It has been 41 days since we released GNOME Do 0.4.2, and today I’m honored to present GNOME Do 0.5: “The Fighting 0.5″. Without further ado, here are the main improvements and new features, accompanied by plenty of sexy screenshots (click for larger images).
First off, the Open with… action has been re-enabled!
The biggest new feature in GNOME Do 0.5 is our new preferences window and plugin manager. You can now browse, download, install, and enable or disable all available plugins from right within Do thanks to Mono.Addins:
You can also visit a wiki page with information about each plugin, and you can do plugin-specific configuration. This means no more configuration files, and no more editing preferences through Configuration Editor (gconf). As an example, here is the configuration window for the Files and Folders plugin:
We’ve added a plugin category called “community plugins” that contains cutting-edge plugins written by many different contributors. If a developer were to write a great new GNOME Do plugin today, we could have it in the community plugins repository and available to Do users everywhere by tomorrow. That being said, community plugins are not rigorously screened or held to the same quality standards as official plugins, so users beware.
One of my favorite community plugins is the new Skype plugin, which allows you to make calls, initiate chats, change your status, and more. The Skype plugin is also fully integrated with Do’s contact system, so you can simply type a contact name, and then chose to send an instant message to that person with Pidgin, email them, or initiate a Skype chat or call:
There’s an awesome new plugin by Jason Smith called “WindowManager.” It lets you manipulate and rearrange windows on your desktop. You can focus, shade, minimize, maximize, tile, and cascade your windows. This plugin is so feature-packed, I don’t even know everything it does yet! Check out these screenshots, then try the plugin for yourself.
Minimize all Firefox windows.
Bring a GIMP window into focus by searching for its name.
Alex Launi has done some amazing plugin work, making great contributions to the Twitter, File and Folders, and Pidgin plugins to name a few. He also wrote new Flickr, Gmail contacts, and Google Calendar plugins. Here’s a preview of his work:
Twitter plugin now supports replying to Twitter friends.
Set Pidgin status (also searches saved statuses).
Upload images to Flickr
Search and create events on Google Calendar
These are only a few of the new features and improvements in GNOME Do 0.5. We’ve also fixed tons of bugs, and we’re going to have some intensive wiki-updating sessions over the next couple weeks to bring documentation up to speed. There are a few more changes that just barely missed the cut, so you can expect to see a 0.5.1 release within a few weeks. Special thanks to Alex Launi, Jason Smith, Chris Halse Rogers, Jorge Castro, Jason Imison, Jason Jones, Jacob Andreas, Guillaume Beland, Ken Simon, Mathieu Cadet, Rick Harding, and all the rest. Ubuntu users may get 0.5 packages from our Launchpad PPA, and you can find source packages on our downloads page.
Finally, GNOME Do is free software, and we work on Do because we love it. Do is free to use, but if you could spare a few hundred yen to help us cover hosting costs and other Do-related expenses, please click the ugly yellow donate button at the bottom of the page and we will be forever grateful. Thank you and enjoy!
60 comments
Awesome work everyone! This has been an awesome team to work with.
If bandwidth is really that killer, I’ll host a mirror free. Get in touch.
Very nice!
But what the heck does Gnome do in KDE or other desktop environments ?
“Do is free to use, but it’s not free to work on or host on the web.”
LaunchPad says: Licenses: * GNU GPL v2
so I’m really not very clear about the license…
Dread, Do works well in KDE and most other environments with sane window managers (don’t try it with xmonad).
Do is GPLv3. By “it’s not free to work on or host on the web,” I meant that I incur some costs by working on Do and hosting Do files on the Internet. I have clarified this, thank you.
Wow. This is going to be so awesome.
Feel free to ping me if you need any icons made for Do :)
It’s definetly one of my favourite and most-used apps.
Congratulations everyone!
I’m pulling my copy right now :)
Some notes:
i’m not able to ‘enable’ lots of the plugins .. what’s going on?
I can’t find a handwritten configuration anywhere, so how do I enable the other plugins, in the mean time? I mean, until you fix the preferences thingie ;-)
Still love it though !
I’m having trouble in the preferences dialog too.
