Ubuntuland

I'm pleased to announce the release of Compiz Fusion 0.7.2.

This is the first development release of Compiz Fusion 0.7 series, which will
be the basis for the stable 0.8.0 release. This release is based on Compiz 0.7.2
and requires some features that weren't in Compiz 0.7.0.

Please note that we decided to skip 0.7.0 to keep in sync with Compiz version
numbers to reduce confusion as much as possible.

The Compiz Fusion 0.7.2 tarballs are available at
http://releases.compiz-fusion.org/0.7.2/ . You can verify these tarballs
using the sha1sums in
http://releases.compiz-fusion.org/0.7.2/compiz-fusion-0.7.2.sha1 , which are
signed by Compiz Fusion Release Team GPG key (C2B8F46E) at
http://releases.compiz-fusion.org/0.7.2/compiz-fusion-0.7.2.sha1.asc . The
matching Compiz Core tarball is available in the compiz/ subdirectory.

We've added a lot of new features and fixed a lot of bugs, but it's too much
to write everything down here.

New Plugins:
compiz-fusion-plugins-main:
- session: Communicates with session manager to save/restore window state
- bs: Change window brightness and saturation with key/button bindings
- mousepoll: Provides a generic system for other plugins to get the current
mouse position
- mag: Provides a magnifying glass under the mouse pointer with 3 different
display modes (simple/image overlay/fisheye)

compiz-fusion-plugins-extra:
- 3d: Adds depth to your desktop by raising windows in layers off the cube
- loginout: Provides a simple system to implement login and logout animations
- maximumize: Resizes a window to fit within the available empty screen space
- notification: Displays error messages on the screen with libnotify
- shelf: Shrinks a window to a preset size for monitoring many windows at once
- showmouse: Paints particle emitters that orbit the mouse pointer to make it
more visible

compiz-fusion-plugins-unsupported:
- atlantis: Renders an aquarium inside of the transparent cube

Configuration manager changes:
ccsm:
- Action settings were split into button, key, and edge settings, each using
its own widget.
- Match settings can be edited with a simple editor that supports easy
grabbing of window properties
- Advanced Search page was improved
- New icons for some plugins
- Minor adaptations and fixes

simple-ccsm:
New settings manager focused on simplicity and aimed at end users

Compiz Fusion is entirely developed as a volunteer project, and we'd like
to thank everyone who contributed to this release. Translators, testers,
the support team and developers: thank you, your continuous contributions
made it all possible.

We hope you will enjoy using Compiz Fusion as much as we enjoyed writing it!

- - The Compiz Fusion Team

Compiz Fusion is a collection of plugins and a configuration system for the Compiz compositing window manager for the X Window System. Compiz Fusion is the result of a merge between the old Compiz community plugin set "Compiz Extras" and the parts of the Beryl project that are independent of the window manager core.

The aim of the project is to port almost all of the features of Beryl to Compiz plugins, and continue to write further Compiz plugins. At the same time, Beryl has been discontinued and Compiz will add some of the core changes made by Beryl to the Compiz core.

Main Plugins

* Animation
* Color filter
* Expo
* Enhanced Zoom Desktop
* JPEG
* Negative
* Opacify
* Put
* Resize info
* Ring Switcher
* Shift Switcher
* Scale Addons
* Snapping Windows
* Text
* Window Previews
* Viewport Switcher
* Desktop Wall
* Window Rules
* Workarounds

Extra Plugins:

* ADD Helper
* Benchmark
* Crash handler
* Cube Caps
* Cube Reflection
* Extra WM Actions
* Fade to Desktop
* Firepaint
* Cube Gears
* Group and Tab Windows
* Motion blur
* Reflection
* Scale Window Title Filter
* Show desktop
* Splash
* Trailfocus
* Widget Layer

Unsupported Plugins:

* Fake ARGB
* Snow
* Mouse Switch
* Tile

Experimental Plugins:

* Screensaver
* Compiz-Scheme
* Sound
* Visual Event
* 3D Windows
* Cube Atlantis
* Freewins
* Anaglyph

Software release life cycle

A software release is the distribution, whether public or private, of an initial or new and upgraded version of a computer software product. Each time a software program or system is changed, the software engineers and company doing the work decide on how to distribute the program or system, or changes to that program or system. Software patches are one method of distributing the changes, as are downloads and compact discs.

The software release life cycle is composed of different stages that describe the stability of a piece of software and the amount of development it requires before final release. Each major version of a product usually goes through a stage when new features are added, or the alpha stage; a stage when it is being actively debugged, or the beta stage; and finally a stage when all important bugs have been removed, or the stable stage. Intermediate stages may also be recognized. The stages may be formally announced and regulated by the project's developers, but sometimes the terms are used informally to describe the state of a product. Conventionally, code names are often used by many companies for versions prior to the release of the product, though the actual product and features are rarely secret.