My Thougts On Screenlets 0.0.8

So I just installed Screenlets 0.0.8 which if you haven't heard about yet, then you should check my bog more often cause I posted about it here. Anywho I decided to get it up and running cause my old version of Screenlets was very broken and had me super frustrated and it just wouldn't work anymore. So I scrapped it and installed the new one, which maybe I will blog latter on how to get it up and running.

My first impressions were, "yes it is actually working for me!" After I got over my initial reaction I decided to fool around with it and check out some of these new Screenlets. The first one I decided to play with was the all new and exciting FLOWER Screenlet.....yea exactly who the heck thought it would be cool to have a growing flower on your desktop.....Flowers aren't exactly the kind of eye candy I was looking to show off to my friends. Anywho despite me thinking it un-cool eye candy I tried it anyway, maybe it woudl be cool. So I got it running on my desktop and it looks exactly like that picture to the right....an empty pot. Do I need to wait for it to grow or something? I have had it running for a good 10 minutes before I wrote this review to see if the plant woudl actually grow, but apparently its realistically and grows in real time. I don't plan on using my computer long enough to wait for this plant to grow, so i decided to look in its preferences and see if I could speed up the grow rate or something. Nothing like playing God with digital plant life. So while looking through it's preferences it said something about how I should water it.....yea so again tell me how do I water a digital plant.....they forgot to mention that I guess? Ok so I am done with the flower Screenlet because I have no clue how it works...any suggestions woudl be appreciated.

After my troubles with the flower Screenlet I moved on to the picture frame screenlet, which guess is a neat idea, I can see nifty pictures form one of my photo albums I assume? So I got it up and running and it looks liek the picture to the left, when you don't have any pictures put in it. So after getting it up the obvious thing to do is to get pictures in it right, now that shouldn't be to hard., right? Well it seems pretty easy as I right clicked on the screenlet selected to browse for some pictures. So I browsed to the folder of the picture album I wanted to be in the picture frame, and selected a picture. Unfortunately my picture is a jpeg....and this picture frame screenlet only allows png pictures at the moment. But the warning message I was given said "yet" in it so I assume more file formats will come soon...hopefully.

Other then the two new screenlets all the old screenlets I am used to having all worked great. An I am pleased to say screenlets 0.0.8 works well. I personally don't see much of a difference but I guess all the new stuff/changes are invisible to our eyes and I guesses in the code. Lastly there was another new screenlet in their but it isn't done yet but the start of it seemed cool. I was called storage and looked like a little cardboard box on your desktop and when you drag a file onto it, the top opened. I am not sure what happened to the file when I dropped it in it but the file was still on my desktop. But it seems like it will be a cool useful screenlet.

Overall I love screenlets, coming from a mac I want to see screenlets evolve and become more easier to manage screenlets. Also I want to see the number of screenlets increase, I want more. Those are my thoughts on screenlets 0.08

Update:

ok So Now my plant started to grow! I wounder if it dies when it gets really old...?


Update number 2:

Well the plan't sure does die when it get old, cause mine looks dead. But i just noticed if you right click it you can click on "water" so I assume thats how you keep it alive.

The Snazzy Way to Logout of Linux

There is this fairly new program called Closure. It's not brand new but I have only seen it mentioned and talked about on the AWN Forum. Closure to be used does need a composite manager, so you will need to be using; compmgr, beryl, compiz or the new Compiz Fusion. Ok now back to Closure. Before I go into Closure I will dazzle your eyes with a screen shot of it:


As you can see it looks pretty smooth. As for features Closure really doesn't do a whole lot, but what it does it does well. Basically when Closure is just an updated look for the log out menu. AS you can probably see in the screen shot above, Closure will; Lock, reboot, and Shutdown. Also there is a small elegant x out button just in case you brought up Closure to log out but then decide not to. Closure is not very complicated to use and is super simple and easy to set up. Its a nice quick way to give an updated look to your computer. Just compare Closures looks to the "normal" way someone would log out of gnome on Ubuntu:

(I will try and get the picture back, Unfortunately someone changed it to a bad picture....)

