…it turns out someone on the Interwebs already did it. Curse you interwebs for how easily you crush one’s brief pretensions to originality. Anyways, in GNOME Shell we finally got bug 589652 in which means we’re ready for translations! We don’t have a lot of strings, but it’d be good to get the ones we have translated for 2.28. Ready, set, go! I’ve given French a leg up with a translation for Activites as a test case.

Along the way it took a bit of gjs hacking to make it easier to create native modules; if you found yourself embedding Spidermonkey but yearning for PyArg_ParseTuple, gjs_parse_args is your friend.

Speaking of programmer stuff, the built-in console mentioned in my previous post gained a parent-list inspector and property inspector which bring it very slightly closer to Firebug-like real, ultimate power. True story, I originally called it lookingGlass.js completely forgetting about Sun’s project ironically also about 3D-based desktops. Anyways, since that doesn’t seem to be actively developed anymore, and it’s a really great name, I think I’ll just…if you don’t mind….(yoink!) claim that name.

There have been a lot of other user-visible changes recently, in visual terms I really like the result of both Sander’s excellent work in bug 584609 in combination with the progress recently on moving visually to the mockup Jon referenced here. Another promising change is our start on the application menu area.

Which gets me to the subject of the next blog post; one the major changes in GNOME 3 from both a user experience point of view and application developer view is that we’re application based, not task based. Work continues in this area – in the next post I’ll talk about how this affects the experience.