The impending GNOME 3.14 release is getting closer

Sep 16, 2014 09:11 GMT  ·  By

Cheese is a Photobooth-inspired GNOME application for taking pictures and videos from a webcam, and its developers have released a new version that brings a ton of improvements.

Cheese is an easy-to-recognize application from the GNOME stack and it's been around for a very long time. It's actually included in many Linux distros by default, although it's no longer used as much. Still, the devs have made quite a few changes and improvements for the 3.14 launch.

A new GNOME release is the works, 3.14, but it's still under development and so is the Cheese package. The interesting thing is that most of the other applications don't really bring any changes or fixes so late in the game. Most of the apps from the GNOME stack are now at version 3.14 RC1 and a lot of the new packages are only about translation updates and other minor changes.

What the devs are saying about Cheese

If you are a new Linux user, you might not know anything about Cheese. It's usually available by default in most distros that feature the GNOME desktop environment or in other OSes that are at least based on GNOME, like Ubuntu for example.

"Cheese uses your webcam to take photos and videos, applies fancy special effects and lets you share the fun with others. It was written as part of Google's 2007 Summer of Code lead by daniel g. siegel and mentored by Raphaël Slinckx. With Cheese it is easy to take photos of you, your friends, pets or whatever you want and share them with others," say the devs on the official website.

The application is not just a simple webcam program; it comes with a host of interesting features. For example, users can add various effects and morph the images, it's possible to take pictures in burst mode, and users can make videos, chat with other people, and share their favorite work.

According to the changelog, an outdated GTK+ version check has been corrected, APPSTREAM_XML is now used instead of APPDATA_XML, outdated intltool build rules have been removed, the intltool-* scripts are not included in the distribution any longer, some unnecessary pkg-config dependencies have been removed, a crash that occurred when animating the countdown has been fixed, and numerous translations have been updated.

This latest iteration of Chess is part of the greater GNOME stack, which is slowly advancing towards the 3.14 release. There are still a few weeks until then, so you can give some of the individual features a try.

A complete list of changes can be found in the official announcement. You can download Cheese 3.14 RC1 right now from Softpedia. This is just the source package, so you will have to compile this yourself.