Firefox Mozilla Mockups for version 4

How would you like the next version of Mozilla Firefox UI to look ? Would you like it to have a spartan look and feel similar to Google Chrome ? Or should it be an amalgamation of all the good UI ideas found in different browsers like Opera, Internet Explorer 8.0, Safari and Google Chrome ?

Mozilla Firefox has initiated a discussion on how the UI of Firefox 4.0 should be designed. It has put together a couple of ideas as mockups.

These mockups have not been finalized but are shared with the public to initiate a discussion and for brainstorming. Should Firefox 4.0 have tabs on top of address bar or on bottom of address bar like in Google Chrome? Should it have a combo stop/refresh/go button ?

Check out the mockups of Firefox 4.0 and also the feedback received.

And if you have any UI ideas you would like to share, do write to the Firefox Mozilla team.

GNOME Do - An intelligent launcher tool for GNOME

GNOME Do is an intelligent launcher tool which makes all your default menus and panels in GNOME redundant. Since last time I had written about GNOME Do, it has gotten only better. Just a glance through the numerous plugins available for GNOME Do will be enough for any sceptic to fall in love with it.

Just to give you a feel of what can be achieved with this marvellous tool, do yourself a favour. After installing GNOME Do in your Linux distribution within GNOME, start it and open the GNOME Do preferences dialog box. Click on the plugins tab and glance through the diverse plugins available for GNOME Do - right from Twitter, to Google tools and more.

Another neat trick is to use GNOME Do as a dock, like in Apple's Mac OS X. To achieve this, the prerequisite is -

Your GNOME desktop needs to run using a composite window manager. You can enable it by opening the System > Preferences > Appearance GUI tool. Then click Visual Effects tab and enable the special effects.

Once you have enabled visual effects, you can use GNOME Do as a dock by simply changing it's theme to "Docky" in the "Appearances" tab of GNOME Do preferences dialog.

The blog I'Been To Ubuntu has a fabulous article on how you can use GNOME Do and a few other packages available in Ubuntu Launchpad repository to transform GNOME into a Mac OS X like Desktop. Really inspiring.

Of course, in Linux, we have another option for a dock such as Avant Window Navigator. Or you can transform your traditional KDE desktop into a Mac OS X.

Can you name a GNOME Do equivalent tool in Windows, Mac OS X and KDE respectively ?

10 Desirable features in Ubuntu

Ubuntu is no doubt a fabulous Linux distribution. And it is gaining in popularity by leaps and bounds - thanks to Mark Shuttleworth and his team at Canonical. As an end user, what would you like to see in Ubuntu which would tempt you to ditch your current OS and embrace Ubuntu with gusto ?

Kumail Hunaid has a wonderful post describing what he feels are the 10 things the developers should include in the future releases of Ubuntu. The intelligent icons and the icons that talk do look rather enticing. Incidentally, Kumail is also the co-developer of Xenon - a web based operating system (still in alpha stage) designed with netbook users in mind.

A visual walkthrough of the enhancements in KDE 4.2

The main emphasis of KDE 4.2 release has been drastic improvement in desktop effects. KDE has its own composite window manager called KWIN which received a huge graphical upgrade, with composite and GL support.

Lucas Murray has put together a collection of videos showcasing all the improvements in desktop effects that have found its way into KDE 4.2.

The desktop effects being - Present windows, Snow, Desktop grid, Invert, Box switch, Cover switch, Magic lamp, and of course a slew of subtle features which makes KDE 4.2 a major release in itself as far as the end user is concerned.

All the videos are in high definition format and can be viewed here.

Free wallpapers for portrait monitors

Beautiful wallpapers for normal monitors are dime a dozen. In fact you will find links to quite a collection of wallpapers right on this blog. So what is unique about this set of wallpapers you might ask.

The USP of this collection is that it is optimized and targeted at portrait monitors - Those monitors whose height is larger than their width. Some of the wallpapers are a montage of numerous photos which have been stitched together to bring them to the required dimensions.

Check them out. They are indeed very beautiful.

100s of beautiful wallpapers free for the picking

No matter what OS I am running on my machine, one thing I really like to do is, adorn my desktop with is a beautiful, aesthetic, less distracting and pleasing to the eye wallpaper. I like my wallpapers to be vivid with colors but at the same time not be an eye sore. Nature, animals, abstract art, blue swirls ... are all my favorites.

Here are a couple of links which collectively have literally 100s of wallpapers of different hues, colors and designs. All of them are eye catching and quite a few are actually stunning. But I will let you be the judge of that.

