OSNews

Rhythmbox & Totem
When Rhythmbox becomes a bit more feature-complete I hope it will become part of Gnome. The latest release 0.6.1 is actually pretty good. Two things I want to see doing though: 1. Use the XMMS visualization plugins. Re-inventing the wheel never helped anyone. Re-using existing code is the wise way to go (for Totem too). 2. Integration with iPod & syncing.

Regarding Totem, what I would like to see is to use either Gstreamer or Xine on the fly, depending on which of the two supports the needed codec or what's installed. Additionally, I want to see Totem 1.0 (when it's out) be included on Gnome as the standard video player (and Rhythmbox as the music player).

For the formats that Gnome is not allowed to bundle for legal reasons (e.g. .wmv or .mov or region-free dvd playback) I would like Totem to recognize the file format and show an alert to the user "would you like to download from the web these formats and install them?". If the user answers "yes", show a license agreement saying that Totem and Gnome are not responsible for any of these user actions, and then download, install and on-the-fly use these new libraries and play the video in question. Something like this could be a breakthrough on the multimedia/video playback usability on Linux. Painlessly is the keyword here.

Gstreamer and Video Editor
When Gstreamer becomes more mature I would like to see a company (Ximian?) create a home video editing application in the realm of power that OOo or Evolution offers. The current video editors on Linux, simply put, they suck. There is definitely space for improvement and innovation on this department on Linux. Come on Novell, buy out Adamation and give us some good home video stuff. Adamation has gone the way of the Dodo, their application is sitting there waiting to be purchased (for cheap), get ported and you get a definite edge over other desktop distros.

Epiphany
Why can't I still drag-n-drop a link to the URL bar and have it load on that page? Also as a web developer I need the ability to use "no cache" at all, even if I have to use the Gconf editor to set that up. Having complete context menus on forms (e.g. "paste" on a textarea) would be good too. Thankfully, Epiphany is really active on development!

Images, Cameras, PDAs
EoG is a good but basic image viewer. gThumb is in my opinion much more powerful and still simple enough to be used by everyone. I would advocate it to become part of Gnome instead of EoG.

On the same theme, better maintained tools for digital camera capture (see: better than GTKam) and a PDA integrated solution (not only for Palms but for PocketPCs too) would be smashing as well.

Text and Video Messaging Integration
The Gnomemeeting maintainers say that Gnomemeeting is primarily a PC-2-Phone app instead of a casual chatting one and so if this is the case I would advocate the forking of its engine for use with Gaim for the SIP MSN video protocol and maybe even Apple's iChat one (unfortunately the Yahoo! one is not documented). Also, including Gaim on Gnome by default makes a lot of sense, even if distros include it anyway. Gaim should be integrated more with Gnome and its apps, with or without Dashboard.

Clipboard Utility
I always loved this Clipboard utility, ClipUp (as a gnome-panel plugin as well as a stand-alone app). That can be extra useful on Linux where the clipboard is inconsistent at best. There was a clipboard app for Gnome under construction once but that app was too much trouble for what a simple user will ever need I believe. Something simple and also elegant as ClipUp would rock.

Burning Application
The only good app for burning DVDs and CDs on Linux today is KDE's K3B. Gnome has XCDRoast and GComBust and a few others, but they don't cut it (they are unusable by Mac or Windows newcomers). Coaster looks good but it seems abandoned (don't get fooled by the wrong dates on their homepage, these are a year old) and it doesn't support DVDs either. The Dropline guy is working on a simple burner app too. Gnome needs a good burning app. A good one, I repeat. (update: read the Gnome roadmap for more info on addresing this problem)

Quick Lounge
In my opinion this gnome-panel add-on should be included by default (after a handful of bugs are fixed), as many users use the Red Hat setup of gnome-panel which is 48pix height. This simply means that people at 800x600 (still more than 30% of the internet users worldwide!) will see most of their horizontal gnome-panel space go the way of the do-do after adding 3-4 icon shortcuts there. Quick Lounge 'fixes' this problem by allowing 2 rows of icons to be placed vertically (icons are similar in size to Windows' quick launch area). This is a good workaround for small resolutions and practical enough and desirable even for me who I am mostly on 1600x1200 or 1280x1024. You can never have too much mustard in a french salad or screen space.

Gnome Office
I like both Abiword and Gnumeric, but putting such apps together and releasing them as "office", I would expect better integration between them. For example, I would need to be able to copy/paste a gnumeric chart or sheet on AbiWord. Also, adding gLabels 2.0 to the office package when it is released would be great too.

1. "Gnome in general"
2. "Gnome and System Integration"
3. "What is a DE without applications?"