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Add Screenlets to make your Linux desktop more useful

Jack Wallen — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 17:50:13 +0000

If you spend as much time on the Linux desktop as I do, having small applets available for specific tasks can make your life that much easier. If you use the KDE 4.x desktop you will be familiar with Widgets. These are very handy, but are only available to KDE. For the GNOME users there is an application called Screenlets that serves the same function as the KDE widgets. Screenlets are written in Python, so if you know the language most likely you can create your very own desktop tools.

Screenlets take up very little in the resources department, are very unobtrusive on the desktop, and are user-customizable. The amount of available screenlets is fairly numerous so you should be able to find plenty to serve you. In this article you will learn how to install the Screenlets application, add screenlets, and customize screenlets.

Features

Install SuperKaramba themes.
Install Google Gadgets.
Load web apps.
Compositing support.
Supports compiz widget plugin for a “Dashboad” feel.
Open source.

Installing

I will be illustrating how to install Screenlets on Ubuntu. For other distributions you can check the Screenlets Install FAQ for more information. The first thing you will need to do is add the PPA repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list file. To do this open up a terminal window and issue the command:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Now add the following to the end of this file:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ketilwaa/ubuntu RELEASE main

Where RELEASE is the release name you are working with (such as jaunty).

Now save that file and issue the following command:

sudo apt-get update

Since you already have the terminal window open you can install the application with the following command:

sudo apt-get install screenlets

This will install everything you need to work with Screenlets.

Adding screenlets to your desktop

Figure 1

Figure 1 shows what screenlets can look like on your desktop. Here you can see:

Clear RSS
Weather.com weather applet
Gmail notification
Applications menu
Digital clock

In order to install any of these you first have to open up the Screenlets Manager tool. This tool can be opened two different ways. The first is to use the menu entry which is found in the Preferences sub-menu of the System menu in GNOME. The second method of opening the manager is from the System Tray icon (see Figure 2 – fourth icon from the left). To open it from the icon you must double-click the icon. If you do not see this icon in the System Tray you will need to enable it from the Screenlet Manager by checking the “Show daemon in try” option.

Figure 2

The Screenlet Manager is where you

Figure 3

take care of addling screenlets to your desktop, getting new screenlets, and more (see Figure 3). To add a screenlet to your desktop scroll through the list of available screenlets, select a screenlet and click the Launch/Add button. You can also just double-click the screen let you want to add.

In some cases the screenlet will open almost off the screen. If this happens just click and drag the screenlet where you want it.

Configuring your screenlets

If you right click the screenlet you will see a number of options. Each screenlet will have unique entries in the right-click menu. But most all screenlets will have a Preferences. This Preferences entry is where you can get to the the options for that screenlet. I won’t go into the various options because they will differ from screenlet to screenlet.

I will mention the layring of the screenlets. There are basically three options for layering. These options are found in the Window sub-menu and they are:

Keep above: This will ensure the screenlet is always in front of your windows.

Keep below: This will ensure the screenlet is always behind your windows.

Widget: This is the option you want to choose to make a screenlet part of the “Dashboard” effect.

Dashboard effect

Figure 4

If you’ve used OS X you know if you hit F9 your windows disappear and all of your widgets appear. You can have this same effect with the help of Screenlets and Compiz. To do this set all of your screenlets layering to Widget and then open up the Compiz Settings Manger. Within the CSM you need to enable the Widget Layer feature. Once you have enabled this feature you can hit F9 and all windows will fade and the screenlets will appear. When the widgets are not visible they will be completely invisible. You can also assign only certain screenlets so that only those assigned to the Widget layer will appear when F9 is hit (see Figure 4).

You can adjust the darkness of the background layer within the CSM. In order to get your desktop back just click on the desktop and your widget layer will disappear again.

Final thoughts

Screenlets is an outstanding application that brings new functionality to the Linux desktop. It’s very easy to install and use and the added functionality it brings is well worth the time spent.

Tags: Compiz, dashboad, screenlets, widgets

Dressing your Mac up for Christmas

Joe — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:07:00 +0000

Whilst I realise this website has a Linux and Windows-focus, I am (for better or for worse) a OS X user. As Christmas approaches, houses and offices are often adorned with decorations and there is no reason a Mac can’t be too.

