| live.gnome.org live.gnome.org GNOME Shell is the defining technology of the GNOME 3 user experience. It provides core interface functions like switching to windows and launching applications. GNOME Shell takes advantage of the capabilities of modern graphics hardware and introduces innovative user interface concepts to provide a delightful and easy to use experience. Technology The Shell acts as a compositing manager for the desktop, and displays both application windows and other objects in a Clutter scene graph. Much of the code of the shell is written in Javascript but uses Clutter and GNOME platform libraries via GObject Introspection and JavaScript bindings for GNOME. For window management and compositing, the shell builds off of a Metacity branch called Mutter, which adds Clutter-based compositing to Metacity. See Owen Taylor's blog post for the explanation of the technology choices that were made for the GNOME Shell. Design GNOME Shell project takes a highly considered and open approach to design. Designers are involved in every stage of the development process from start to finish. The design process is not a hit and run - slap it on in the end affair. If you are a designer and would like to get involved we'd love to hear from you. Details are available on the the design page. |
