Some interesting things happen in the GNOME world these days.

First of all John Carr posted about his progress with the synchronization utility Conduit regarding Windows CE devices. It will be a good day for Linux when we can plug in a mobile, let Conduit pop up and synchronize all your contacts/calendars/notes/files with the computer automatically.

The hazzle to configure all the opensync/msynctool command line stuff is just beyond any usability level for a regular user.

Much of the base of his work should also help in implementing SyncML stuff and make mobile synchronization hopefully just work in Linux.

Next comes GSoC veteran, James Sharpe, who has been working on my initial proposal to implement multiple desktop wallpaper support in GNOME. He has put up a video of his progress and all patches for the functionality are now in the bugtracker.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1QHs-STcHs[/youtube]

There are still open questions regarding the best UI to change the background and how this works on multi-display setups and with Compiz, but the progress is clearly visible. I just would have liked if the current background implementation would be further refactored instead of being built upon.

More GSoC gems are hiding like the media services tool to allow easy to use multimedia format conversion for any GStreamer supported format and more…