Eyes on Karamba

An anonymous reader writes "dot.kde.org posted an interview with Hans Karlsson, the author of the now pretty popular KDE clone of Samurize, Karamba, which is responsible for the recent craze at kdelook.org. An interesting interview well worth a read which shows that even today most open source programs still start as tiny hobby projects after all."

Comments

I first saw this news item from Karamba...

[srichter]

I just installed Super-Karamba this morning and I am fiddeling right now around with the Slashdot theme to make it nicer looking on my screen.

Karamba is really cool! I downloaded SuperKaramba due to its Python support and I plan to write some plugins for receiving automatically Mailing list notifications. Should be trivial as far as I can tell.

I think something like this was overdue for a long time and it rivals the Active Desktop from MS Windows.

Karamba

[Necrotica]

I compiled Karamba once and....quickly uninstalled it. Sure it looks nice but I never found it particularly useful. It takes up a lot of desktop space and really is nothing more than a very beautiful way to waste your system resources.

For example, one of its features is the ability to read headlines from news sources such as Slashdot. While its nice to see the headlines right on your desktop, how useful is it? If you want to read the whole story you have to fire up a browser anyways to read it. So whats the point?

Sidebars such as Karamba need to be more useful than just show information. There needs to be a way for a user to interact with the information presented to them. Until that happens they will remain pretty much useless (and off my desktop).

This just smacks of "Active Desktop"

[cnelzie]

The only major difference being that one actually has the choice of what to put on their desktop, not some mega corporation that only wants to "push" a bunch of silly adds down our throat...

Does anyone else remember "Active Desktop"? The premise is almost exactly what Karamba is. It gives the user the ability to display disparate information that is streamed to the computer over a network connection directly on the desktop, underneath applications.