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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"."
gDesklets provides an advanced architecture for desktop applets - tiny displays sitting on your desktop in a symbiotic relationship of eye candy and usefulness.
Populate your desktop with status meters, icon bars, weather sensors, news tickers... whatever you can imagine! Virtually anything is possible and maybe even available some day.
The system consists of three parts: the gDesklets core (a daemon running in the background), the Sensors (providing data and processing user actions), and the Displays (what you will see on the screen).
New Displays can be put together by simply composing widgets and Sensors in a XML file. Advanced users may also create new Sensors easily.
As of now, Sensors are restricted to Python modules, but we are planning to extend this to scripting languages like Perl and Ruby, and to C as well.
You can get gDesklets from: www.pycage.de/software_gdesklets.html
Have fun!
Martin Grimme
Christian Meyer
Jesse Andrews
Try konfabulator which does the same for Apples. I've bought it and love the way I have so much eye candy on the screen that I end up only using about two thirds for productive work!
Pimping my Karma Whore since 1847.
A developer calls it "an ugly hack". Well, not quite. It was pretty clearly marked as tongue-in-cheek, and not to be taken seriously.
Looks to me like the submitter deliberately wants to fan any remaining flames between the projects; who knows why.
Instead, we have some pretty good illustrations as to why having two projects is a really good idea. KDE gets Karamba (and SuperKaramba) which takes off like wildfire. Undaunted, some Gnome people sit down and look at what Karamba does and learns from it (what the devels envisioned versus how it is actually being used; awkwardness and mistakes in teh design) and develop something similar, but with the benefir of hindsight from the other project. No doubt will the Karamba people look at gDesklets and in turn learn from it's strengths and weaknesses. THe end result is a set of tools that become far better, faster, than either would have become on its own.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Good to know Gnome is going to have something along the same line as KDE. Having said that however, I'm wondering if the Gnome community can match the number of Karamba plug-ins out there, some of which really do look good (www.kde-look.org) Also, before slamming Karamba for being "an ugly hack", I'd love for them to explain A.) Why they think this is so and B.) Why their version is going to be so much better. I mean, a good explanation might go a long way in converting people over who use KDE just for Karamba (and they are out there).
*Fortitudo, aequitas, fidelitas.*
For something being touted as eye candy for the desktop, there's amazingly few screenshots available in the links provided.
Have EVDO, will travel.
I guess smarter developer would have ported karamba to gnome. I've had enough of this duplication of every goddamn app in world for both of the systems. What's the use of making everything twice? Waste of talented programming resources, IMHO.
... and call it iKaramba.
[Tumbleweed rolls past]
I'll see myself out ...
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.
As Ron Minnich said
"You want to make your way in the CS field? Simple. Calculate rough time of
amnesia (hell, 10 years is plenty, probably 10 months is plenty), go to
the dusty archives, dig out something fun, and go for it.
It's worked for many people, and it can work for you."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Really, was it really necessary to mention that "karamba is an ugly hack" comment? The project's homepage is very objective and doesn't slam KDE at all. That comment was the opinion of one single person!
Why was it mentioned? Are you trying to slam KDE again? Or are you trying to make it look like as if the GNOME guys are slamming KDE, and start yet another flamewar on Slashdot?
I'm sure I will get modded down for this, but hell, it's the truth! Slashdot should not encourage more pointless desktop flamewars or trying to make either GNOME or KDE look bad.
Obligatory mention of gkrellm ... www.gkrellm.net. IMHO, its smaller, more lightweight... can be extended with hundreds of plugins and doesn't clutter the desktop. I think it's been around a bit longer too, but I could be wrong.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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 ;)
"Also, before slamming Karamba for being "an ugly hack", I'd love for them to explain A.) Why they think this is so and B.) Why their version is going to be so much better."
There is no "they". There is only "he". This is the comment of one individual, not the entire project.
Slashdot is just trying to start another flamewar. This whole story could be considered a troll just because it mentions that single comment.
Quote: "Footnotes is running an update article on gDesklets, Gnome's answer to KDE's Karamba."
What's the point of summarizing a story, if - by the end of the summary - the reader still has no clue as to what it's even about.
What the hell is Karamba, and why should people care enough to click-through?
This wasn't just plain terrible, this was fancy terrible. This was terrible with raisins in it. - Dorothy Parker
The parent is an absolute troll... but ok, I'll bite.
7) The half assed way of changing screen resolutions. The Xrandr hack is useless if you want to change colour depth.
This is an XFree86 issue, no?
5) Nautilus, half asssed file management with no "real" features. Guess whos using konqueror.
Have you bothered to actually use Nautilus? If anything, it has more features than Konqueror. It's incredibly pluggable, with hundreds of enhancement pluggins. It's now fairly efficient and usable even on my lowly 700mhz celeron.
Personally, I was quite impressed by Nautilus of late. I guess you last used one of the 1.0.x series of Nautilus.
4) Its word processor (Abi word office) has no table support
You obviously haven't used AbiWord 1.99.3 (2.0 beta3). All recent work (the last year or so) on AbiWord has gone into version 2 - which is due to be released at the end of August. AbiWord 2 has many amazing features, tables included. Other such cool features are the Open Text Summariser and Enchant. Check them both out on the AbiWord homepage.
3) The clock, in its asswipe MM/DD format (again W!=USA)
You can change that, you're trolling with that one.
2) The file dialog (no further comment)
Being fixed in Gtk 2.4. Possibly your only valid complaint.
1) HAVOC PENNINGTON
The consensus among the majority of Gnome users and developers are that the HIG is a great thing which you obviously don't understand. It's not 'remove features', it's 'be sensible about them'.
Havoc is a dedicated and decent member of the Gnome community and Gnome - and open source in general - would be much worse off without him.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
1. XML is readable by people. You don't end up with useless legacy binary files with XML.
2. You don't have to write yet another file format IO library - you can download XML readers and writers for any language, and there are simple and easy APIs (like SAX) for extracting the information.
3. XML files are cross-platform - there are no issues like endian-ness or word length to prevent the data being read.
4. XML files are self-documenting in terms of structure - tags, attributes and text content are understood by everyone - you don't need to specify your own delimiter set, escape characters, line terminators etc.
5. XML files can be validated for correctness.
6. XML is extensible. You can take someone else's format, and add your own tags with your own namespace, extending the structure of the data without altering the meaning for legacy programs (programs need only interpret the tags they recognise).
7. XML is transformable. You can easily port data between different XML tag sets, or to another file format (PS,PDF,RTF,SVG etc) using XSLT style sheets.
8. XML is searchable. You can store in XML repositories and it will be searchable on tags and attributes.
9. XML is international. There are defined mechanisms for coding international characters.
10. Almost everyone is either using it, or going to. Microsoft Office can load and save XML. Microsoft .Net and the SOAP services use XML for communication. The OpenOffice native file format is a ZIPed directory containg XML files. Why not be compatible, rather than write your own custom format?
So Yes, Everything Should Be XML