I can enable them sometimes, but it sure takes long! Other than that, great work once more!
(I confess: the only thing missing for me is to be able to make the rhythmbox plugin do a filter search instead of queuing up/playing :P Or even a clear queue command.. Had I the knowledge :( Maybe this summer I’ll give it a go (highly doubt it, though) )
Congratulations ;)
Congratulations everyone, that’s some real amazing work you’ve been doing here.
As soon as I get home, I’ll download my copy.
Just wrote a blog post (http://linil.wordpress.com/2008/06/10/gnome-do-05-is-out-in-the-wild/) about this new release and used some of your pics. Let me know if there’s any problem.
Inofficially bug reporting, too: cannot enable some plugins at all, sometimes it just takes multiple attempts. The problematic ones are: Pidgin, SSH, Window Manager, Twitter.
Other than that release 0.5 sounds great!
This looks awesome David! Do is really a cool app with a fun and enthusiastic group of developers. I’m looking forward to trying out this new version :-)
For anyone having trouble enabling plugins, the problem may just be that the server hosting our plugins can’t meet up with demand. The first time you enable a plugin, it must be downloaded. If problems persist, we will have to move to a more responsive server.
What about offline installation? We could download a pack and have it install from there.. And a file for download is easy to host.
The plugin installation problem is not server-related, it turns out. We just found out that plugins are VERY picky about the version of Do you are using. We did a last minute version change from 0.5.0.0 to 0.5.0.1 to fix a minute bug, and that caused many plugins to refuse to load (even though they work just fine). We are working to fix this and ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Make sure you’re using 0.5.0.1 and all plugins should install fine.
Ouch.. I think I’ll wait for updated repo then =/
I was able to enable all of the plugins (that I wanted to) after removing the plugins and re-installing as suggested here, by you! : http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=5158177&postcount=269
nice.
Wow, GNOME is like totally COOL. I love it.
JT
http://www.FireMe.To/udi
What’s with the Leopard wallpaper on Linux machines!?
Will xmonad support ever be in the cards, or am I a silly, silly boy?
Is anyone else not noticing this is a complete ripoff of Quicksilver on the Mac? The exact same look and functionality, though with less features than the Mac software. At least credit them as a source of inspiration or something.
yeah… Whats with the Mac wallpaper in the background?!?
I agree with Reid. It looks like you have a nice implementation going here but cite your source. I don’t mean to rain on your parade but this is a complete rip of Quicksilver on the Mac. Take a look here: http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/what_is_quicksilver
The entire concept, the GUI (right down to the semi-translucent rounded corner boxes with the triangle in the upper right and the underlined letters as you type and the drop-down scroll areas…everything) and, apparently, the basis of the plugin interface… all of it has been in Quicksilver on the Mac for years.
Considering that the code for Quicksilver is also released (On GoogleCode under the Apache license) makes this project even more sketchy. Admittedly, that code is probably pretty tightly tied to Mac OS X but it still exists.
Even the wallpaper is stolen from Mac OS X.
People go on about making Linux a good desktop.
Engineers need to learn how to innovate instead of copy.
Linux needs to come up with it’s own UI elements to stand out.
The only element truly centric to the Linux expxerience at this point is still the command terminal.
If you bothered to get any further you’d find that the official Do site pays homage to Quicksilver, as does the entire chapter dedicated to it in Dave’s white paper (which also cites the differences in implementation)… I think most users would recognise Do as a clone, if not instantly, then eventually…
open source is about encouraging creativity, not stifling it…
I dug a little and there is mention of the link to Quicksilver but it requires that you actually read through the whitepaper and/or slideshow that was posted previously. It would probably be in your best interest David to put up a project page somewhere that summarizes what the project is and why that you can link to from your blog entries. Maybe put it in your Links section to the right of the page. Otherwise, you will be getting snarky comments whenever you write up a new blog entry.
Your ideas from the whitepaper seem interesting but I think you undervalue the simplicity and ubiquity of the GUI as well as the learning features of the interface. Also, the default scanning behaviours in Quicksilver are fairly comprehensive. The examples mentioned for improving the “poor design” of the Catalog are to add scanning of recent and open documents and the documents folder. All of these are scanned by the Quicksilver on my machine. These may have been added since the whitepaper was written but I definitely did not have to configure those behaviours.
