Here are 5 small things that I am looking forward to in the Fedora 12 desktop.

Better tooltips

GTK+ tooltips have traditionally been yellowish, and have a strong smell of Windows 3.x. In Fedora 12, they will come in a fresh blue, with nice rounded corners and a touch of translucency. We have also improved the positioning algorithm to avoid covering the tool that the tip refers to, as well as appear in a more predictable position.

Spacious icons

Status icons have any number of problems. Two of the bigger problems are that they are all crammed together, and that they jump around as they come and go. In Fedora 12, we have added a small amount of padding between status icons. The padding is added inside the icons, enlarging the clickable area for each icon. And the notification area keeps icons from jumping around, by sorting them into predetermined positions. ‘Standard’ icons such as battery, network, Bluetooth and volume go the the right, everything else goes to the left.

Spacious applets

Just like status icons, applets are traditionally crammed together on the left or right side of the panel, since the panel configuration is not flexible enough to do anything better, short of hard-coding absolute positions. No more. It took me one evening to figure out how to insert padding between objects without breaking any of the drag modes that the panel supports.

Special folder icons

Just a nice little touch. These icons make it a little easier to find the locations for Music, Downloads, Pictures, etc. They appear in the file chooser, in nautilus and in the Places menu on the panel.

A new NetworkManager look

NetworkManager has always been stretching the limits of what a GTK+ menu can do. The new design still straddles those limits, but in a much more usable fashion. The ‘More Networks’ submenu limits the length of the menu, the unwieldy progress bars have been replaced by icons, and it is possible to explicitly disconnect.