In Northern England, we have been ‘fortunate’ enough to have had quite a bit of snow this week. Not everyone is as lucky though, and Snowflakes is an application which ensures those at lower latitudes won’t miss out. Snowflakes allows snow to fall either on the desktop or, should you really need reminding, in front of all windows. The speed and number of the snowflakes can be modified. It is a little distracting even behind all windows, as the snowflakes falling can be seen in the space just above the dock.

Mac users love widgets and fairy lights. Festive Lights is a widget which allows you to ‘decorate your dashboard’. Users have several options: festive lights can surround the dashboard, or only hang from the top; they are available in different colours; mistletoe can be added; and the pattern which the flashes follow can be selected.

Fairy lights are also available for the desktop. One way would be to drag the above widget to the desktop (a little hack required). Another option is Xmas Lights, a standalone application which allows lights to appear behind and in front of windows. Several lights are available and more can be added.

Christmas Countdown is another useful widget which does what it says on the tin, displaying the amount of days until Christmas in the form of a Christmas Tree.

Tags: christmas, freeware, mac, macintosh, os x, software, widgets

Yahoo Widget Position Restorer

Martin — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:13:34 +0000

Widgets, gadgets are little applications that are running on the desktop. Prominent examples are the gadgets that can be added to the Windows Vista sidebar or Yahoo Widgets. I never found a reason to use any of those little applications on my system but apparently some users really like that feature.

There is however a problem with the position of Yahoo Widgets when the screen resolution changes. This can be initiated by the user or by another application like a game that changes it automatically. The position of the Widgets changes with the new screen resolution and it can be a dull task to move them to their previous position after changing the screen resolution to its original value.

The Widget Position Restorer can be useful to users who use the Yahoo Widget engine and see frequent screen resolution changes on their system. The position can be saved and restored at any time using the software. The software is compatible to Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 2003 and Windows NT 3.51 & 4.0.

Tags: software, widget position restorer, widgets, Windows, windows-xp, yahoo widgets

Klipfolio a Customizable Dashboard

Martin — Sat, 24 May 2008 08:45:29 +0000

I’m not a huge fan of dashboards that take up valuable space on the monitor and I dislike the Windows Vista Sidebar mainly because of its inflexibility and resource consumption. Klipfolio on the other hand is a customizable dashboard for Windows that uses less system resources and provides better options than the Windows Vista sidebar.

The first thing that I noticed was that it is highly flexible. It is possible to increase and decrease the size of the whole dashboard or of single Klips, to dock it to edges of the screen and even create separate dashboards and place them in different locations on the screen. This means you could dock one part of the dashboard that is displaying information about the computer, memory, cpu and hard drive usage, in a bar at the top of the screen and another part of the dashboard in the right sidebar that is displaying RSS Feeds, Gmail Messages and other information.

The sidebars can be set to automatically hide the contents, stay always on top or behave normal. Winamp users will recognize the way Klipfolio handles and connects the single elements of the dashboard because it looks and feels like an advanced version of the way Winamp handles the separate program windows for years.

The image above is showing the compact dashboard that is not docked to any part of the screen. Each Klip can be customized in numerous ways. The layout can be changed which I briefly mentioned already. Far more interesting is the Alert option. This option can display a popup message and / or play a sound when new items are added, items change or specific words appear in the item.

More than 4000 Klips are available on the Klipfolio homepage. Each Klip can be downloaded and installed individually. One excellent feature are the so called Klip Sets which are themed Klip collections. You can find sets for gaming, poker and tools for instance.

Klipfolio is exactly what I wished the Windows Vista sidebar would have been. That pretty much sums it up. It uses less ressources, offers way more ways to customize the layout and provides the user with more ways to customize each individual item.

Tags: dashboard, klipfolio, software, widgets, Windows

Pimp up your desktop with Avedesk

Martin — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 10:32:27 +0000

Avedesk was mentioned on one of my favorite websites Donation Coder and it sounded so incredible that I had to give it a try immediately. One could say that Avedesk adds widgets to your desktop, not the kind of useless widgets like the clock in Windows Vista. I’m talking about widgets that look great and provide enough functionality to justify their presence on the desktop.