It seems that what this project brings to the table is a fork of the Quicksilver project on an alternate codebase tailored for Linux with an alternate (potentially better) indexing engine. Which is definitely not a bad thing.
Wow! this is great! :)
Great job!! Twitting from GNOME Do is so cool! :D
Still looks like Windows
I really don’t see the need for Gnome, or any other Linux window manager for that matter, to create unique UI elements. There are a multitude of universal UI elements that are OK to use given that the end use is GPL’d and credit given.
Until Quicksilver is ported to Linux, projects like Gnome DO are necessary and welcome. Gnome DO is a testament to the tenacity and hard work all Linux devs have towards making create apps.
can i request for a win do? i cant find one that resembles the big clean style of a mac than this.
can it be ported to windows???
Why are some talking shit about DO, what if it is a ripoff? was there already an app like that on linux?
well then go an install quicksilver on your linux box, ooh I think you can’t!!
Why can’t an idea come from another idea? it could be even better that the original one.
Gnome-Do is great. No one is ever going to port Quicksilver for Linux, because even though its open source as I believe its written in Objective C or Cocoa or one of those Mac OS based languages.
Plus if you go to the Gnome-Do site (http://do.davebsd.com/), right on the front page it says:
“GNOME Do is inspired by Quicksilver and GNOME Launch Box.”
Awesome love it, spent the morning messing with the plugins, so many nice ones. Wish it could be ported over to windows, currently using launchy, always thought it was great, but after messing with this new gnome-do, launchy seems limited (never thought I would say that)
Can anyone create some Ubuntu 7.10 packages? I am too lazy to compile :D
Any chance this could be later ported to Windows? I see it’s built using a lot of C# and so I would assume it’s possible to port to Windows, what would be the main road blocks for doing that?
Patrick, there’s a great change. The main road block is (wo)man power. You want to work on the port? I already have way more work than I can handle just supporting GNOME, not to mention the other 1000 variations of Linux desktops, window managers, distros, etc.
I know C#. I don’t have a ton of time to dedicate to a project like this right now, but at the very least I could look at it and maybe come up with a more comprehensive punch list of stuff to do.
Wanna shoot me a quick email and we can discuss there?
Anyone know if this will work on XFCE?
Bryan-
I’m running Hardy Xubuntu, and it works perfectly.
And Dave, I must say that as a former XP guy, I was really looking forward to the Linux port of Launchy…but now I’m not so worried about it. Thanks for this!
oh wow. Everyone saying this is a ripoff of Quicksilver is trash. Yes it is a ripoff of quicksilver. He says that on his homepage. The major difference is that in this case, ripoff is not a bad thing. What would this world come to if everyone had to “innovate” EVERY SINGLE TIME SOMETHING WAS DONE. All inventions would remain in their most primitive stage. Whats more, opportunities for “innovation” would systematically disappear because they might have been tried before.
In this situation, the pop-up dialogue and the functionality of the program, while identical to quicksilvers, is still the best way of doing it so far. Why would Mr. Siegel have to waste his time coming up with a method that was inferior simply because the best method had already been done? If we treat inventions like property the progress in this world will end.
I may have over-dramatized that a bit, but I know that the people criticizing your program are the breed of mac fanboy’s that want to insure the special treatment that Jobs gives them to remain theirs. I may be an open source elitist, but I know that there has to be some imitation in order for improvement .
Anyway, I cannot compile the latest Gnome-Do. The configure script worked fine but make fails with the following:
error CS2007: Unrecognized command-line option: `-lgnome-keyring’
Compilation failed: 1 error(s), 0 warnings
make[1]: *** [bin/Debug/Do.Addins.dll] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/john/Desktop/gnome-do-0.5.0.1/Do.Addins’
make: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
This is with the latest 0.5.0.1 release. Any ideas?
nevermind. I was using a corrupted version of gnome-keyring-sharp. It works great! good work!
just installed this.. its really really good. dint expect this kind of a project at all. i was surprised to see such good s/w guys. Keep developing :)
Wonderful release, great new functionality, but to me it has 2 pretty large problems. Sorry in advance for the long post.
