In Cinnamon 1.3, every panel component is an applet. This means you can remove the default menu or window list and replace them with 3rd party applets.

Another important feature in this release, is the fact that applets can now be dragged and dropped with the mouse and placed wherever you want within the panel(s). So you can now move any part of the panel(s) around and really fine-tune the layout of your desktop to what works best for you.

Your panel, your rules. You can now drag and drop applets and order things in your panel exactly the way you want (The screenshot above is an extreme example of this).

Settings improvements

Cinnamon Settings gained a lot of new features and a lot of new tabs. You can now use it not only to change Cinnamon preferences themselves, but also to configure your fonts, windows, desktop icons, window, cursor, gtk+ themes..etc.

It’s graphical interface was also changed, for the tool to be able to show more information without using more screen estate.

A new UI for Cinnamon Settings, similar to Gnome Settings, which allows the tool to feature more settings and use less space on the screen.

Menu improvements

The menu received the following improvements:

• New hover delay preference
• Better icon sizes (crispier icons)
• Fixed menu size when the number of favorites is high
• More exhaustive search results

Other notable improvements

• Panel launchers can now be re-ordered by drag & drop
• Improved visuals in the default theme
• Workspace navigation is now possible in scale mode (note that we’re still planning an Expo mode)
• Multiple bug fixes

Impact for themes artists

If you’re developing a new theme, simply start from scratch using the following tutorial.

If you made a theme for Cinnamon 1.2:

• You don’t really need to add anything for your theme to work
• The default theme was slightly improved, in particular it now uses more transitions and shadows, and it defines “ltr” sections for things to look better on Left-to-right locales (Arabic, Hebrew..etc). Have a look at the diff (list of changes) made to cinnamon.css: cinnamon.css.diff
• PanelMenu isn’t used much anymore. Instead, all core components of the panel now are applets, so make sure your applet section of your theme (at the complete bottom of cinnamon.css) is up to date.

Here’s the Applet style section present in cinnamon.css in Cinnamon 1.3:

As you can see, it defines a different behavior when the applet is hovered, and it triggers a different behavior on applet-icon and applet-label as well. In the default theme we use this to add text-shadows and icon-shadows to applets when the mouse goes over them.

Impact for applet developers

Unless your applet is tightly linked to our code or referring to other panel components, it should continue to work in Cinnamon 1.3 the same way it did in Cinnamon 1.2.

Impact for extension developers

For all extensions, you need to change the version of Cinnamon from 1.2 to 1.3 in the metadata.json file.

If your extension refers to any part of Cinnamon that is a panel component (for instance: menu.js, windowlist.js, dateMenu.js, status/bluetooth.js, status/keyboard.js….etc), it will no longer work in Cinnamon 1.2. All these components were migrated to applets and are now located in /usr/share/cinnamon/applets.

Extensions which design was to modify the behavior of a particular applet component (for instance: an extension which hides the bluetooth icon in the panel) should be abandoned. Applets can be removed, and rather than modifying them using extensions, developers should write their own modified versions of them as applets.

Extensions which design was to add new content to the panel (for instance: the weather extension), will continue to work.. but we STRONGLY recommend they get migrated to applets. Extensions are stuck to a particular place in the panel and users won’t be able to drag and drop them and move them around like they do with other applets.

If your extension has nothing to do with panels, then it should continue to be an extension.

If you encounter any problems, please log in the IRC and ask us for help at #linuxmint-dev on irc.spotchat.org

Cinnamon 1.2 is out!

All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable!

I hope you’ll enjoy the many new features, the desktop effect, desktop layouts, the new configuration tool, the applets, changes, bug fixes and improvements that went into this release. This is a huge step forward for Cinnamon.

We’ll follow up with documentation for artists and developers, and with a website for users to download, rate and comment themes, applets and extensions. For now, we hope you enjoy this new release as much as we enjoyed working on it. Some of the new features were requested by many people, others will come as a bit of a surprise. It’s a real pleasure for us to finally unveil the very latest of our favorite desktop and we look forward to receiving your feedback so we can improve Cinnamon further with each and every release.

Desktop effects

We all remember Compiz, wobbly windows and the desktop cube… some people loved it, others preferred a desktop with no animations. What was good with Compiz and Metacity though is that people had a choice to get exactly what they wanted. Cinnamon 1.2 is a first step towards reintroducing desktop effects and the ability for the user to define fancy animations or to turn effects OFF altogether.

This release features 2 new animation plugins:

• Fade, which changes the opacity of windows
• Scale, which changes their dimension

And 30 transition styles:

30 transitions, 2 animations and configurable durations means you can make windows appear and disappear in a multitude of different ways

For each animation you can also define the duration, so it’s easy to give your desktop your own unique feel.

