Friday, May 6, 2011

Having Fun with Gnome 3

I have been digging into Gnome 3 on Arch and want to talk about some of the cool things I have discovered while getting accustomed to it. Being a developer, here are a couple of links that I have found to be very useful about Looking Glass (Gnome's new Firebug-like developer tool), a Gnome Shell cheat sheet, and a link to some extensions that have been written to extend the Gnome Shell.

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/LookingGlass

Screen-cast of Looking Glass in action (though not too much action):


See that screen-cast...yeah I took that with a new easy-to-use integrated screen-casting feature. Press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R to start and stop the screen-cast. You'll see a recording symbol at the bottom right of the screen. That shortcut along with several others can be found here:


https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet

along with other fun stuff. Another really cool detail about Gnome 3, especially if you're a web developer like me, is that you can now extend Gnome with Javascript and CSS. I think this alone will generate TONS of new third-party features and extensions given a bit of time. Here are some links for extension development:

https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions
http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2011/04/gnome-3-shell-extensions.html

You can checkout the extensions in the public gnome extensions repository by running this:

git clone git://git.gnome.org/gnome-shell-extensions


Instructions to install them are included here:
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Extensions


Note though that if you want to hack on an extension, in order to see your changes you must restart the Gnome Shell. Very easy though, hit "Alt-F2" enter "r" and bam!!! It's restarted. Happy Hacking!!!

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