Some new stuff in the GNOME world [3. Update]

Like the guys in the KDE world the community in the GNOME world never sleeps – and makes impressive progress. Especially in these days where all the KDE folks (like me) have to wait until the first pre-alpha of KDE 4 is launched, a look at the GNOME fields can help to see in which direction the general development of free desktops is going, and where we will have the friendly (!) competition I like so much.

So, first of all I stumbled over this post yesterday which introduces “listen”, a new audio player for GNOME which the auther, E@zyVG, describes as equal to Amarok. The problem here is that Amarok is one of the killer apps of the KDE desktop with almost no comparable alternative anywhere – even Banshee has problems to compete with it.
For a more detailed review of listen check this post.

But, that’s only one app – to get a feeling where GNOME heads to at the moment the best is to have a look at a fresh review of the actual development release of the GNOME desktop – check it out here at A Stranger’s Universe, it has pictures included. 😉
The review gives a nice overview of the current development and how the applications look like. He also describes roughly its subjective improvements and compares changes in the GUIs to the previous version.

However, he misses a bit to really show the apps “in action” – for example I would like to see the Deskbar Applet in action, how it performs, if the tagging system is included and works well, and so on. Also I heard that the GNOME file dialog, which I never liked since it was reworked, was reworked again – if this is true I would like to see pictures of that as well.

So, as you see there is not only KDE around – and GNOME comes along quite nice in these days, thanks to an awesome community. All the best to the GNOME folks, who knows in which camp I am in some years? 😉

Update:
A reader mentioned another Amarok equivalent of which I also never heard of: exaile. Looks pretty interesting, especially because their attempt really seemed to be quite close to Amarok. It can only help both sides to have this friendly competition, I like that!

2. Update
kOoLiNuS mentioned that he had made a short blog post about the deskbar applet some time ago which I have missed obviously. It has a nice screenshot at work, check it here and another screenshot here.

3. Update
has again another interesting link – and that’s the last one I include now, I promise 😉 builderau.com.au has a detailed review of the upcoming GNOME 2.16. Take a look.