There was an IRC meeting yesterday regarding the Nautilus UI and a lot of design as well as functionality changes were proposed. Some of these are already confirmed as TO DO such as:

Browsing the Gnome Shell wiki @ live.gnome.org, I stumbled upon some great login screen and lock screen mockups which you can view below:

Window Applets (which we've covered before) are 2 separate applets f

New Wave is a truly awesome Gnome theme available in Ubuntu's community-themes package for quite a few releases.

Right now you have multiple desktops but only from the applications point of view: you can move applications from one desktop to another and that's it. There is currently a mockup posted @ Gnome Shell Design Playground website (and a lot of discussion about it on the Gnome Shell mailing list) which seems very interesting:

Some community themes from the Ubuntu Artwork Wiki made it into the "community-themes" package from Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (which you can install using: sudo apt-get install community-themes) however some amazing themes didn't.

The beautiful Bisigi themes were available for Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx users in a testing PPA. Well, today the themes have moved to the main PPA.

I'll start with a sad announcement made by Google

Although Google released Picasa 3.0 for Linux, a company spokesperson said that version 3.5 is only being released for Mac and Windows due to low adoption of Picasa 3.0 among Linux users.

It's kind of sad, because as much I enjoy the Linux's software variety, Picasa is irreplaceable from my point of view. The latest version ported to Linux is 3.0, and.. the latest Windows version is 3.6 which have cool features like face recognition and lots of bugs fixed. I really don't understand why is so hard to maintain the Linux version because even the version installed from Google's repository is emulated with Wine (and probably a little bit changed, but.. the hard work is done by Wine). Anyway, here's how you can have Picasa 3.6 (or the latest) in Ubuntu.

You can skip the first step if you have it installed on a Windows partition,or you can get the installation folder from another PC.

The Gnome icon theme is not exactly a great one or at least I for one never found it to be polished enough to use, but the latest version available via GIT is definitely an improvement.