Now doesn't Closure look much slicker then that? You bet it does, so now your probably asking how can I get this nifty little program? Well I will tell ya. So lets open up a terminal and grab the SVN for Closure:

svn checkout http://closure.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ closure

Now cd into the directory that was created by the SVN and and in terminal run:

./autogen

make

sudo make install

Now If you had no errors you should be able to run closure with the command:

closure

Closure will also be in your application menu if you want a desktop icon, or it even looks very nice on AWN. If for some reason you are having trouble get help in this forum thread. Also if you want Closure is hosted on Google Code here. Closure seems to be in very active development so stay tuned for updates. I will post updates here on my blog but you can also see them in that forum post I mentioned before.

Giver, Easy File Sharing Review

Ok so pretty soon I will ad my own review and thoughts about Giver but since I already posted about how to install it I figured I would post this video I found online to just show you all how it works, so then you will be like wow I need to install this!!!

Time Vault, The Linux Version of Time Machine

As anyone who pays attention to anything related to mac, you may probably know of the new feature in Leopard called Time Machine. Time Machine just in case you don't know or just don't get what it does is a nice back up/recovery system for your files. So how does Time Machine work, well you have it connect to an internet storage host or your external hard drive and it syncs up and just starts remembering....basically its like a brain for your computer and remembers what folders once had inside. With this knowledge you can go back in time on your computer if you knew you had a file in a certain folder but now don't see it there, you can travel back in time and go back to when that file was in that folder. If non of my explanation on how mac's time machine works then I guess read what they have to say about it because they can probably explain their own product much better then I can. So obviously after reading my explanation or mac's explanation your like, "this is pretty super cool", or your thinking, "yea this is cool but I knew about this for ages so why you waisting your time and writing about it now?" So why am I writing about this, well I think its kind of obvious There is something similar out for Linux users!!!! Well I wouldn't get to excited yet, read on or go try it out yourself.

So I was super excited about this when I first read about it at this blog post, but was it all that I dreamed it would be? Well not exactly or maybe I just don't understand it..... So i downloaded the package from here, and installed it very easily. After logging out and then back in like it said, I had it running ad tried to configure it. Not gonna lie I found the preferences pretty hard to understand.Once I was some what sure I had it configure to what I think were my likings, I tried to test it. Let me say this first before I go into my review on how it works, it looks nothing like mac's Time Machine it inst super snazzy looking and beautiful, but I was willing to not have that bother me and use it if it worked as advertised. So the first thing I did was go into my home directory and move a directory out of there, and see what this so called Time Vault did.Well it actually didn't do anything to my disappointment....so I waited.......and waited....then gave up and decided to do other things.....after a while of ambiguously surfing the internet something happened! In the top right hand corner where my notification area is the icon that represented Time Vault notified me something change din my file system. So now I got excited, and rused to my home folder and clicked the Time Vault Icon and it was getting so exciting, but then wait I remember I already put the file I moved back into my home folder....I thought it didn't work so I just put it back but now Time Vault says it was moved but hasn't said it was moved back..... SO then I started to move things like crazy back and forth back and forth in my frustration, and once I tried to call something back with Time Vault but it didn't work, but maybe because it was lagged to like 5 or 6 moves ago. So basically Time Vault didn't really work for me but maybe it because I was confused on how it works or how to set it up, but don't let my review deture you give it a try and leave a comment if you figured out something I didn't. As for me I give up on Time Vault for now.

My few complaints about Pidgin

Pidgin which was previously called gaim is one of the leading chat clients for Linux users. It runs swell and without a hitch and its even cooler when used with AWN. The only thing I wished it had was more customization. To me it seems Linux is all about customization, you can make your Linux Desktop look like anything now a days. One of my only complaints about pidgin is it looks, it looks so old. The Screen shot to the right is an example of how pidgin will usually look. The only things you can change look wise are the window boarders if you got emerald working or some of the icons. But for the most part changing the look of pidgin is extremely limited.

Now if you were to look at my desktop with everything minimized you would be like "WOW" everything looks so slick, clean, and modern. It looks especially spiffy with Compiz Fusion. So when I have friends over who have never seen Linux before and they are playing around with it they are all like going nuts with how cool it is, but then they open or un-minimize pidgin and everything comes crashing down. Pidgin compared to the rest of my desktop looks out of date and doesn't fit in well at all, with this new age in compositing. We need themes and compositing to be integrated with pidgin. Pidgin needs a major face lift!

