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
The "Expo" overview allows you to manage your workspaces
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
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
- Troubleshooting options (restart cinnamon, looking glass, restore settings to default)
- Panel Edit Mode
- Quick access to settings
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/cinnamonCinnamon 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
Cinnamon now features a menu editor (forked from Alacarte and fully integrated within Cinnamon)
- 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:
- Fixed Menu label appearing as “Me…”
- Lighten the next month in the calendar
- Changed Panel Launcher’s hover style to make it more highlighted and changed box shadow with border (same effect, slightly better performance)
- Set both applets and systray icons padding to 3px
- The commits by “chamfay” introduce improvements for RTL languages
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