GNOME: driving to the sky, one step at a time

In the new GNOME 3.x series there has been a push to integrate the user’s online accounts into the desktop. At the same time we have been working on a new set of core applications for finding and selecting the user’s content. Documents is one such application. It lets you view and search your documents that are stored both locally and online.

GNOME 3.6, which will be released in September this year, will have lots of improvements and new features in this regard. One of them is the integration of Microsoft’s SkyDrive file hosting service. Go to the Online Accounts panel in System Settings (hit the super key or the Activities button and type “online”) to enable your Windows Live account, and you will be able to access your SkyDrive from Documents just as you are now able to do with your Google account.

Here, in these screenshots, you can see that I am viewing the PDFs of the famous Linux Device Drivers (3rd edition) book which are stored on my SkyDrive account.

The development of this new and exciting feature is being tracked here. You can either wait for GNOME 3.6 to come out in September, or you can get the latest copies of gnome-online-accounts, gnome-documents and libzapojit to try it out.