Plasma is KDE’s and therefore Netrunner’s desktop and workspace. I’ve explained what Plasma is and how to change it to your liking in the past. Unlike its competition KDE puts the user in charge of his or her desktop, and in the mobile age of technology, KDE should get an easy and pleasant experience for touch-input devices as well mouse pointing devices, specially when Windows 8 is coming out, and many people migrating from a Windows 8 PC will now have this feature. This is where Homerun hits the scene, developed by Aurélien Gateau and Shaun Reich, whom contribute to Gwenview… Continue Reading

Playing music is easy, just choose a media player of some sort and fire up a few songs. With the right plugins or codecs installed, you will hear sound pouring from the speakers. Easy. However, finding the right software to suit your needs, taste and mood, and help you organize music – is not. Today, we have a little contest coming up, between Amarok, Clementine, and Tomahawk. Amarok As you probably know, Amarok is a popular music player for KDE desktops, perhaps the most popular. The list of capabilities is truly impressive. Amarok will run on Windows, if you are so… Continue Reading

As we pointed out last week, Netrunner isn’t just any Linux distribution, it’s a truly web enabled experience. As such it recognizes that in the modern world most users don’t store their contacts or calendars on their local hard drives, rather this type of information is stored in the cloud. Dryland Second Edition provides the necessary tools to be useful in this new world, not only by offering ways to sync your cloud stored data with it, but rather making it as straight forward as possible. While applications like Kontact have always support this kind of integration, these features were… Continue Reading

Hullo, my first article here, and I’m blithely taking on Telepathy. Officially, Telepathy is a software framework which can be used to make software for interpersonal communications such as instant messaging, Voice over IP or videoconferencing. Telepathy enables the creation of communications applications using components via the D-Bus inter-process communication mechanism. Through this it aims to simplify development of communications applications and promote code reuse within the free software and open source communities by defining a logical boundary between the applications and underlying network protocols. But that’s geek lingo. For normal people, this is an instant messaging client with additional audio… Continue Reading

Last week we revised Calligra’s presentation app, namely Stages; we didn’t doubt to call it a piece of software not ready for prime time yet. Today we take a look to Sheets and the situation is completely different. Sheets it’s a mature application ready to fight toe-to-toe with any out there. As we’ve been doing with other members of the Calligra family we will start by talking about the main dockers. Main Docker It’s used to insert formulas into cells with a little more space and more comfortably (like the main formula line in most spreadsheets apps). Once you finished writing a… Continue Reading

Stage is Calligra’s presentation app. Thanks to the fact that it supports ISO standards presentation can be opened and edited by all popular applications. Dockers As all other members of the suite its UX design is build around dockers. As a big example of how integrated Calligra’s app are, Stage’s main dockers are shared dockers, and therefore we’ve covered it in our opening article regarding Calligra. That said, Stage does have a few dockers specifically designed for it. Document Shows a list of all slides. You can easily add and remove slides. It has three different view modes: Thumbnail view, Detail view… Continue Reading

Every six months all members of the Ubuntu family get updated. Every six months new features are added, bugs are corrected, new apps get in, some apps get off. Some releases come once every three years. Long Term Support (LTS) releases must be more stable and polished than usual, there’s less room for experiments, this versions are meant to be used for a long time and by users on enterprises or managing systems that require as much stability and longevity as possible. Moreover, Kubuntu 12.04 isn’t just another LTS, it’s also the last Kubuntu version with the lead developer Jonathan… Continue Reading

Last week we took a tour exploring Calligra’s common interface elements. Today we’ll take a tour to meet Calligra’s word processor, perhap the most widely used of all the kinds of office applications. Because of how widespreaded their usage is any self respectable suite needs to be fully capable of working with documents processed by other popular apllications. Word is fully compliant with this requirement, a goal accomplished by adhering to ISO standards. Any document created with Word can be opened and edited with the mighty popular Microsoft’s Office, and basely any other office suite. Users with older versions of Microsoft’s… Continue Reading