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gDesklets - Gnome2's Karamba
Deusy writes "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba. I've heard a lot of noise with regards to Karamba (and Super Karamba) and a lot of moans from Gnome users about the lack of a Gnome equivalent. Hopefully this should fill that void and more, as one of the developers comments that gDesklets is the product of "months of planning" and describes Karamba as an "ugly hack"."
For something being touted as eye candy for the desktop, there's amazingly few screenshots available in the links provided.
Have EVDO, will travel.
Probably more effort than writing from scratch, given the differences in the two projects (Qt vs GTK, C vs C++).
Why should there only be one of every app? Is there only one type of car. Writing portably where possible is great, yes, but not in every case.
These look strangely like BeOS replicants. Small programs that can sit on a desktop. Only the BeOS versions could "front" as monitors for larger programs and pass information between eachother without extra programming.
Here are just some examples of the things that can be done:
Display system information such as CPU Usage, MP3 playing, etc.
Create cool custom toolbars that work any way imaginable
Create little games or virtual pets that live on your desktop
Display information from the internet, such as weather and headlines
The possibilities really are endless!
In other words, more proprietary gui and more useless stuff on the desktop. I am not trolling, but why would anybody want little games or virtual pets on his/her desktop ? or display the weather or/and headlines ? it is just cosmetics, i.e. they don't do anything useful. And since Linux has so little desktop usage, I can't see how useful is this for the majority of the Linux users.
Personally, when I work, I don't like to be destructed by anything that moves on the computer screen but it is out of my focus. Maybe it's just me.
I'm honestly curious what the attraction is. I guess eye candy is always nice, but when I'm sitting at my machine, I'm /using/ it. And I have windows open doing things... I don't even see my background wallpaper all that often.
;)).
Do people really sit around looking at their eye candy?
I guess I can imagine it, but only among the 21 and under crowd (nothing personal guys, I used to be one
I've been waiting long for something to equal the power of the command line + Unix philosophy in a graphical environment. I think this technology has that power. I think we soon will see a set of graphic small tools which do one thing, and do it well.
Why "classic" frameworks as Gnome and KDE failed to provide this tools? Well, they follow the "component model", which basically means that there are BIG modular reusable tools intended to have everything but the kitchen sink. Those components are great to assemble stand alone applications, because they provide a great chunk of related functionallity. But that's not the Unix way.
The Unix way is to have small and versatile commands, to know what they do and to combine them in new ways to solve problems as they appear. I think most GNU hackers (and some intermediate users) benefit from that approach, and I think that a text command line is not a requirement for that.
You only need a common API to communicate those small tools, something that Unix carry out with pipes. But now we have two new environments, Karamba and gDesklets, which could be the base for a graphic API. I believe it's time to move from the Command Line Interface to the Command Graphical User Interface.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
>Do you think we need dozen KWrite-alike programs which all
>have very little features?
Of course not. But each desktop environment does need its own integrated version (in order to have it honour user preferences etc). And if someone doesn't like the current choice and spends their free time to write their own and happens to release it for free, what's wrong with that?
I don't understand the whole "why are we wasting our time writing two desktop environments?" argument. It's not like there is "we" to start with - open-source devlopment time is not some fixed utility like it is in the closed source world. It's mostly made up of what free time people will give. The more interesting they find the project, the more time they will give.
With two projects, you get two teams looking at the same problem from different angles and there is cross-pollination. Even if you could force developers to only work on one, their motivation would drop and you'd end up losing more development time than you save by only having one environment.
Ok, so gDesklets is a clone of Karamba that is a clone of Konfabulator that is a clone of the old hack Andy Hertzfeldt and Arlo worked on in Nautilus. Nice so see how things work in circles ;)
Pretty shiny things to clutter your desktop, though? That's just evil. There's no there there. It's just pretty graphics pretending to be useful!
Am I totally missing the point, or am I spot-on?
I tried to like Karamba when it came about; I was never able to find a good use for it, though. About the best use anyone ever came up with was as a half-assed OSX-style Dock. Weather applets? Stuck to my desktop? Until I stop using my computer for anything other than staring at my desktop, no thanks.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I have a newstick always up top below my taskbar that rips news from all my fav sites, bbc, cnn, etc. That way I dont have to go crawling through to read the headlines. A site like slashdot that I hit constantly during the day, I dont bother pulling headlines from.
I have an xmms applet so that I can keep control of my music right on the bar. I have a run applet so i can click right in it and type a command and run it. I also have a dictionary applet for when Im writing..clickity click and off it goes.
Applets are useful.
So basically they're all just knock-offs of Konfabulator...
Here is a Gnome desktop widget that is actually quite a bit more interesting: Dashboard, software that gets fed "clues" from other applications, and searches some databases for related information.
VOS/Interreality project: www.interreality.org