On May 30, Banshee 1.0 RC 1was released to the public. Banshee 1.0 RC 1 represents the sixth release since we began rewriting much of the core of Banshee. The primary reasons for this rearchitecting were to deliver much needed performance improvements, make features more powerful and mature, and allow us to add awesome new features like the Play Queue and video support.
Banshee now uses much less memory and has greatly improved startup speed.It can handle collections that are much larger in size without adversely affecting application speed or memory usage.
These core architectural changes also allowed us to cleanly implement many great new features and provides a framework for new features to be easily developed in the future.
New features
New Device Storage Indicator
Read the rest of this entry »
For those who like to have Mac OSX Dock style, here is the list of dock (according to my preference) which you can choose from.
With one of these docks, you can get similar effect as the Mac OSX Dock for your Ubuntu. To get this three dock working on your Ubuntu, your computer must be able to support composition. You must also have a composite manager such as Compiz-Fusion and Beryl installed in your Ubuntu.
Read the rest of this entry »
Inspired by two popular Mac applications; Spotlight and Quicksilver, David Siegel has developed GNOME Do as a part of his university course which afterward became a popular application for Linux.
With GNOME Do, you can quickly launch an application just by typing the application’s name. It’s not just restricted to applications. You also can search and open webpage, Firefox bookmarks, files, album in Rhythmbox and etc. Everything is just on your finger tips. Type the things you one in GNOME Do and launch it. You can extend the functionality of GNOME Do by installing extra plugins such as Banshee, Pidgin, Google Calculator and Tomboy.
Install GNOME Do in Ubuntu 8.04:
Read the rest of this entry »
About two weeks after the release of the first beta version, here comes Banshee 1.0 Beta 2. Same as before,three new features has been added in this released and over 28 bugs have been fixed since beta 1.
New Features:
Podcast Support
With Banshee 1.0 Beta 2, you can subscribe to your favorite audio and video podcasts, and search and browse your podcasts the same way you do your Music Library.Banshee will stream the audio or video so you don’t have to wait for it to download first.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ubuntu system doesn’t come with something like Mac OSX widgets or Windows Vista gadgets by default. However, you can get this feature by installing software called Screenlets.Screenlets are small applications written in python which can be put anywhere on your desktop. With the released of Screenlets 0.1.1, support for web widgets (widgets which are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, similar to Mac OSX widgetst) and Google Gadgets were added. With the widget plugin for Compiz Fusion, you can show and hide the Screenlets the same way you can with Mac OSX widgets. Screenlets include a bunch of preferences like keep above, keep below, lock a screenlet, make it sticky and set it as widget.
Read the rest of this entry »
