The GNOME Roadmap

The GNOME Community Roadmap is a big-picture view of functionality we expect GNOME to include in short-term and long-term future. The roadmap is based on feedback from current GNOME developers and other community members.

The roadmap is organized into target groups: Users, Developers, Admins and Everyone in each target release. In the case of user-targeted plans, sometimes a change will not be user-visible but will nevertheless alter the user experience in some way.

This roadmap shows the ideas and hopes of GNOME contributors for the near future. However, GNOME is primarily a volunteer community that does time-based releases, as opposed to feature-based releases. Therefore, these changes will only happen for their target releases if the contributors have the necessary time and resources. If it needs more time, then the feature will be moved to the next 6 month release cycle. We hope this roadmap allows interested people to take part. The GNOME project relies heavily on your involvement.

To have access to the Roadmap of previous stable releases, go to RoadMap/Archive

To know more about our Roadmap process, go to RoadMap/Process

GNOME 2.26

For Users

Artwork

• Dark widget theme
• Flat widget theme
• Compact widget theme for small screens
• Provide color variations on some of the existing themes
• Initial set of 256x256 icons
• Nicer GNOME Panel icons
• Update outdated desktop emblems

Evolution Groupware

• IMAP relook/revamp
• More plugin loaders

• WebKit or GtkMoz* integration

• Full fledged logging support
• Exchange 2007/MAPI Connector

GNOME Character Map

• Ability to print charts of characters with pangocairo

GNOME Control Center

• Support for launching arbitrary commands via keybindings

GNOME Games

• Aisleriot
  • Theming: backgrounds and card localisation
  • Game layout improvements (ex. adapting to smaller screen size)
  • Keyboard dealing for all games
  • Misc game improvements

GNOME Media

• Replace gnome-volume-control with a PulseAudio mixer, and/or a higher-level device control UI

GNOME Power Manager

• Better ConsoleKit and PolicyKit integration

Nautilus File Manager

• Toolbar editor
• Improved list view interaction
• Allow resetting file associations and removing custom applications

Seahorse Encryption Keys Manager

• Possibly a Pidgin/Telepathy encryption plugin
• Digitally signed documents in Evince

Tomboy Notes

• Complete cross-platform support

Vinagre Remote Desktop Client

• Support for RDP (Microsoft Terminal Services) connections

Vino Desktop Remote Access

• Ability to disable wallpaper

For Developers

Anjuta Integrated Development Environment

• New Symbol database plugin
• Improved symbol autocompletion
• Better Glade integration
• Automated UI testing
• Easy start-up wizard

For Everyone

Future 2.x releases

For Users

Artwork

• Colorscheme support on themes and appearance capplet

Evince Document Viewer

• Testsuite with a good coverage
• Better developer documentation
• Metadata integration with a common GNOME framework
• OCR support
• Better integrated postscript support with text search, etc.

GNOME Developer Docs

• Update the Platform Overview to reflect changes in the platform such as the upcoming gio/gvfs, search technologies, and D-Bus desktop services
• Cleanup Human Interface Guidelines 2.0 with updated screenshots and other misc fixes
• Revamp the Documentation Handbook in order to reflect recent and upcoming changes to the documentation system, such as Mallard and Rarian
• The following documents are on the drawing board:
  • Internationalization Guide
  • Optimization Guide

GNOME Doc Utils

• Support for easy PDF generation

GNOME Media

• Webcam support
• Common widgets/gst helpers
• GNOME media converter
• a2dp/upnp integration
• Live streaming recording in sound-recorder or podcaster
• Audio configuration tester (test surround installation, for example)
• Better and usable encoding profiles

GNOME Panel

• New library for the applets
• Compatibility layer for old Bonobo applets and remove Bonobo usage in the Panel
• New interaction model for managing applets: activate/deactivate an applet instead of adding/removing it, eg. Possibly, a mode for editing the panel contents
• Better integration with multi-user setups (eg. have a Switch to "user" in the logout dialog)
• Simplify the panel code related to Session/GDM: only call dbus methods that will be implemented by GNOME Session
• Eye-candy additions

Metacity Window Manager

• Improved EWMH/ICCCM support
• Improved DnD interaction with applications
• SELinux-related labels for windows

Pessulus

• Support for pluggable lockdown addons for applications

For Developers

AtSpi

• D-Bus support

GConf

• Migration to GSettings and dconf: new settings or preferences management platform

For Everyone

Infrastructure

• Switch test module to chosen Distributed Version Control System (DVCS)
• Upgrade GNOME Bugzilla to 3.0 (while keeping all customizations not yet upstreamed)
  • Switch from RT3 to Bugzilla
• Make use of 'configuration management software'

Library.gnome.org

• Support for Project Mallard documents
• Online editing and support for merging annotations with content

GNOME 3.0

Some GNOME hackers have discussed what form GNOME '3.0' would take, such as radically changing its user model or taking advantage of new technologies. However, the changes in this roadmap are more incremental, designed to fit within the basically stable UI and APIs we guarantee within the 2.x series. For more on the radical changes that could be in a GNOME 3.0, see the long-term ideas at ThreePointZero. And remember, even then, the GNOME 3 APIs would be available in addition to the existing GNOME 2 APIs, so there is no risk that today's applications would break in the future.

• CategoryRoadMap