Gwibber, an open source microblogging app for Gnome has now reached version 2.0!
Although at 2.0, the developers are not considering this a stable release yet and not making it available on the stable distribution channels. What I could notice first from the upgrade was the UI from:
to

Which means:

it is now easier to jump between different [...]

Posted in Utilities 2 Comments »

If you want to run a WebKit web browser with no strings attached (unlike Safari and Google Chrome), Arora is surely worth a try.

First plus is that it runs on Linux, Windows and MacOS X. It is fast, has private browsing and looks like it has some plug-in support. Another good news is the announcement [...]

Posted in Utilities 4 Comments »

One of the “I thought it would never come” moments in the open source software industry would be audio and video support in Pidgin. Now it is here! Almost… Windows is not yet supported.
With the release of Pidgin 2.6.1. audio and video is finally supported in the xmpp protocol (used by GTalk). I have to [...]

Posted in Messaging No Comments »

Not long ago I was working with some .po files and needed a nice and simple diff program to merge 2 files. First I tried the multi-purposed text editor vim.
Using vim as a diff and merge tool:
with Andrej’s article I found some nice tips & tricks and the Vim manual for diff tasks. Some useful [...]

Posted in Utilities, Web services 1 Comment »

Although it has been a round for quite some time, I’m not a coder so my experience with text editors and IDEs is very limited. To give you an example, I’ve been using on the command line the good-ol’ simple nano. But, since I’m starting to need a bit more powerful features, my search began [...]

Posted in Utilities No Comments »

For those who like ebooks, Calibre is a great program that was created to manage pretty much any aspect of your reading files.

The list of features is pretty extensive:

convert files from and to epub, mobi, LRF and supports input of several other formats including PDF, html, odt, rtf amongst others;
syncs to mobile reader devices (seems [...]

Posted in Office, Utilities No Comments »

For quite a while now OpenOffice has been promising the ability to import and edit PDF files. Although not released with the program itself, you can grab the Sun PDF Import extension to do just that.
This extension is in beta and is available multi-platform for Windows, Linux and MacOS X systems.
Tests that I ran were [...]

Posted in Office No Comments »

The last time there was an Android upgrade, I had to wait over 1 month to get mine. Fortunately this time it appears Europe had Android 1.5 launch date before users in the U.S. This is a much expected release because of the extensive list of new features.
Without further delay, here is the tour of [...]

Posted in Mobile 4 Comments »

Doing a basic screencast in Linux is pretty easy. The package recordMyDesktop can be found easily on the repository of many Linux distros (including Ubuntu 9.04 that I use).
With this package you’re actually getting the backend recordMyDesktop which is written in C and the frontend developed in Python (gtk-recordMyDesktop or qt-recordMyDesktop).
The feature list is simple [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, Imaging, Utilities No Comments »

The eco-system around Pidgin is fantastic, below is yet another cool plug-in tip for it.
Pidgin-Twitter plug-in works with Linux and Windows for you to get back into posting to and receiving notes from Twitter (also works well with Identi.ca too!). Steps to get it working:

download and install the plug-in the plug-in;
go to Pidgin menu under [...]

Posted in Messaging, Tips No Comments »