Desktop

Calendaring issues solved with AirSet

I’ve been looking for a tool to do shared calendaring for some time now. I went through manual editing of text files, ical, Korganizer, RSSCalendar.com and some other tools that I don’t remember anymore. None of these provided all the functionality and comfort that I needed. So, I used neither one of them.

Today, I finally came across a tool that looks very promising. One of the comments to this post in Alexandra Samuel blog suggested AirSet.

I tried it and it was love from the first sight! AirSet provides a free online service for managing and sharing of calendars, contact lists, and web links. It features flexible access control facilities with user and group management. Sharing of information can be neatly controlled and can be utilized either via RSS feeds or via AirSet web service.

I liked it so much that I immediately registered and created my public calendar. Check the “Calendar” link at the navigation bar at the top of the page. There you will find my public calendar and a link to the RSS feed with items for the next 30 days.

I foresee a lot of popularity for AirSet in the near future. Congratulations to the development team for a really nice service. Let’s see how stable it is.

Dictionary plugins for Mozilla Firefox

Being a non-native English speaker, I have this mildly often need to lookup the translation of some word in the dictionary. Instead of installing translation software on my computer or visiting one of the online translators every time such a need arises, I chose to use an extension to Mozilla Firefox.

Until now I was using the DictionarySearch extension, which can be configured to lookup in several different dictionaries, encyclopedias, etc. I was mostly happy with the extension, but felt that it could be ~~improved~~ simplified. I didn’t need all those configurations, choices and such. All I wanted was to lookup the translation of either English or Russian word in the Yandex Lingvo.

Today I came across an extension which does exactly that. Lingvo Online! for Mozilla Firefox is a very small and simple extension which does exactly what I want. It adds a context menu which allows quick lookups of selected words.

Outstanding!

Tags in system applications

I was thinking about how cool tags are. They truly help finding bookmarked or themed information faster. Keeping up with important issues is much easier too.

But are there any good uses for tags in system applications? Sure, there are. One particular area that springs to mind is font management.

After I have installed about 6,000 fonts on my computer I realized that it is extremely difficult for me to efficiently use them. There are no categories or bookmarks of any kind. There are not subfolders. There are no comments or descriptions. I would be willing to sort out and tag all these fonts once to be able to find the most appropriate font later.

KDE people? Anyone?

Gwenview – image viewer and browser for KDE

Gnome users might be a bit luckier than KDE users when it comes to image viewers and browsers. Gnome features an excellent application – Eye of Gnome (eog). Another good alternative that many people find satisfying is GQview (gqview).

KDE also ships a couple of image viewing and browsing applications, but they need some work.

Firstly, one could always use KDE’s file manager Konqueror (konqueror). It can browse through the directories nicely, generating thumbnails for preview, and even editing EXIF comments via the Properties dialogue. Scaling image to fit window is not trivial, but can be achieved. And it is somewhat slow. I wouldn’t spit on better keyboard navigation too.

Secondly, KView (kview). This is a pure image viewer. All it knows about browsing is “Previous image” and “Next image”. For a simple program that it is, I can’t stand its startup times. It takes ages to start and load the image. If I have to go through a collection of pictures, I am reading to kill myself by the time I reach the third image.

Thirdly, Kuickshow (kuickshow). This one is both a browser and a viewer. It shares the slow start up time with KView. It also has a rather limited functionality and poor keyboard navigation. My biggest problem with this one is absense of “Delete” in the viewer. Which means, I have to switch back to the browser to delete an image and than go back to the viewer to see the next picture. That’s simply annoying.

I have asked for suggestions in #kde today and some people pointed me towards Gwenview. I looked through the website and decided to try it. Luckily, it is also in Fedora Extras, so all I had to do to install it was to run yum install gwenview.

Gwenview (gwenview) is a really nice application. It works fast. Navigation is extensive, flexible, and natural. It also has all the usual functionality for simple image manipulation (rotating and flippig) as well as configurable menu of external tools (edit in Gimp, set as wallpaper, open in Konqueror, etc). EXIF comments can be edited via same old “Properties” dialogue. Image viewing is avaiable in a number of forms (thumbnail, small preview, full size, full screen) with an easy keyboard-oriented switch between them. Bookmarks are available as in most of KDE applications that deal with file browsing.

Gwenview also has support for Kipi plugins. Kipi, in case you don’t know, is the KDE Image Plugin Interface. It is an effort to create a base for exchange of plugins between several graphical KDE applications (Digikam, KimDaBa, Showimg, and Gwenview).

With all those nice plugins available I am still missing the historgram preview.

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