Google’s master plan: NaCl

Judging by the title you may be wondering if Google’s big idea is to enter the pharmaceutical market or some other activity heavy on chemistry.  Sadly, as attractive as the idea of buying my amoxicillin  straight from Google is, NaCl actually stands for Native Client: Google’s effort to finally bring native-like performance to the web. Unlike Netrunner, or any other Linux distribution or relevant operating system, Chrome doesn’t support running native apps (Chrome itself aside), this severely limits how much can be done in the platform, developers could potentially be trapped between Javascript and Flash as their only choices to develop. A bit of… Continue Reading

KDE Search and Destroy, I mean Launch

In a galaxy far far away, long before there was Android en masse, long before touch was popular, I mean retro-popular, because we have been using the touch technology for at least two million years, long before there was any modern, simplistic interface for smartphones and tablets, there was KDE. It’s all in the name. KDE is one of the few remaining staple desktop environments of the Linux world. It’s been around forever, and it does not seem to be slowing down. In fact, it’s evolving and growing. So far so good. One big thing that sticks to KDE is… Continue Reading

What’s new in KDE 4.10

KDE’s transition from 3.5.x to 4.x was a traumatic experience for many users, many regressions happen and there’s a general consensus among observers that 4.x was released prematurely, an opinion not shared by some developers that argue they needed feedback and bug reports. Thankfully those times are behind us and I can assure you that the next big revision of KDE will not be traumatic at all, it will be exciting and stuffed with many new features. We will talk about the move to framework 5 and Plasma 2 as they get more mature, but today let’s enjoy a new… Continue Reading