Ever so often, I take a stroll over to KDE-Apps.org and look at some of the fantastic creations people from the KDE community develop. There are a wide range of apps in nearly every category, but I have selected 5 that stand out and would be very useful additions to my desktop and hopefully yours too. All of these apps are either new or have been recently updated within the past few months.
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Tavis J. Hampton
5 More Intriguing KDE Apps
By | March 30, 2011 | 1 Comment
M.A.R.S. – A Ridiculous Shooter, Indie Game Showcase
By | March 23, 2011 | 2 Comments
At MakeTechEasier, we have reviewed quite a handful of cross-platform indie games. The latest to catch our attention is M.A.R.S. – a ridiculous shooter (their words, not mine). Like some of the other favorites we have highlighted, M.A.R.S. is a 2D retro-style arcade game with some modern features like online multiplayer matches.
The weird thing about M.A.R.S. is that it is very different from the typical top-down or side-scrolling space shooter in that your ship is very much at the mercy of the gravitational fields surrounding the ridiculously close planets. It is very easy for your ship to go spinning out of control, making navigation a significantly large part of the challenge. To make matters worse, bumping into a planet causes damage, but that is just all part of the fun of M.A.R.S.
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Create To-do Lists and Organize Notes With myTinyTodo
By | March 16, 2011 | Leave a Comment
As a freelancer, I have tried all types of to-do lists and electronic notepads to help me be more efficient and keep track of all of my work and clients. There are many good desktop solutions and also many good online cloud-based solutions. But if you want something simple that you can install on your own website and domain, myTinyTodo might just work for you.
myTinyTodo supports as many to-do lists as you can think of, offers features such as hiding/showing completed tasks, and uses AJAX to give you drag and drop functionality. Best of all, it is free, open source, and will install on just about any web server, even shared hosting accounts.
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Sprinkle Some Eye Candy on your KDE Desktop
By | March 9, 2011 | 5 Comments
KDE is beautiful, even if you never change a thing on your desktop. What makes it even more appealing is all of the customizable visual features. Three areas you should consider spicing up a little are your KDE style/theme, your Plasma Workspace theme, and your icons. The following are just a few of the most popular in each category on KDE-Look.org.
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Back to Basics with KDE 4
By | March 2, 2011 | 10 Comments
After our review of KDE 4.6, we received a great deal of positive comments, but not all of them were sparkling assessments of KDE’s functionality. For that reason, I have decided to get back to the basics this week with a little how-to guide for KDE 3 users who may be reluctant to switch to KDE 4, Gnome or other desktop users who avoid KDE because of certain usability problems, and anyone who might be new to the software and its unique desktop interface.
At the end of this quick training guide, you should be able to:
- Add printers and print
- Configure and use bluetooth devices
- Attach and configure external monitors
How to Remotely Control KTorrent
By | February 23, 2011 | 1 Comment
KTorrent is KDE’s BitTorrent client that has a uniquely useful plugin allowing users to connect and add torrents remotely using a web browser. In a previous post, we gave you a taste of what Ktorrent can do. Today, you will learn how to start Ktorrent remotely, add torrents from URLs or file uploads, and make small settings changes to currently downloading files.
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How to Format Your Book for the Kindle
By | February 16, 2011 | 3 Comments
Some time ago, MakeTechEasier gave you an extensive 3-part guide to formatting a book using OpenOffice.org. That guide was specifically oriented toward print publications, and while it may be sufficient for PDF ebooks, formatting a book for Amazon’s Kindle e-reader takes a little more attention and care.
Generally speaking, a Kindle book is just HTML and CSS. The part that can be difficult is figuring out which tags the Kindle actually supports. There are also a couple of unique tags that are not standard HTML but that you can use to add formatting to your Kindle book.
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How to Use CSS3 Pie to Modernize Internet Explorer
By | February 9, 2011 |
One of the biggest dilemmas facing web developers is the incompatibility of various Internet Explorer versions with current web standards. Although Microsoft has promised CSS3 and even HTML5 support for IE9, Windows users, especially businesses, may continue to use IE8, IE7, or even the dreaded IE6 for years to come.
As a result, coding a site with exclusive CSS3 features will only alienate a large portion of your website’s visitors, and obligating them to download a standards-compliant browser, like Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome, will only come across as arrogant.
A possible solution to the problem is to use a modernizer, which is a script or application that uses a variety of tricks to make your site appear as it should in all browsers. CSS3 Pie is javascript-based modernizer that helps Internet Explorer recognize cool CSS3 features such as rounded corners, soft drop shadows, and gradient fills. It is quick, easy, and works most of the time with very little tweaking.
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KDE 4.6 Review: It’s Full Of Awesomeness
By | February 2, 2011 |
On January 26th of this year, KDE released version 4.6.0 of its Plasma Workspaces, Applications, and Development Platform. While many major versions of KDE have focused on features, 4.5 was mostly a stabilizing release, fixing thousands of bugs. The 4.6 release is all about polish. It is the icing on the cake for KDE 4, adding speed, visual enhancements, and increased hardware compatibility.
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How to Encode WebM Videos for YouTube in Linux
By | January 26, 2011 |
WebM is the new open video file format that Google created for HTML5 video. It is a combination of the VP8 video codec and Ogg Vorbis audio codec, wrapped in a Matroska container. It is free and open source, giving anyone the ability to encode videos without restrictions, and play them in supported browsers (Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera).
Google’s recent announcement that it is dropping support for H.264 video in Chrome means that the primary HTML5 video format on YouTube will eventually be WebM. Now is an excellent opportunity for you to learn how to encode videos in the new format. Furthermore, H.264 is patented and not open, so Linux users should make an effort to avoid it, when possible.
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