are not connected to the Internet. Click here to manage your network settings.’ (Or something like that.)
- An integrated graphical clipboard manager. Glipper seems to be dead at the moment though…
This is a rather large shopping list, I know. But there’s nothing wrong with dreaming, is there?
As far as I know 