• 218 HD Resolution Desktop Wallpapers for Nerds - This is a collection of wallpapers which are literally stunning. I do like the ones by Hamad Darwish who claims to be one of the few photographers commissioned by Microsoft in 2005 to shoot photos to be used in Windows Vista's Wallpaper Collection.
• Social wallpapering - This is a community effort to classify, rank, and distribute high resolution images for use as computer wallpaper.
• Wallpaper images - And if you are a nature lover and like to swoon at flowers, leaves, pebbles, rocks, vegetables, fruits and what not, then this is the right place to be. Mike Swanson is a technical evangelist for err... Microsoft and he has made available his entire collection of wallpapers as a free download.
  

The best news is that you do not need to have explicit permission of Microsoft to use these wallpapers on your Linux desktop ;-) .

Cool Awn Applets to adorn your Ubuntu Linux Desktop

In the previous article, I explained how to install Avant Window Navigator in Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy Gibbon). By default, it doesn't install any applets. But a dock without any applets is as boring as a desktop without a dock right ?

So here are a couple of AWN applets which I found really interesting. But first the installation ...

Installation of Awn applets

To install these applets you have to enable an additional repository from reacocard. For that open the /etc/apt/sources.list file in your favorite editor and append the following line to it.

#FILE: /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/reacocard-awn/ubuntu gutsy main

Now update the repository and install the following package. NOTE: It is assumed that you have already installed the Avant Window Navigator.

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install awn-core-applets-bzr

That is it. Now you can find all the applets in the awn manager which is accessed from GNOME Menu System>Preferences>Awn manager .

Fig: Awn manager GNOME menu

To run an applet, open the "Awn manager" dialog box and in its left pane, click the "Applets" icon. In the right pane, you will find all the applets installed on your system. Select an applet and click the "Activate button". The applet starts running on your Awn dock.

Fig: Awn manager GUI

A few cool AWN applets
Here are a couple of very nice applets which caught my fancy.

Dilbert Cartoon Applet - This applet displays comic strips of popular cartoon characters. At present you have a choice of 5 different strips namely - Dilbert, Peanuts, The born loser, Wizard of ID and Xkcd.com.

Fig: Dilbert applet displaying a comic strip

Main menu applet - This applet provides an alternate menu containing all the applications you will find in the menus on the GNOME panel.

Fig: Main menu applet - I find it more functional

Stack applet - I like this applet very much. It has three layouts namely "Default dialog", "Curved GUI" and "Trasher GUI". The "Trasher GUI" is the same as the "Default dialog" with the exception that in the former, there is a delete button embedded. The "Curved GUI" is what has picked my fancy and makes me think of the dock found in Mac OSX Leopard.

Fig: Click on the stack applet to open a stack of objects.

Terminal applet - What better way to use the dock than embedding a terminal into an applet ? The terminal supports transparency which makes it ultra cool. And you can even choose the terminal you want to embed such as gnome-terminal, konsole, xfce terminal, xterm and so on.

Fig: gnome-terminal embedded in the terminal applet

Weather applet - Would you like to know the weather forecasts for today ? Even better how about the predictions for the next 4 days? Well, you have got your wish in the Weather applet. This applet pulls relevant data from the weather.com website and displays it in a nice pictorial view on your desktop. I was really surprised to find my city covered. Also the weather predictions seem pretty accurate.

Fig: I am always interested in the weather :-)

Fig: The weather map of India

Install Avant Window Navigator (AWN) in Ubuntu Linux

AWN - short for Avant Window Navigator is a dock like bar which sits at the bottom of the screen. It provides similar effects as the Dock in Mac OSX Leopard. The AWN project consists of three main parts namely

1. The Dock
2. AWN window navigator and
3. The shared library 'libawn' which is used to develop applets which enhance the functionality of AWN. The applets can be coded in either 'C' or 'Python' language.
   

Pre-requisites for installing AWN
To install AWN on your Linux machine, it has to meet certain conditions. Them being -

• Xgl or AIGLX installed - in short your computer should be capable of compositing support. This mostly means if you have an Nvidia or ATI video card, you should download and install the proprietary drivers.
• A compositing manager installed. A few examples of compositing managers are Beryl/Compiz/Compiz Fusion, Cairo, Xfce, Metacity, xcompmgr and so on.
  In Ubuntu you can enable compositing manager by clicking System>Preferences> Appearance and then enabling Visual effects from the 'Visual Effects' tab in the Appearance dialog.
  