So what can we look at for suggestions and ideas? I think the mock ups of Trillion Astra look fabulous! Trillion realized there previous version of Trillion did not fit in with the new look of Vista. So what did they do they updated there look, to fit in with the New Desktop. The new Trillion is beautiful. All us Linux users all know that Windows Vistas new spiffy look doesn't even come close to anything that Linux can accomplish with snazzy looks, but we too need to update some of our desktop applications to fit in with the new look. Now yes in this post I am ranting on pidgin's design but lets face it there are other programs that also just don't fit in with the new composite desktop, I just am picking on pidgin because its one of those most used applications and should be the first to get a face lift.

Linux is slowly starting to get the complete Face lift to fit in with the new composite Desktop, and I think the leader of this is Neil the creator of, AWN and Affinity. Neil has two great applications and his work has started to inspire others, like the creator of Closure. I think the pidgin developers should take a look at affinity, because it the most of all these composite programs just stated shows how cool looks and composite can be integrated into a desktop application. I think either a new chat client needs to be designed to fit in with the new looks of a composite desktop or the pidgin developers have to realize they need to change with the times!

Update: July 4th

After seeing my article, (I thought only a few would actually read) it got noticed on Digg and the comments left in the comments section mostly bashed at me. So I decided to write back and try and set things straight. My article makes it seems like I want a totally new new design for Pidgin....well I do kind of. I want pidgin to be theamable along with the chat boxes, like in adium and kopete. Linux to me is all about choice and almost most things on Linux are theamable so why stop with the most popular chat client? Some also took my article offensively and thought I was saying Pidgin sucked. Well Pidgin rocks, it is chat client I use most on my computer and I have no complaints about its functionality. This article was juts a way of stating my own opinion on the way it looks, and maybe if it got a way to be theamable then the developers wouldn't have to care what it looked liked, they coudl leave the default look, and everyone coudl make there own themes that we could download from gnome-look. Again sorry for those that took offense to my article, but its just my opinion relax.

Updated again here

Google Desktop On Linux Review

I first found out that Google Desktop was going to be on Linux and I was super excited!! I rushed to go download it, and was immediately disappointed when I got to the download site (http://desktop.google.com/linux/) and looked into it. I noticed it was just a search and un-like the windows version Google Desktop for Linux didn't allow the use of Google gadgets. SO lets compare them right here, this is Google Desktop for Windows:

Now lets look at Google Desktop for Linux, its a bit skimpy compared to the windows version:


If you look at the two pictures you see that the Linux version is just a search box for files on your computer and nothing else... But I was still optimistic and thought at least maybe I will have a cool way to search my computer for files so I installed it.

After installing and trying it I was even more disappointed, the search results were horrible! The search results were completely irrelevant. Lets to a demo search for example I searched the word navy. My google desktop results give me this:
This picture may be a little hard to read but here are my first result copied below:

cdlg_En.rc

… Olive" IDS_COLOR_NAVY "Navy" IDS_COLOR_PURPLE "Purple" IDS_COLOR_TEAL "Teal" IDS_COLOR_GRAY "Gray" IDS_COLOR_SILVER "Silver" IDS_COLOR_RED "Red" IDS_COLOR_LIME "Lime" IDS_COLOR_YELLOW "Yellow" IDS_COLOR_BLUE …
/home/mike/stuff/wine-src/wine-0.9.37~winehq0~.../cdlg_En.rc - Open folder - 1 cached - 05/11/2007

what the hell is that... all my results are very similar and arent very useful, you coudl say Google Desktop search went a little to in depth....

SO basically I have come to the conclusion Google Desktop Search on Linux sucks, so now what shall Linux users do..... Well I suggest get beagle. Beagle is a great desktop search program for Linux, now lets see how my search term navy works with beagle, and we can compare results with that of the Google Desktop Search.

Here is a picture of the results with beagle searching for the same search term, "navy":


You can see that the above results are much more relevant results of things I would actually be looking for, unlike the Google desktop search results. So in a battle Beagle beats out google in the Linux desktop searching!