Some of you might notice a new screenshot on miester.org. It features some of the newest from the Gnome front. I’ve spent the last few hours tweaking various portions of Gnome, Nautilus, and Evolution. Read on for my full review.

I’d like to first say that, in my opinion, the screenshot looks GREAT. Let’s start in on the review now.

Nautilus
This is Gnome’s new file manager and does it ever have potential! It supports ftp, http, nntp (not tested), and files without any problem. It’s snappy while loading my $HOME (with almost 800 items in it) and lods subsequent windows with ease. The theme I have is vector based, which allows you to resize icons, antialiased, etc. I haven’t got TTF working yet, but I plan on working on it. I’d really like to get some funky fonts kicking. My only complaint is that, even though it loaded ftp and samba shares fine, I could not a.) play mp3’s from my samba share or b.) edit files via ftp. This seems like something that would be standard – no?

Evolution
This is the contact manager/email client/calendar application created by Ximian. It’s got everything you’d expect in such a client and closely resembles Outlook. I haven’t used it much, but I like how it works so far.

Gnome
The Gnome team seems to have addressed most of the speed issues that once plagued the project. It loads up pretty fast (considering all the stuff it starts up with), works well integrating various applications, and is generally nice to use. My only beef is that I can’t find the keyboard shortcut editor.

I’d recommend everyone check it out.