KDE PIM Integration

In a previous post, I outlined some of the nifty ways that PIM information (calendars and contacts) sync across the Gnome desktop – today I will be discussing KDE.

KDE has one main application that gathers the various PIM apps under a single umbrella: Kontact

Kontact pulls in your email (through KMail), Calendar (KOrganizer), RSS Feeds (AKregator), Notes and Tasks into a single package.

New emails or calendar items appear in the system tray in the same way that they would if you were running the programs individually (they start daemons on login, similarly to Evolution’s calendar-sync-daemon).  In fact, the only advantage of using Kontact over the individual programs is that they are all gathered in one place.

Kontact allows you to pick and choose which applications fall under its umbrella – even if you have AKregator installed and configured, you can tell it to turn off the quick access link inside of Kontact.

Gnome PIM Integration

Every desktop environment has its own methods of bringing PIM information to the forefront.

In Linux, sometimes you have very tight integration of this information because a developer needed the ability to view calendar items on their desktop when the email program is closed.

In the Gnome desktop (default desktop of Ubuntu), if you use Evolution, you will find several of these niceties.

Events in an Evolution calendar will appear in the date drop down on the right-hand side of the screen (for today’s events).  The calendar can either be a local file, a web calendar or a Google calendar.  This is in addition to the normal pop-up reminders, which also do not require the Evolution client to be running.

Your contacts can also be integrated with various online services.

Pidgin and Empathy can also connect with Evolution to flesh out your address book items.

All in all, it works pretty well, and offers something that is unavailable on other platforms.

Next, we’ll look at KDE.

Scribus

Scribus is a free, open-source desktop publishing tool.

Use it to create brochures or other “press ready” output.

I recommend this to clients that need to create a tri-fold brochure (especially if they were using Word).

http://www.scribus.net/

Inkscape

Inkscape is a free, open-source vector drawing program.

Fairly good tablet integration allows you to easily distort or transform your vector masterpieces.

Vector art can be scaled up or down without loss of quality.  Other popular vector editors are Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator.

http://inkscape.org/

Agave

Agave is a free, open source colorscheme designer for Gnome.

You can enter (in Hex) or pick your base color and Agave can determine color schemes from complements to tetrads.

Agave also allows you to save colors – quite helpful when you’re trying to figure out if purple or red might be the way to go.

http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/

GIMP Image Editor

The GIMP is a free, open source raster image editor.

You can use it in similar ways to Adobe’s Photoshop.  I use it at least once a day to touch up photos or to create images for advertisements for clients.

It has a quirky interface when compared with Photoshop, but really, Photoshop has a quirky interface, too (There’s nothing intuitive about editing images)!

http://www.gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.6.html

MyPaint

MyPaint is a free, open source painting program for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.  It has fantastic tablet support, and works very well for freehand and tracing.

The interface stays out of your way, which works incredibly well with a tablet.

http://mypaint.intilinux.com/

Transparent Proxying

Transparent proxies allow all of your web traffic to filter through a proxy for security or monitoring purposes.

Using a transparent proxy has advantages over a traditional proxy setup for companies in that:

• There’s no maintenance for individual machines (‘I accidentally turned off the proxy’)
• There’s no additional setup for new users
• You don’t have to rely on the OS/browser being able to find the proxy via a script

The only real disadvantage is that there is no way to get around a transparent proxy – if you need to directly access the web without the proxy jumping in the middle, you can’t (easily).

Squid, among other things, is often used as a transparent proxy.

I’ll discuss more about Squid in a future article.

Browser Speed Comparison

Lifehacker has put together a nice browser speed comparison – if you follow the link you’ll see that each browser has its strengths in different areas.

Windows:

http://lifehacker.com/5575407/browser-speed-tests-safari-5-firefox-36-and-opera-106-beta

Mac OS X:

http://lifehacker.com/5577951/browser-speed-tests-the-latest-chrome-firefox-opera-and-safarion-a-mac

Linux:

I’ve not found a good up-to-date speed comparison for Linux browsers, but anecdotally, Firefox 4 runs wonderfully fast, followed closely by Chrome 6.

Firefox 4 New Features

Firefox 4 will be out soon (some time in January, hopefully) – and it has a raft of new features and improvements.

My favorites:

• Faster Javascript engine, makes page response time and rendering much faster
• Hardware acceleration (not in Linux yet)
• Improved typography – fonts look sharper
• Many UI changes that make it more ‘Chrome-like’.

Check out the full list here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/4.0b7/releasenotes/