First of all are all standards bad and the answer is a big no. Doing
things in a centralized fashion is great for things like the dbus and gstreamer but what about for things
like OOXML
that was made an iso standard even though there is no completely
standard compliment implementation not even from Microsoft themselves.
Standards can be great but it really depends on who makes them.

Application developers who make services for the desktop like Zeitgeist
and Tracker innovate. They dont need to worry about communication
because they use the dbus to pass info and have a well documented way of
formatting the info passed. So innovative projects use standards but the
programs shouldnt push things like how Microsoft pushed OOXML, they
change things release on release and try to keep things stable and well
documented but it doesnt stop the innovation.

So the problem with standardization in software projects is exactly what
happened to OOXML. A bunch of people sat around a table and wrote a
document that was rejected as a standard then they made some changes and
it was accepted (quite ridiculously). While they should have been
already developing it (maybe not releasing it but working on it) because
developing it works out the kinks. There is lots of pages to the
standard but some of it will never see the light of day and why because
it wasnt developed in the correct manner. They should have developed the
standard in house then presented it as a standard.

How can you expect anyone else to develop a standards compliant
application if the developers of the standard cant even do it? How do
you expect to develop a standard without testing it? Whats wrong with
innovation as a means to develop a future standard?

You develop standards through innovation not by committee.

• Rhythmbox could make up a playlist of songs that you play most often or which songs you havent played.
• Totem could suggest the next movie in a series going by which you have already watched.
• Open Office could suggest what to work on going by what you normally work on at that time of the day.
• Empathy could remind you to audio call your Mother/Boss at the time of day you normally ring her.
• On your N900 your phone could automatically switch between work mode and home mode going by the time you work at and offer you the right contracts.

Zeitgeist can give Gnome/KDE/Maemo all of this right now. Think of a desktop that learns how you do things from the way you do things, the time you do things at and in which program you use them in. Zeitgeist is not just a logger it is your desktop/phone/netbook/smartbook/server but smarter.
Now the hard part is getting some attention we can do lots of cool stuff but we need some help from the development community to get data into Zeitgeist and get the data used in programs. You can push the relevent info to zeitgeist (the docs are here) so help out and make the desktop a little smarter. I promise its not hard and if you hit any bumps go to #zeitgeist on freenode and they can help you out. Oh and if you want to mess about with the code or try the new versions in trunk go here.

On the zeitgeist front have a look at Gnome activity journal. They have a really cool related activity thing now and some preview magic now. You can grab the version from the repo in lucid but its a little out of date and doesnt have the new coolness yet. If you want to mess about with the code or try the bleeding edge grab the trunk.

If you want some more reading they are making this this and this a reality(Ok the last one is a little bit far fetched but maybe…….?)

Shot of jaq is bloody awesome. Well us ubuntu people are a little bit biased here because its done by two people who make ubuntu awesome but still it is very cool. Not only is it nice and interesting(kinda like my blog ) but it gives a nice view on things. The two guys have a good back and forth and the show in general has a good feeling and a nice tone. Plus its short enough to keep my attention which is very limited but long enough to take a dump while its on. Whats also great is the talk that gos on in the comments. People air their views and its nice to see such friendly conversation going on.The show rocks go on and listen

Zeitgeist, ive blogged a lot about zeitgeist so ill just post a few links to what I said previously. They also had a new release (along with gnome activity journal) so id like to congratulate them on that.
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/15/debunking-the-gnome-3-myths/
http://shanefagan.com/2010/01/10/gnome-activity-journal/

Gnome Do or well Docky, I love Docky its nice to look at. It does the window management which I like. Plus you can store application shortcuts in it for added ease of use. Gnome Do is cool too, I love the plugin system and the way applications are easy to open. Its one of those things that shortens the time to get things done.

