14 DAY TRIAL // The GNOME Project, through Owen Taylor, announced a few hours ago (February 22nd) the immediate availability for download and testing of the first Beta version of GNOME Shell 3.4.
GNOME Shell 3.4 Beta 1 is a development release and it comes with over 10 changes, as well as many updated languages.
Among the fixes and improvements we can mention that the "Recent Items" search was replaced by "Documents" search, the NetworkManager VPN plugins can now use a shell-themed dialog, systemd is now used to handle console/session, include_cursor parameter was added to ScreenshotWindow and Screenshot D-Bus methods, "FlashArea" D-Bus method was added to the screenshot flash.
GNOME Shell 3.4 Beta 1 (3.3.90 is the actual version number) is part of the new GNOME 3.4 Beta 1 desktop upgrade, which will be released these days.
Download GNOME Shell 3.4 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a beta release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.