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A while back there has been a lot of noise about the GNOME "platform" and what GNOME 3.0 should be. Personally -- while I certainly like the progress GNOME makes as a "platform" -- I must say that the platform is already quite good. In my opinion, what is lacking right now are more the tools and utilities that are shipped *with* the GNOME platform than the platform itself. More specifically there are a set of (rather small) tools I am really missing in the standard set of GNOME tools. So, here's my wishlist, in case anybody is interested to know:

<wishlist>

A simple, usable VNC/RFB client as counterpart to the VNC server vino that has been shipped since early GNOME 2.0 times. Isn't it kind of awkward that we have been shipping a VNC server since ages, but no VNC client? What I want is a client (maybe called vinagre as a pun on vino) that is more than just a simple frontend to xvncviewer, but not necessarily too fancy. Something that integrates well into GNOME, i.e. uses D-Bus, gnome-keyring, avahi-ui. There seems to be a libvncclient library that might make the implementation of this tool easy.
I am one of the (apparently not so few) people who run their GNOME session with LANG=de_DE and LC_MESSAGES=C, which enables german dates and everything else, but uses english messages. Right now it's a PITA to configure GNOME that way. It's not really documented how to do that, AFAIK. The best way to do this I found is to edit ~/.gnomerc and set the variables in there. A simple capplet which allows setting these environment variables from gnome-session would be a much better way to configure this. Nothing to fancy again. Just two drop down lists, to choose LANG and LC_MESSAGES and maybe a subset of the other i18n variables, and possibly G_FILENAME_ENCODING (although I might be the only one who still hasn't switched his $HOME to UTF-8)
There's no world clock in GNOME. Sure, there are online tools for this, but I am not always online with my laptop.
There is no simple tool to take photo snapshots or record short videos from webcams. I want to see something like camorama in gnome-media. Nothing too fancy again. No filters, no TV functionality. Just a small but useful GStreamer frontend.
I'd like to see a simple BitTorrent client shipped with GNOME, which is integrated well into the rest of GNOME/Epiphany, so that downloading files from FTP or HTTP looks exactly like downloading them from Bittorrent.

</wishlist>

posted at: 19:06 | path: /projects | permanent link to this entry | 15 comments

Posted by Christopher Blizzard at Fri Apr 20 19:43:11 2007
One of the Red Hat guys is working on a VNC gtk widget:

http://gtk-vnc.sourceforge.net/

It's worth checking out. It would at least make writing an app very easy.

Peter Teichman is writing a nice world clock. I don't know where it's hosted.

We're doing a simple camera/capture app for OLPC. Lots of that code can be borrowed, I'm sure.

Posted by MattW at Fri Apr 20 19:45:47 2007
Someone's doing a Photobooth-style app for GNOME in Google Summer of Code this year, I believe. That might provide at least some of the simple webcam app functionality you want - and one can easily imagine it being extended for video if it's only done for pictures initially.

Posted by mike at Fri Apr 20 19:52:17 2007
You're not the only one mixing language and locale settings.. I think most of the truly multi-lingual people do such stuff.

It's best to have the GUI stuff all in English because that's the language all the chatter on the web about the software is written in.. Reading in English is lighter than translating constantly from your native language to English to get help or to be able to help friends etc. Personally I'd go so far that I would probhibit everyone on this whole planet from running any software in any other language besides English.

The other settings such as date format are nice to have in local settings because in many cases "english" in software leads into what I'd call legacy formats.. 12 hour clock, imperial units and such..

Posted by Max Beauchez at Fri Apr 20 20:03:29 2007
The recently released service pack for SLED contained a world clock applet, and im pretty sure it's open source.

Posted by Matthias Clasen at Fri Apr 20 20:41:43 2007
There is also an old JDS patch to add worldclock functionality to the clock somewhere in bugzilla, that I recently updated.

It is not as shiny as Peters clock, though...

Posted by Jonh Wendell at Fri Apr 20 20:43:00 2007
Hi.

Actually, i want to rewrite tsclient so that it fits on GNOME desktop just like we like :)

And after this, i'll propose it as a GNOME Module.

Posted by Jonh Wendell at Fri Apr 20 21:37:01 2007
Ah, and dude, i really liked this name (vinagre)!!

Posted by mike at Sat Apr 21 13:29:00 2007
> Someone's doing a Photobooth-style app for GNOME in Google Summer of Code this year, I believe. That might provide at least some of the simple webcam app functionality you want - and one can easily imagine it being extended for video if it's only done for pictures initially.

It's already here, but no source-code yet:
http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/2007-03-12/lets-take-pictures

Don't know whether it is really in GSoC.

Posted by mike at Sat Apr 21 13:40:06 2007
Ohh yes, there is a real GSoC project for "cloning photobooth"

http://code.google.com/soc/gnome/appinfo.html?csaid=9241C03D23E01D36

Posted by Erich at Sun Apr 22 02:13:57 2007
Very fair post. When I saw the title in my RSS reader, I though 'yet another "gnome is missing feature X in the UI, so it sucks"' kind of post, but your post wasn't.
As a VNC client, tsclient isn't bad. It's not really integrated, but it's okay. It also can launch a RDP client to access windows servers^Wcomputers.

For the LANG/MESSAGES thing; I'm one of those using de_DE for both. I'm not talking about my menus much anyway, and if I am, it's often to local users. So using de_DE is more helpful for me. As much as I agree with you that it would be nice to have a UI for it, how am I going to explain people the difference between using german number formats and similar and switching the language? None of the people I frequently talk to needs this, and would indeed just consider it 'overly complex' to just see this option and would be scared away by it. What is so bad about having those 'smart' kind of users edit .gnomerc?

On my Debian systems, I had a "gnome bittorrent" tool installed, which was a rather minimal torrent client. http://amedias.org/~koke/gnome-torrent/ probably. I don't know what has happened to it in Debian.
When I'm downloading torrents, it usually is 'headless', so it wasn't useful for me.

Posted by Felipe Contreras at Sun Apr 22 12:51:09 2007
What about Transmission (http://transmission.m0k.org/).

IMHO it's the best BitTorrent client for GNOME/GTK+. It's also a good thing there's libtransmission :)

Posted by Calum at Mon Apr 23 00:15:40 2007
Re vino, it's worth mentioning that when we originally wrote it at Sun, it included (and still does, in our packages), a vino-client as well as a vino-server. Unfortunately, the client is a Java applet, which of course wasn't very popular at the time :) So it was removed from CVS/SVN.

Posted by Nicu Buculei at Mon Apr 23 08:16:27 2007
Felipe Contreras wrote:
> What about Transmission

After I discovered Transmission, it is my BT client of choice, despite not being developed specifically for GNOME, it fit very nice the desktop.

Posted by Lennart at Mon Apr 23 23:11:38 2007
Erich: I don't thinkt it is necessary to show all options the locale system offers, just a few important ones like LC_MESSAGES and LANG.

Due to the ... hmm ... "questionable" quality of the german translations it is preferable for many users to use the original english texts, as long as they are capable of understanding english. Users from my family and friends who use Linux are mostly amused and irritated by the German translations. Since all of them know english they then prefer the original language. And I see, give them the option to do that!

Posted by Jamei at Sun Mar 16 04:36:37 2008
Looks like most of your wishes have come true in Gnome 2.22!

The locale options and a decent bittorrent client may still be missing (gnome-bittorrent is rather minimal), but Vinagre, world clock, and Cheese are all included in Gnome 2.22.

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Fri, 20 Apr 2007

What I miss in GNOME