On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 1.4!
It’s been a month since the 1.3.x releases and we’ve been reading
your feedback with a lot of attention. Most of the things you’ve asked
made it to this release and today we’re extremely proud to release
another major update to the Cinnamon desktop.
Cinnamon 1.4 features a total of 267 commits. Read below for a brief overview of the new features and major improvements.
Have a lot of fun with this new release and don’t hesitate to give us some feedback! Enjoy
The new “Expo” overview
This is something we announced before. We weren’t happy with
workspace management and the overview and so we completely changed the
way it works. Cinnamon 1.4 comes with two “overview” modes: “Scale” and
“Expo”.
“Scale” was present in previous Cinnamon releases and looks like the
Compiz Scale plugin, it shows all the windows from your current
workspace on the screen and easily allows you to select the one you’re
interested in.
The "Scale" overview allows you to select a window
“Expo” is new in Cinnamon 1.4. It zooms out of your current workspace
and shows you all the workspaces on your system. From there you can
switch to the workspace you want, or even drag and drop windows from one
workspace to another. As such, it looks and behaves like the Compiz
Expo plugin (from which it gets its name).
The "Expo" overview allows you to manage your workspaces
Expo also introduces a new feature: workspace management. Workspace
management is fixed in Compiz (done via configuration) and missing in
Gnome Shell (automated by the desktop). In Cinnamon you’re the one who
decides how many workspaces you need, when you want to create new ones
and when you want to remove the ones you don’t use. If you need a new
workspace, just go to Expo and click the button to create a new one. If
you want to remove a workspace just click the close button on the
workspace and it’s gone…. and whatever you do things don’t change on
your behalf. Say you create 5 workspaces, then your Cinnamon has 5
workspaces, whether you use them or not, whether you restart Cinnamon or
not, whether you even reboot your computer or not… you’re in charge of
your workspace management now.
Note: In future releases you’ll also be able to “name” your workspaces.
By default:
- CTRL+ALT+UP goes to Expo
- CTRL+ALT+DOWN goes to Scale
- The hot corner is on the top-left and calls Expo
- CTRL+ALT+LEFT/RIGHT switches to the LEFT/RIGHT adjacent workspace
- CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+LEFT/RIGHT moves the active window to the LEFT/RIGHT adjacent workspace
You can now also configure the location of the hot corner and whether you want it to call Expo or Scale.
New “Settings applet” and “Panel Edit Mode”
The introduction of drag & drop support and movable applets in
Cinnamon 1.3 confused a lot of people. Some applets such as the
workspace switcher, the window list and the panel launchers, due to
their internal design and their user interface, made it extremely hard
for people to move them around.
Cinnamon 1.4 introduces a brand new applet called the “Settings applet”.
The new "Settings" applet makes your life a little easier
This applet features:
- Troubleshooting options (restart cinnamon, looking glass, restore settings to default)
- Panel Edit Mode
- Quick access to settings
The quick access to the settings and the troubleshooting options make
it easier for novice users to perform complex yet sometimes necessary
tasks (restarting Cinnamon without restarting the session, restoring the
default settings etc..).
The “Panel Edit Mode” is a new concept in Cinnamon. Applets are not
movable anymore. If you want to change their position you need to
activate the “Panel Edit Mode”. When this mode is on, the zones of the
panel (left, center and right) appear in different colors and all
applets are easy to drag & drop. Applets such as the window list,
the panel launchers or the workspace switchers, which were hard to move
in previous releases, now detect the panel mode and behave differently
in Panel Edit Mode to ensure you can move them around with ease.
Localization
Cinnamon is now localized. If you want to monitor or participate in the translation effort, please visit
https://translations.launchpad.net/linuxmint/isadora/+pots/cinnamon
Cinnamon 1.4 comes with support for 39 languages and features significant improvements for RTL (right-to-left) languages.
A screenshot of Cinnamon in Arabic. This release is localized in 39 languages and features improved RTL support.
