Wednesday, March 09, 2011

And now for some good news

With all the doom and gloom blog posts running around at the moment you may be forgetting all the awesome progress that is being made.  So I just wanted to shout out some things that are happening that I love:

GTK3

GTK+ has been cleaned up and it shows!  GTK is a great toolkit but it had been showing its age.  The tidying up (particularly removing the GDK stuff) has significantly reduced the learning curve.  And more improvements planned for GTK4!

GNOME Shell/Unity

The core user interface is being pulled from the 1990s to the future!  There are real risks and challenges here but it's progress in making GNOME the front-running interface it deserves to be.

GObject Introspection

No more out-of-date language bindings!  With introspection information GNOME developers have huge flexibility in picking languages and all languages are first class citizens.

Vala

A modern language for a modern desktop!  Languages like Java and C# offered a lot of promise, but never seemed to break into GNOME.  A modern language makes us more productive, attracts new experienced developers and gives us an opportunity to escape from the Albatross around our neck (C).