GNOME 3.2 Officially Released

GNOME 3.2, the next major update of the GNOME 3 desktop environment, has just been released earlier today by the wonderful developers behind the GNOME Project.

The GNOME developers proudly announced on September 28th, in a press release, that the final and stable version of the popular GNOME 3.2 desktop environment is now available for download.

GNOME 3.2 comes after six months of hard work and it brings lots of new features, improved applications, new translations and updated documentation. Let's have a look at the highlights of GNOME 3.2:

Online Accounts - Your online documents, calendars, contacts can now be easily shared with GNOME apps, like Empathy and Evolution.

Web Applications - Thanks to the Epiphany web browser included in GNOME 3.2, users can now save a webpage as a web application and can be launched from the overview mode.

Manage your Contacts - A new application has been added to GNOME 3.2, named Contacts, which allows users to easily manage their contacts from Empathy or Evolution, and even the online ones.

Manage your Documents and Files - The Save File and Open File dialogs in GNOME 3.2 have been revamped to allow access to Recently Used files, to easily view, find and organize documents, and easily access online documents locally.

Quickly Preview your Files in the File Manager - Nautilus, the GNOME 3.2 file manager offers now a quick preview of various media files, such as pictures, movies or music.

Color management - In GNOME 3.2 users are able to calibrate devices in order to ensure that the shown colors are representative.

New Login screen - GNOME 3.2 features a revamped login screen that has been integrated with the entire desktop evironment.

Contacts search - In the new GNOME 3.2 it's easy to search for contacts now, directly from the overview mode.

But wait, there's more! GNOME 3.2 also features...

· Messaging built in; · Support to configure Wacom graphics tablets; · Support for Touchscreen devices; · Media hotplugging; · Lots of visual polish thanks to GTK+ 3.2; · Support for Apple Filing Protocol (AFP); · Movie rotation support in Movie Player (Totem); · Encryption and certification improvements; · Cleaner design for Empathy's log viewer; · NetworkManager 0.9 with improved Wi-Fi roaming, faster user switching, flexible permissions, centralized storage of network connection info, and WiMAX support; · Google contacts avatars are now displayed in Evolution; · Gedit has received support for Mallard and Markdown snippets, as well as revamped Search and Quickopen dialogs; · Performance improvements; · Added the ability to set regional settins from System Settings; · Revamped font chooser utility; · Added a brand new on-screen keyboard; · New and updated translations for over 50 languages.

The upcoming Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) operating system will include a fully functional version of the GNOME 3.2 desktop environment, on October 13th.

Until major operating systems will update their desktop environments to GNOME 3.2, advanced users are able to download the GNOME 3.2 sources right from Softpedia.

GNOME 3.2 Officially Released

The highly anticipated desktop environment is here for all its fans