Fig: Enable Visual effects

Installation

In Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, the installation of AWN is a two step process. First you have to enable the backports repository which contain the necessary binaries of avant window navigator and related files.

This is done by clicking System>Administration>Software sources on the GNOME panel.

Fig: Click on the Software Sources Menu

It opens the "Software sources" dialog box.

In that click the 'Updates' tab and enable the gutsy-backports option as shown in the figure below :

Fig: Enable gutsy-backports in the Updates tab

Next fire up a terminal and update and install the AWN packages as follows :

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator awn-manager 

awn-manager is a GUI tool which allows you to make changes to the look and feel of the AWN dock as well as install and manage applets and themes.

Fig: Avant Window Navigator close-up view

Now that you have installed Avant Window Manager, it is time to take it for a test drive. To start AWN, click GNOME menu Applications>Accessories>Avant Window Navigator.

Fig: Avant Window Manager menu

Fig: Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon desktop running AWN

A few AWN tips

• To add applications to the AWN dock, just drag and drop icons from the Applications menu or from Nautilus (/usr/share/applications).
• You can right click on the AWN dock and select properties to open the 'Avant Window Manager' dialog where you can change the look and feel of the dock and add additional applets.
  

Conclusion

Finally we Linux users have our very own dock similar to the dock seen in Mac OSX Leopard. While the AWN project is still a work in progress, there are a lot of applets available from the ubiquitous clock to the GMail checker which brings visual joy to the user's desktop. To know about these applets, read the following article.

Sexy Ubuntu wallpapers. Um... NSFW

These are beautiful eye catching Ubuntu wallpapers. Some of the best I have seen in quite a while. No doubt about it. And they are "not safe for work" only if viewing a bit of skin is frowned upon at your work place or if you happen to work at a convent ;-).Then again, no one should accuse me saying I didn't warn them before hand and so the NSFW label. All the wallpapers can be downloaded from gnome-look.org.

Links you may like

Do you know the relation between Sex and Linux?

Click on an image to download the wallpaper.

Gorgeous GPL wallpapers for your Linux desktop

Who wouldn't like to spruce up their desktop ... like changing the theme to one of your liking, changing the look of the icons, and at the most basic level, changing the desktop wallpaper. And Linux desktops are very flexible in allowing you to change every aspect of its look to your liking. So much that there are projects which allow you to make your Linux desktop (be it Gnome or KDE) look like Mac OSX.

There are good, Sexy Ubuntu Wallpapers on this blog.

Some of the sites which I frequently visit scrounging for pictures to spruce up my desktop include kde-look.org and gnome-look.org just to name a few. Today I came across a collection of gorgeous wallpapers for the Linux desktop at Shareapic.net. Shareapic is a free service that allows its users to upload and host images on their servers.

While the wallpapers are to put it lightly, stunning, I am not sure if they do not cause some distraction at work. If you use your Linux desktop primarily for recreation, casual browsing or chatting, then go ahead and use the wallpapers. But if you are doing serious work, it is always prudent and less distracting if you select a wallpaper which has plain colors or rather no wallpaper at all. But that is just me airing my opinion. You can download the nature collection of wallpapers released under GPL at http://www.shareapic.net/134601-GPL-wallpapers.html (Update 30-March-2009: Link Broken).

Transform KDE desktop into Apple Mac OS X

One of the biggest motivation for a lay person in buying an Apple Mac - apart from its robust high-end hardware and its OS stability - is its beauty. Over the years, Apple has pioneered new ways of easing the desktop users life with its well designed desktop OS - Mac OS X. Many people who set their eyes on an Apple Mac for the first time will be tempted to buy it.


What if I told you that you can make your Linux OS look and feel like an Apple Mac ?

The panel in KDE with the MacOSX look and feel

Now-a-days a lot of development has been taking place in Linux on the usability front and some of the projects such as XGL are worth the efforts put into it. But for the die-hard Mac enthusiast who would settle for nothing less than a desktop which looks like the original, it is possible with some effort to make a Linux desktop look like a Mac OSX one by clever use of icon sets, wallpapers and themes.

Earlier I had explained how to convert your GNOME desktop to look like Mac OS X. Now it is possible to create an exact imitation of Apple's OS X look using a project called Baghira. In fact Arnaud, a Baghira user has written a very good tutorial to convert your KDE desktop to look like an Apple Mac OS X desktop. The tutorial is pretty detailed in its explanation of the steps and is replete with screenshots.