Request for an application

I’ve got an idea for an application. If you have nothing to do or looking for an idea to practice your mad programming skills, feel free to use this one.

Flickr is an excellent source of images. Better even, all images are tagged and most are available in different sizes. It would be very nice to have a tool that could use Flickr images as desktop backgrounds (wallpapers). Ideally, I would just specify the tags that I am interested in, such as sports, nature, or landscape, and this tool would get the list of images from Flickr that are available in the resolution that I am using. Images could be random or sorted by some criteria, such as posted date or number of comments. If there would be a preview and an easy way to change to the next image (maybe even automatically based on time period) I’d be totally happy.

I don’t see myself programming this anytime soon as I don’t care much for desktop candy. But if one was available there is a chance that I would use it. I also know of a few people who would simply love something like this.

Trying out Sim

During the last few days I’ve been trying out Sim. Sim is yet another open source Instant Messaging (IM) client that supports a variety of protocols (ICQ, Jabber, AIM, and MSN). I am currently interested only in ICQ though.

Before Sim I’ve been using Licq for a long time and centericq before that.

I switched from centericq to Licq because I wanted to have annoying notifications on new messages while in graphical mode. Otherwise I was constantly forgetting that centericq was running in one my konsoles and it stayed there abandoned for weeks.

Licq is almost perfect for my needs. And I wasn’t looking forward to jumping of off it. It’s just that a few people suggested that Sim is a better client in general, and that is solves a few of those issues that I have with Licq.

Continue reading Trying out Sim

Using knotes

KDE has an excellent helper tool – knotes. It a small application that allows one to create notes similar to yellow Post-it that are so familiar to everyone. With knotes it is possible to create notes in all fonts, colors, and sizes as well as set alarms on those notes, display them over all desktops, above or below all windows, etc.

I knew about this application for a long time now, but never got used to using it until recently. After thinking a bit about what kept me away from it, I realized that these were the shortcuts. Particularly, there are two shortcuts which can make all the difference – “New Note” and “New Note From Clipboard”. By default, some weird keys (Alt+Shift+N and Alt+Shift+C) are assigned to these actions. Very inconvenient and non-ituitive.

Using knotes’ configuration dialogue I reconfigured the shortcuts to be F12 for an empty new note and Ctrl+F12 for a new note with clipboard content. That feels way better now. Try it and you’ll be surprised…

P.S.: Now I wisht that knotes could have transparent window background…