Tracker, I love tracker too. The way it gets all the files, emails, everything. The thing that always made me love it was it isnt slow. It has so many things to look through and it still isnt slow. Id love for it to be included by default again in ubuntu. For Gnome 3 if we had Zeitgeist and tracker included we would be able to get a lot of info and have a complete use history for each file (with zeitgeist) and have the metadata and cool stuff that tracker has. Exciting stuff (well for me who is interested in somewhat boring stuff)

Vala, my first programming language is Java. Then I went on and learned VB and assembly as part of my college course. Then I learned python and a few other languages(most of the main ones). The problem was that im most familiar with Java and im getting better at the others but I still wanted to find an alternative. So then I gave Vala a try and its really fast and all the Gnome stuff (GTK…etc) have bindings for it so I love it.

Quickly, Python-Snippets, Acire and Lernid. All of these projects are awesome in their own way. Quickly makes it easy to do the hard stuff in programming, starting, packaging and distributing and lets you get down to the fun bit making a project do awesome things. Python-Snippets and Acire help you do the programming. The snippets show you what to do and you can copy them into your own projects. It contains code from the simple to slightly more advanced stuff. The whole point is learning. Acire is the viewer for the Snippets and allows you to view the code but also execute it too which is cool.
Lernid is a project to make it easy to contribute to IRC events like ubuntu open wee, ubuntu user days, bug jams..etc. It has some awesome features other than simply viewing the IRC event you can also view information posted by the event host, which is really cool.

Ok so I talked a lot there so ill just give a quick list of some more cool stuff I like. Liferea, Gwibber and Inkscape check all those out too.

Gnome Shell == Gnome 3

Actually its very far from the truth, in fact there is a lot of work that has nothing to do with user interface.

The second biggest myth is

Gnome will drop all support for Gnome-Panel

Actually it will be fairly easy to go back to Panel if you dont like Gnome-Shell its just “gnome-panel –replace” in command line.

Here is a list of some of whats going on (If I forget some please feel free to comment and add them).

You can see the release announcement here. For one its a redefining of the user experience with Gnome-Shell. Its also Gnome activity journal which will bring a new level of convenience to the desktop. There will be a lot of integrating of web technologies like webkit and javascript(which is what gnome shell is written in). A lot of outdated technologies will be deprecated and new technologies introduced. A new Gnome website too.

Gnome-Shell
There is some cool mockups and info about shell here.
This is the one huge change, removing the old gnome panel written back eight years ago and replacing it with a new fresh user interface. It is written in Javascript and uses CSS for theming. Gnome Shell uses Clutter for the display and it is very exciting looking at the beauty of Moblin which uses Clutter already. It features a simple desktop and an activities area that gives and overview of workspaces and allows the user to do all of what it does currently. It also has a built in notifications system and will soon get its own applcation indicators. Its not a huge change but it adds some new eye candy to the Gnome experience.

Gnome Activity Journal and Zeitgeist
This is very cool and has a load of awesome applications throughout the desktop. Zeitgeist is an engine which simply gets your activity from the programs you use, files you open, pages you open, code you view or edit and so on. Gnome Activity Journal uses Zeitgeist, tracker and telepathy to offer a complete timeline of your activities and the history of your files. Telepathy integration is also coming for to the journal for added collaboration.
What Zeitgeist offers is that it replaces GTK recently used and it can show you what activities you do most for each program. Zeitgeist and tracker will have all the information about you and your files and will add a never before seen level of information and relevance. Here is a nice video of Gnome Activity Journal in action.

Use of web technologies
The use of web technologies is very important, it enables developers from the single largest area of development to contribute. It also leverages all the goodness being done in this area. So we can use webkit to make a really cool program made using HTML, CSS, XHTML, Javascript, Ajax… Also as I mentioned above Gnome Shell is being written in Javascript to lower the barrier for new developers coming from other platforms.

Deprecation of old technologies and increasing use of new ones
Cleaning up is awesome, the Gnome platform hasnt had a big clean up in a long time and its starting to get crowded. The main changes are moving fully over to the dbus and moving to dconf. This will streamline the platform substantially.

The new Gnome Website
This looks really awesome.

So whats coming is a clean up, a new user experience, new technology and a new website. I hope this post clarifies Gnome 3 for people and I hope you are as excited as I am