New configuration options
Cinnamon 1.4 adds the following new options:
- “Only use workspaces on primary monitor”
- Configurable hot corner position and behaviour
- Menu hover delay
- Draggable panel launchers
Menu improvements
The menu received two significant improvements: full drag & drop support, and edition.
You can use drag & drop to:
- Add applications to the panel launchers from the menu
- To add/remove applications to/from your favorites
- To reorder your favorites
By right-clicking the menu and selecting “Edit menu” you can launch a
brand new menu editor. “Alacarte” was made compatible with Cinnamon and
got fully integrated with the desktop. Using this embedded menu editor
you can fine-tune how applications and categories are shown within the
menu.
Cinnamon now features a menu editor (forked from Alacarte and fully integrated within Cinnamon)
Other improvements made to the menu:
- It’s now possible for the menu button to have no icon
- The menu height was fixed for certain screen resolutions
- The menu now scrolls when showing the context menu if the menu
Window list improvements
The window list is an essential part of your desktop. In Cinnamon 1.4 we introduced some handy features:
- You can now reorder windows in the window list via drag & drop.
- If you drag-over a file on a window in the window list, the window
comes to focus (this feature was present in Cinnamon 1.0 and lost along
the way, so it’s nice to have it back).
- You can simply right click any window in the window list and send it to other workspaces, or have it shown on all workspaces.
Applets improvements
Other applets and the applets API itself received the following improvements:
- Keyboard applet: now has an option to launch the character table
- Network applet: shows its status in the tooltip
- Calendar applet: better layout and year selector
- Sound applet: added limited support for gmusicbrowser
- Workspace Switcher applet: Mouse scroll support
- All applets:
- Use symbolic icons for common applets (better look and feel)
- More consistent margins and spacing between applets and tray icons (better look and feel)
- Panel settings and “Add/remove applet” option added in applets context menu
- Fixed applets menus orientation after moving from one panel to the other
Cinnamon Settings improvements:
- UUIDs are now visible for applets and extensions
- Extensions and applets are now sorted by name
- Allow search on applets
Other notable improvements
- Context menus now appear on top of the panels and are clickable
- Fixed a bug which made Cinnamon crash when windows returned NULL as
their name (happened when a window was opened and closed very quickly)
- Fixed a bug which made the Menu label appear as “Me…”
- Systray icons don’t disappear anymore when applets are moved around
- Fix for applets getting “shuffled” after drag & drop
- Remove useless notification when adding/removing favorites
- A couple of memory leaks fixed
- Changed default animations and effects (more subtle)
Notes to applet developers
You can now give your applet a custom icon by placing it within your
applet. Make sure it’s called “icon.png” and its dimensions are 32x32px.
Alternatively you can continue to use the “icon” field in metadata.json
to specify a name for the icon, in which case Cinnamon Settings gets
the icon from the theme itself.
Notes to extension developers
For all extensions, you need to change the version of Cinnamon in the metadata.json file to “1.4.0″.
If you encounter any problems, please log in the IRC and ask us for help at #linuxmint-dev on irc.spotchat.org
Notes to themes artists
For your theme to fully work with Cinnamon 1.4 you need to add styles
for the buttons in “Expo”. Click on the links below to see how this was
done in the default theme:
You can also improve your theme by adding some of the improvements the default theme received in 1.4.
This link shows all the changes made to the default theme (cinamon.css) :
https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master/data/theme/cinnamon.css
Changes made between Cinnamon 1.3.1 and Cinnamon 1.4 include all
commits (i.e. changes to the code) made on the 21st of February, as well
as 1st, 2nd and 5th of March 2012. If you click on a “commit”, you can
see exactly what was changed. As a theme artist, you’re only interested
in changes done to “cinnamon.css”.
The following commits in particular are noteworthy:
If you encounter any problems, please log in the IRC and ask us for help at #linuxmint-dev on irc.spotchat.org