The widgets are called desklets in Avedesk and you can create them in the Desklets > Add menu. It might look confusing at first glance but it is not once you grasp the concept. The first step is to add a desklet using the menu above. You can choose from seven available ones including Drives, Folders, FTP and Shortcuts.

Adding a desklet does nothing more than to make it available in the main interface of Avedesk where you can configure it. Lets take a closer look at the folder desklet for instance. You can change the name of it, the appearance, the label, the format of the label, the image and of course the folder that should be accessible.

Let us explore this a bit more. You can define the size of the icon and the icon that should be displayed. As you can see in the screenshot above I decided to create some ridiculously huge items. You can define a position on screen for each icon and lock that position.

The label is the text below the name of the desklet. Its appearance can be changed as well. You can change the font, colors, position, alignment and format. The standard folder label displays information about files and folders inside the selected folder. Several variables can add new information like the folder size to the label. Oh, and it is possible to hide the label and make it visible when you move the mouse over the icon.

One interesting desklet is the ftp desklet. You can drag and drop files to an ftp using that desklet which – of course – has to be configured before usage. The appearance of that desklet can be changed as well and the icon changes depending on the current status.

I can see several uses for Avedesk. One would be to position icons on the desktop and lock them in that place another to simply beautify drive and folder shortcuts. You can create a huge Recycle Bin if you happen to miss it all the time.

Only the last link to the application was working when I tried, all other mirrors returned a 404 not found or redirected to a parking page.

Tags: avedesk, desktop, software, widgets, Windows

Widgetize you website with Yourminis

Martin — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 12:43:46 +0000

Have you ever wanted to improve your website by adding widgets that would provide some kind of interesting or important information about local weather, time, events, news or whatever else that might benefit your website without the need to write the code yourself or make a third-party script work on your own site?

Hundreds (so far) of more or less useful Flash-based widgets are freely available for your website at Yourminis.com. You can add these widgets to your own site by simply copying the embed code of each widget – no further editing is required. You only need some skills in Macromedia Flash if you decide to create new widgets on your own using Yourmini’s API for Flash8 IDE.

More likely you’d want to try existing “minis” created by other people which are made available on the Yourminis website. These widgets often use some external services (Google, Veoh, Craigslist) to acquire and display desired information or media. You can also remix existing widgets to suit the needs of your site better.

You could add some widgets that display contents of news sources such as Digg or let your users watch the latest videos, embed games and other widgets. Check out some examples of what Yourminis offers below:

Yourminis Homepage

Tags: plugins, web services, webmaster, widgets, yourminis

Get a free RSS widget for your site

Tobey — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 17:05:29 +0000

This one is for those of you, who have a website and would like to display the contents of a RSS feed on that website. It does not really matter if you want to display your own feeds on a different part of your blog or feeds from other websites.FeedFlash is a nice service that takes feed urls and places them in a nice looking and scrollable widget that can be embedded into websites.

The cool thing is that these widgets are fully customizable, including colors, heading, height and width and so on. I’d say that changing the size of the widget is the most important feature as long as you plan to put it into a sidebar. You provide the address to your feed and the service lets you customize the widget with a preview. After that the code can be copied and added to the code of your website.

An alternative for Wordpress would be the RSS-Import plugin which can be configured to display only headlines or headlines and content on your Wordpress blog.

Thanks to Ollie Parsley from TechJuicer for mentioning this service.

Tags: blog, feedflash, rss feed, rss widget, website, widgets

10 must-see Opera Widgets

Martin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 21:05:52 +0000

Firefox has its extensions, Internet Explorer its plugins and Opera has Widgets. They basically mean the same: addons for your browser of choice that add functionality to it. I don’t think that Opera deserves to take the third place in the ongoing browser war, it’s fast and resource friendly and many users who rely on Firefox or Internet Explorer should at least take a look at it and evaluate it for themselves. They might be surprised about Opera after all.Widgets for Opera come in all colors and shapes and you can compare them pretty much to the excellent list of extensions that are available for Firefox.

The major difference is how they add the functionality. Widgets for Opera usually open in their own window (like a mini sized popup) and one can opt to have the widget always on top. This means that they stay on top even if Opera is minimized. I actually prefer to browse the Opera website for Widgets because it looks much cleaner and professional than the one for Firefox. Not a fan of the windows marketplace at all. All widgets are free to download which is another similarity that Opera and Firefox share. Enough of the babbling, here is the list of 10 must-see Opera Widgets.

