The Elementary Project started off as a purely art project by releasing an icon set (resembling the mac icon set) and a theme for Linux operating systems. On 11th January 2011, the elementary team blogged :

” The elementary team is beaming with pleasure over being able to announce that elementary OS is almost ready for prime time! “

This version of elementary OS is codenamed Jupiter. They say “its gonna be huge !!”. So Let us keep track of this tremendous makeover and what we should expect from the new OS.

Beginnings (Themes and Icons)

Elementary has always been a popular GTK theme with cool icon sets. This still exists and continues to rock the desktops of a number of Linux users. These themes were sleek, notably border-less and  light. You can install these themes on Ubuntu from the ppa, ppa:elementaryart/elementarydesktop ( add this to software sources and reload. Then you can install these from synaptic package manager). The icon set is very detailed and suits the theme perfectly. Here is a desktop featuring elementary themes.

The Makeover

Elementary soon developed into a concept of fast, sleek, beautiful, Just Do Desktop. These started materializing when the team started working on (or adopting into elementary) various projects :

File Browser – Nautilus Elementary and Marlin

Nautilus elementary was a patched version of Nautilus and is no longer maintained. It gave way to the new fast file browser, Marlin. Nautilus Elementary featured a much simplified UI with new navigation tab called breadcrumbs and new buttons to switch between different views. The team also patched up nautilus with Zeitgeist integration.

Breadcrumbs and View Mode Switchers in Nautilus Elementary

Marlin is a new file browser that the team designed to be fast. It includes elements from the XFCE file browser Thunar, and is developed with gtk3. But it may not feature in the Jupiter release as it is still to hit a stable release.

Dexter and Polster – Address book and Mail client

Dexter and Polster are the Elementary’s own address book and mail client respectively. These integrate with each other and with the elementary desktop very well. Dexter allows Google syncing of contacts features duplication detection. Polster is light, easy to use e-mail client. Both are confirmed to be shipped with the Jupiter release of the Elementary OS.

Gloobus – File Preview

Gloobus, a file preview system for the gnome desktop is also adopted into the Elementary desktop. It can preview 40 different file types including various video, music, image and document files. It allows you to take a quick look at the content of a file on the fly, saving you valuable time and CPU resources. You can access the preview mode from several ways, right click on the file you want to preview and choose “Preview” o simply hit the Space key on your keyboard. Video and audio files can be navigated on preview mode by dragging the slider of the progress bar at any given time.

What is Expected?

The projects listed above comes together along with softwares like Midori and Docky in Elementary OS. Work is progressing on AppCenter elementary’s version of the Ubuntu’s Software Center. It is a breath of fresh air; new software, new looks; It is assured to be quick and good looking. The result will certainly be exceptional, provided the track record of the Elementary developers. So wait till it releases guys…