7 young GNOME apps from a new generation
June 25, 2008 3:16 pm gnome, maemoWith the recent discussion in blogs around the GNOME world, it can be easy to forget that there have been some great new applications for GNOME appearing recently. Many of these are written by a new breed of GNOME developer, young students with none of the weight of history sitting on their shoulders, and they are great!
If you haven’t tried them yet, then you should. Most of these aren’t in the GNOME desktop suite, and could probably do with some more exposure.
Here’s a few that came to mind without me having to think too long:
- GNOME Do: This is an amazing application! Its plug-in system is what makes it really great – add all music by an artist to your Rhythmbox playlist, tweet that you’re at your computer, send an IM to a contact, all with just a few keystrokes
- Hamster: I discovered this app recently, and have been very impressed. A plug-in for GNOME Do, and it’d be perfect 😉
- Tasque: For the GTD wannabe that I am.A clean, small app to handle TODO lists.
- Cheese!: Now that this is in the desktop, I guess everyone knows about it. A PhotoBooth clone with an authorwith a sense of humour – especially on April 1st.
- Vagalume: My absolute favourite Last FM client.
- Pimlico: A mobile suite of applications. I tried out Dates and Contacts on my N810, and was very impressed. Everything I personally want in a PIM – simple, functional, intuitive, beautiful.
- Transmission: After using the old GNOME bittorrent client for so long, I was really happy to see someone put the work into making a sensible BT client for GNOME, and Transmission is it. Bravo.
Some of these apps have come from people working in companies like Igalia, Opened Hand and Novell, some of them from students, some of them from hack weeks, all of them have some things in common – a sense of aesthetics and attention to the user experience, lightweight user interfaces ruthlessly focussed on a core usecase. And all serve their users well.
Another thing that many of them share is a sense of humour – when using Hamster or Cheese, you can’t help but feel that the author was having a ball.
Nothing in particular set me writing this, I just wanted to point out that there are many new applications aimed at the end user coming out of GNOME, humour and creativity still live here.
June 25th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Fantastic list Dave.
I haven’t messed with gnome-do before but looking at the screenshots on flickr it looks very neat.
Thanks.
June 25th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
[…] Posted in Blog by Donnie Berkholz on June 25th, 2008 The inimitable Dave Neary just blogged about his favorite new GNOME apps, so I thought it’d be interesting to take a look at what it […]
June 26th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
There is another torrent client, which I like even more than transmission : http://www.deluge-torrent.org
June 27th, 2008 at 8:03 pm
Thanks for the list. I see a few have made it into the latest Gnome release.
For Mac users, GNOME Do seems to be a copy of Quicksilver – http://www.blacktree.com/.
Cheers.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Hi,
Indeed, it’s inspired heavily by Quicksilver – the GNOME Do white paper even gives credit where credit is due.
Cheers,
Dave.
June 29th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
Hi Dave,
Since you’re a newly-fan of the GTD method, and a Tasque user, have you tried its integration with the Remember the milk webapp?
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/05/guest-post-advanced-gtd-with-remember.html
http://blog.rememberthemilk.com/2008/04/getting-organized-with-tasque.html
Even if you don’t get used to the webapp, it could be a nice “back-up” when you can’t work from your computer…