Video Downloader – lets you download videos from many video sites including youtube. It is a little bit different from the Firefox extension with the same name. This Video downloader opens a small popup and requires you to paste a link of the video into it. It displays the download link afterwards.
Gmail Checker – displays a very small icon with the amount of mails currently unread in your inbox. Can be moved around any way you like.
Image Grep – nice widget that makes it possible to search flickr, google and yahoo for tags and keywords specified. Displays the results neatly in its windows. F5 refreshes the results, a double-click loads the image in Opera.
Mini Del.icio.us – this one is fantastic. It ask for a del.icio.us username at first start and offers a quick and easy way to load any bookmark of that user.
gCalendar – read only Calendar that pulls data from Google Calendar. Great for the quick overview.
Bug Me Not – Users submit general passwords to the Bug me not database and everyone else may use those passwords to visit the website and read content that is for members only. Just enter a url and the widget searches the bug me not database and displays the results.
Pandora Radio – displays the Pandora radio in the widget window. Easy and fast access to your radio stations.
Digg Frontpage – displays the frontpage news of digg.com
Fark Frontpage – similar widget that displays news of fark.com
Bittorent – searches many torrent search engines, displays result in the widget.

Tags: addons, browser, del.icio.us, digg, fark, firefox-extensions, opera, plugins, widgets

Widgets for Linux: SuperKaramba

Dearon — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 01:57:39 +0000

Today i’m trying out SuperKaramba. SuperKaramba is also a widget tool for Linux, but it seems to have a larger user base behind it then gDesklets. gDesklets is Gnome based, but SuperKaramba is KDE based. You can still use SuperKaramba on a Gnome interface, but not everything will work.

SuperKaramba can also be taken from the package manager, or downloaded from their site. After the download and installation you can start the tool from the terminal with superkaramba. It will probably also be in your start menu, but that wasn’t the case on my Gnome based distro.

After you started SuperKaramba you can click the New Stuff button to get new widgets. There is a nice list of widgets you can choose from in that list. There are also sites like KDE-Look.org and Biodesign that have some widgets on their site that you can install. After an widget is installed you can click the Add to Desktop button after you have selected it, and the widget will appear on you desktop.

I like SuperKaramba more then gDeskets, it has a more modern interface and it has a bigger user base behind it.
But the fact that it isn’t completely native on Gnome makes it a bit “unstable” at times, so if this bothers you i advise to stick with gDesklets.

Tags: gdesklets, Linux, superkaramba, widgets

Widgets for Linux: gDesklets

Dearon — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 01:10:50 +0000

For Windows there are different tools to have widgets on your desktop. There are for example Yahoo! Widgets, or Samurize
For Linux there is also a tool available to do this, and it’s called gDesklets.

You can install gDesklets from you package manager or download the binaries. After installation you can start it from your start menu, it was listed under accessories in my case. You can type gdesklets in your terminal alternatively. After you have started the daemon you get the gDesklets shell with a nice number of available widgets.

There are mostly normal widgets availible, like calenders or system information, but also things like verse of the day and dinocam. You can also view a list of availible widgets at the Gdesklets website, the list is located here.

There is also a KDE widget tool called SuperKaramba, but i haven’t had the change to test it yet so i cannot say at this point if it’s better, but i’ll handle SuperKaramba tomorrow and tell which has my preference.

Tags: desklets, gdesklets, Linux, widgets

10 Widgets I can’t live without

Martin — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 08:46:41 +0000

Widgets are small programs that add their small windows to your desktop and can be used from there. Widgets come in all colors and forms and you could categorize them the following way:

Informational Widgets – Widgets that display a limited amount of information like weather reports or rss feeds.
Entertainment Widgets – Games, movies, music and Pictures for example.
Programs – Widgets that offer search functionality for instance fall in this category.

The first thing you will have to do is download the Yahoo Widget Engine to your system. Once this is done you can choose from thousands of widgets and select the once that look interesting to you. To make it a little bit easier I decided to post my top 10 widgets today, maybe you like some of them as well and start using them after you’ve read this article.