This is how you configure desktop effects in Cinnamon

Desktop layouts

Another popular feature users “used” to have, was the ability to change the layout of their desktop. Some people liked their panel on top, others liked it at the bottom, and some even liked to have two panels for their desktop. In Cinnamon 1.2, we haven’t reached the stage where each component is independent and can be moved anywhere you like, but we added support for the most common desktop layouts:

• Traditional layout (one panel at the bottom)
• Flipped layout (one panel at the top)
• Classic layout (one panel at the bottom and one panel at the top)

A traditional desktop layout

The “flipped” layout, with panel on top

A “classic” desktop layout, one panel on top, one at the bottom

Easier customization

This release introduces a new configuration tool called “Cinnamon Settings” and additional configuration options.

You can now switch themes, apply desktop effects, add applets and extensions to your desktop and configure some of the settings of the desktop.

There’s already a few quality themes available for Cinnamon

Among other things you can now also define your own date format for the calendar applet and panel launchers are now editable and you can change their icon.

Applets

Cinnamon 1.2 comes with 5 new applets by default:

• Accessibility
• Recent documents
• Removable drives
• Trash
• Display (XrandR monitor control)

Applets are probably the coolest new feature in Cinnamon, for both users and developers

Though they will eventually become something similar to what they were in Gnome 2, “Applets” are a new concept in Cinnamon 1.2.

To users they are optional parts of the desktop which come installed by default as part of what Cinnamon is and which place themselves in the panel, near the system tray.

To developers they’re a fantastic new addition. The extension system developed by Gnome Shell is not adapted to developing applets:

• Because extensions insert themselves in the desktop, they interact with the Shell code itself and this potentially makes them incompatible with future versions of the Shell.
• Because extensions insert themselves in the desktop, they have to define their own location
• Because extensions insert themselves and don’t rely on any proper API, they can’t take advantage of a common behaviour and look and feel

In Cinnamon 1.2, applets are a particular type of extension. They’re specifically designed for extensions which add content to the panel and feature the following advantages:

• They benefit from an Applet API and are trivial to write (as an applet developer you only focus on the content of your applet, everything else is done for you)
• They’re consistent and feature the same common behaviours (a context menu, consistent styles for the applet container, tooltips etc..)
• They don’t depend on a particular version of Cinnamon
• They don’t specify their location or whether they’re loaded or not. In Cinnamon 1.2 they’re near the systray. In future releases the user will be able to move them around.

Eventually, all panel components in Cinnamon will be “applets” and they will be loaded the same way as “applets” written by other developers.

Developers are encouraged to only write extensions for advanced purposes and to use the Applet API instead for anything that adds content to the panel(s).

Improved main menu

The main menu was significantly improved.

If you search for something, the categories now become inactive so you don’t hover them by accident just to see your search results disappear.

You can now also simply press enter after a search and the first item in the search results gets launched.

The menu definitions are now handled by Cinnamon itself and the “Administration” and “Preferences” categories are back!

Under the hood changes

Important changes were made to significantly improve Cinnamon under the hood and these changes also mean we’re now going further away from any kind of compatibility with Gnome Shell.

• Cinnamon now uses its own window manager (Muffin forks and replaces Mutter in Cinnamon 1.2)
• Cinnamon is no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes. It is possible however for a theme to define styles for both Gnome Shell and Cinnamon and to be compatible with both desktops.
• Newly open windows are focused by default (instead of appearing in the back with an annoying “Your window is ready” notification)
• Closing windows on an empty workspace no longer triggers the overview.
• The overview was replaced by a desktop Scale plugin (similar to the old Compiz Scale). In future release, this plugin will be associated with CTRL+ALT+DOWN and a new Expo plugin will be mapped to CTRL+ALT+UP.
• Bug fix galore (after this release, 130 issues were closed since the start of the project)

bron: cinnamon.linuxmint

Blue Systems is a German company sponsoring Free and Open Source projects such as Netrunner and KDE-projects like kcm-gtk-config.

As part of the partnership, Linux Mint will share its knowledge and expertise with Netrunner and both distributions will work together on improving their respective KDE editions. Although Netrunner and Linux Mint KDE offer a different experience, they’re built on the same technology. This cooperation between the two distributions will have positive effects on both.

Blue Systems is also becoming the primary sponsor for Linux Mint. This sponsorship allowed us to contract an additional full-time developer for the whole year of 2012.

bron: The Linux Mint Blog

Artikel/Bron The LinuxMintBlog

Toevoeging om paneel automatisch te verbergen,installeer pakket dconf-tools,en vink panel- autohide aan.

De diverse Torrents en Mirrors zijn te vinden in onderstaande link
Veel plezier
Bron:The Linux Mint Blog