A couple of weeks ago I started to read documentation about Gnome Shell, that will be the new UI of Gnome 3.0.

The Shell will be an important change in the Gnome desktop, and although it’s said that changes are good, it may not be easy. So I kind of followed the steps to getting involved, and I build and run periodically the development version of the Shell (it builds most of the time!).

The idea behind this is not only getting used to the new environment, but try to find a way to contribute and, at least, do my part to fix the things that I think might be wrong (please notice that’s different of the things I don’t like).

I’m back into web development at work, so I got a copy of JavaScript: The Good Parts, because it won’t hurt me to improve my JavaScript kung-fu, and may be I’ll be able to make an extension for the Shell (yep, it uses JavaScript; no comments).

OK, may be I won’t be able to do anything, because of lack of time or lack of knowledge, but I really think that waiting for the Shell and then complain because is not what we expected (although I really don’t know what to expect) it’s not fair. Let’s see how far I can go.

Building the Shell in Fedora 14 is quite straightforward (and I upgraded my personal laptop to a Intel Core i3, so I have some spare CPU cycles for jhbuild).

First I need to figure out how the shell extensions work, and then I guess I’ll try to do something related to my weather applet.

And you? Are you going to do your part in the Shell?