BANGALORE, INDIA: Developer's team at the GNOME Project has announced the release of GNOME 2.24, the latest version of the popular, multi-platform free desktop environment and of its developer platform.

Released on schedule, GNOME 2.24 builds on top of a long series of successful six months releases to offer the best experience to users and developers.

GNOME is Free and Open Source Software and provides all of the common tools computer users expect of a modern computing environment, such as e-mail, groupware, web browsing, file management, multimedia and games.

Furthermore, GNOME provides a flexible and powerful platform for software developers, both on the desktop and in mobile applications.

New features in GNOME 2.24 release includes:

Telepathy

Telepathy provides a common framework for applications to access instant messaging functionality. It can utilise many common protocols including Jabber/XMPP, Google Talk, MSN Messenger and Apple's Bonjour/Rendezvous local network chat.

Track your time better

The new panel released by GNOME enables end users to check how much time they assign to each project and client. So GNOME has added a panel application to make tracking your time easier.

Ekiga 3.0

Ekiga is a fully-featured SIP audio/video conferencing client for GNOME. Ekiga 3.0 features SIP presence support, PBX line monitoring, better video codecs support (H.264, H.263+, MPEG-4 and Theora), accelerated video and optional fullscreen and many SIP-related improvements for robust conferencing.

Improved File Management:

Today's modern filesystems are able to handle almost any desired character as part of the filename. Unfortunately this is not the case for the FAT filesystem that is commonly used on many USB thumb drives and portable music players, which is unable to use many common punctuation marks as part of the filename.

GNOME 2.24 detects when you are copying files with names that contains characters that cannot be used and automatically converts these characters to a "_" without you having to rename the file yourself.

New Sound Theme Support

Sound themes in GNOME are now handled by libcanberra. Using libcanberra also means that an application's alert sounds are less likely to interfere with your music player or movie player, so you can leave those important alert sounds switched on while watching a fullscreen movie.

Better Digital TV

Powered by the GStreamer multimedia framework, GNOME 2.22 introduced digital television (DVB) capabilities into its Movie Player. Determined to make things even better, developers have worked to enhance this support by adding support for multiple DVB tuners (watch multiple channels at once) and better troubleshooting diagnostics.