First off, the community plugins thing is great, and the preferences window is awesome, but for some reason I can’t use any of my own plugins, or test new ones. The documentation says to put them in the ~/.local/share/gnome-do/plugin folder, (the same as in 0.4.0.1) and while it makes sense and it’s there; every time I restart Do to query the plugins, they are deleted, as if with “rm -f”. Is this happening to just me?
Also, the names for the new commands could use some rethinking. Instead of having “Create Directory” and “Create Empty File”, which require typing almost the whole thing to differentiate the two, having “Make Directory” and “New File” would be much easier to type. Alternatively, allowing the Alias action to modify other Actions would be a fix-all solution. On the other hand, I’m working on a plugin that duplicates their functionality, (along with Append to File) but with the reverse order: [folder|file][Action][title], which I use much more often. Would it be possible for this to be integrated by default? I don’t take credit for the code, all I did was switch the modifier and initial item sections around.
On a positive note, the “Alias” command is absolutely phenomenal! I can’t tell you how happy I am to see it functional. Also, Rename is coming in really handy.
One last question: where did the “Last Item” item go? It was great for handling typos, but now it’s gone.
Again, sorry for the long post, hope the suggestions help.
Nicely done. One of the few apps that would benefit from the high-res icons.
i love it :)
Congratulations!
I am having problems with the last stage of install and unmet dependencies: here is the error message: Any ideas?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The following packages are BROKEN:
gnome-do
0 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 92.2kB of archives. After unpacking 356kB will be used.
The following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome-do: Depends: libgnome-keyring1.0-cil (>= 1.0.0~svn.r87622) which is a virtual package.
Depends: libgnomedesktop2.20-cil (>= 2.20.0) which is a virtual package.
Resolving dependencies…
Unable to resolve dependencies! Giving up…
Abort.
I figured it out…Synaptic Package manager took care of it. Thanks.
This question is solved.
how to upgrade with hardy from 0.4 to 0.5 ?
Can you provide installation instructions please?
Superb! Thank you!
I have discovered a bug in connection with the tomboy plugin. When it’s enabled the tomboy icon also appears in the system tray, also when the gnome tomboy applet is enabled.
Gnome Do is installed via ppa Repo.
Any fix to this one?
I have opened a question for this issue:
https://answers.launchpad.net/do/+question/36261
Hi!
Can you tell me how to use the new version in Fedora 9?
Salu2…
Really nice theme, is it just clearlooks with the colour modified in the appearance dialog? If so could you post the hex colour.
When I installed gnome-do for the on Ubuntu Hardy running KDE 3.4.9 first time it was running the way it should be . Then I had a problem with google calendar plugin (I didn’t enter the credentials) which would not let me start gnome-do. Then with a view to do a reinstall I deleted the plugins directory at ‘~/.local/share/’ as well as ‘~/.config/gnome-do’. And then I started getting the error:
[Error 05:58:10.524] Deserializing Histogram Relevance Provider failed: Could not find file “/home/kousik/.config/gnome-do/relevance5″
I saw a bug report at launchpad (https://bugs.launchpad.net/do/+bug/240016). Just curious if there’s any progress. Thanks!
yeah this is what i call sexy!
very nice dude, really
im looking for the amarok plug in, do you know anything about its development??
is there someone actually trying to fix it??
thanks in advance
Actually, it works quite well with xmonad, all you have to do is set it to be a floating window and it works exactly the same as it does in Gnome.
How do I install this on my OS?
I’m running centos 5 with gnome.
Question about the “shelf” plug-in.
I’m new to GnomeDo…..I have the shelf plug-in installed and I type something in to GD and get the option to add to shelf or remove from shelf. So what does the shelf plug-in do? I’ve searched all over and can’t find an answer.
thanks
Hi,
I had similar idea without knowing that GNOME-Do exist. Please take a look at:
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/18848/
Your free to use the idea or concept
Greetings
Klau3
Hey, Great article GNOME. I read More your article.
Thanks to your article.
Johnmclrn
-==============-
Street Fights
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