Return of the King: GNOME 2 Is Making Its Way Back

"GNOME is a big boy and was the preferred DE for many experienced users, as well as classical GNU/Linux distributions' default DE," said Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. "So, there must be acompromise between the developers' avant-gardeideas and what power users need and want to use.

With all the drama and pathos that plays out each and every day here in the Linux blogosphere, the temptation to equate the stories of today with classic tales from the world of literature can sometimes be overwhelming.

Take the world of Linux desktops, for example. For years the users lived happily under the reign of GNOME 2; suddenly, Unity and GNOME 3 appeared on the horizon, and that simple world changed forever.

GNOME 2 was banished from the castle grounds, and loyal subjects across the land fell into a deep state of mourning. Unity and GNOME 3 earned followers of their own, to be sure, but the older generations lamented the loss of their longtime favorite.

A dark cloud hung over the land; bitterness and despair became the status quo.

An Announcement Is Made

Just when many desktop Linux users were about to give up hope, however -- not to mention turn to Xfce -- hope bloomed once againwith the arrival of MATE, Cinnamon and SolusOS.

Then, just last week, countless users' prayers were answered when it was announced that GNOME 2 was coming back.

The practical result? Standing room only down at the blogosphere's rowdy Punchy Penguin Saloon.

'Irreparable Harm'

"This will be great news to those who miss the classic user interface and who still have not found an alternative," Robin Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor, told Linux Girl over a fresh round of Tequila Tux cocktails.

As for Lim himself, however, "I will still be using GNOME 3," he added. "It is my favorite desktop interface, but I pretty much get along with everything. I really don't spend much time on the desktop, with 99 percent of my time spent looking at the interface of an app."

It took the GNOME project "way too long, and they may have done irreparable harm to their future prospects," Google+ blogger Kevin O'Brien opined. "But in one way it illustrates the strength of Free Software: if users do not like what you are doing, they can fork the project, and do it the way *they* want.

"When you saw distros dropping GNOME and picking up MATE and Cinnamon, you saw this in action," O'Brien explained. "In the final analysis, it is the users who determine where the technology goes because they vote with their feet."

'It's About Usability'

Google+ blogger Gonzalo Velasco C. had a similar take.

"Besides the aesthetic and modernizing point of view, the usability factor must be taken into account by developers," he told Linux Girl. "Users want to keep the 'computer-like' control of our desktop; not everything is a touch-screen, smartphone piece of hardware!

"GNOME is a big boy and was the preferred DE for many experienced users, as well as classical GNU/Linux distributions' default DE," Gonzalo Velasco C. added. "So, there must be acompromise between the developers' avant-garde ideas and what power users need and want to use.

"It's not about inertia and fear of change, it's about usability!" he concluded.

'A Household Name'

"GNOME was never my favorite desktop," Google + blogger Alessandro Ebersol began. "It was just ugly, I always preferred KDE."

However, "when KDE made the change to version 4, I could not go on with it," Ebersol added. "Of course, the early days of KDE 4 were terrible, but then, I moved on to other DE and life went smooth."

GNOME, on the other hand, "was a household name," he noted. "It worked. And desktops are not rocket science. GNOME devs tried to emulate what KDE devs had done, but it worked way better for KDE than for GNOME.

"Long story short: Don't fix if ain't broken," Ebersol concluded. "GNOME devs took too much time to realize it."

'Too Little, Too Late?'

Is the latest move enough? Consultant and Slashdot blogger Gerhard Mack wasn't so sure.

"This is a halfhearted attempt at bringing the old desktop back if you are willing to go through the trouble, and it still seems that they don't understand that people hate the new desktop," Mack asserted.

Similarly, "I'll believe it when I see it," agreed Slashdot blogger hairyfeet. "From the way they phrased it, frankly, it sounds more like the GIMPed Win 8 'desktop mode' than a full-fledged GNOME 2."

Not only that, but "is it too little, too late?" hairyfeet wondered. "After all, there is MATE and Unity and LXDE -- does GNOME have enough people that haven't moved on yet to make this a big deal?"

'They Have to Leave Us the Option'

Blogger Robert Pogson hasn't used GNOME much for years "because it and KDE are both resource-hogs," he told Linux Girl. "I have PCs to get my work done, not to make some GUIdevelopers' wet dreams."

A useful user interface "does not have to be heavy and bloated, with a dozen services scurrying underneath to make it all happen," Pogson explained. "I use Xfce 4, which runs like a rocket and does not have dreams of retraining me."

In fact, "I have used the rectangular regions with widgets things for two decades," he said. "I see no reason to change at this stage."

Looking ahead, "GNOME and KDE should both realize no solution suits everyone," Pogson concluded. "We don't all drive Cadillacs, for instance. If either GUI's developers want to take over the world, they have to leave us the option to go GNOME 2ish -- it could be a choice made by the user on first execution or an easily found configuration option."

'I Like Having Choices'

Last but not least, "I love this, as I always like to have more options," Google+ blogger Linux Rants opined.

"I actually really like the current GNOME 3 interface, and I'm a fan of Unity as well," Linux Rants told Linux Girl. "Despite that, I still load up KDE or E sometimes."

In general, "I like having choices, and Linux means that I don't have to stick to just one," he concluded. "We're not talking Windows or OS X here. I just hope that this doesn't stagnate development on UIs that don't resemble the classic GNOME interface."

source:www.technewsworld.com

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iTunes 11: I Want to Be More Impressed Than I Am

iTunes 11 remains an improvement because it's much faster than the old iTunes. It's snappier in navigation, and the elements load up and transition more quickly. The iCloud integration seems better, too. You can, for instance, set it up so that if you buy a TV show on your MacBook Pro, it'll download to your iOS devices, too. Like my iPhone. So I can download an episode of "Homeland" on my Mac, start watching it and pick up where I left off on my iPhone.

After the iTunes 11 delivery delay, I was hoping Apple was working through a seriously complicated redesign that would vastly improve my iTunes experience. Instead, we got iTunes 11, which looks like a huge improvement, but -- if anyone out in the world is at least somewhat like me -- is just a marginal improvement with some pretty shininess built into it.

Granted, iTunes has a lot of mistresses to keep happy: It's not only a jukebox hub for music, it holds movies, TV shows, podcasts, iTunes U content, books, apps, and even ringtones. Plus, it's the store for buying or renting all Apple-oriented media and a conduit for synchronizing with iPhones, iPads, and iPods, not to mention the Apple TV.

Still, after two years since the last update, you'd think a $100-plus billion company would have the resources to knock our socks off.

                           iTunes 11 has a more visual interface and better integration between devices.

So What Goes Wrong?

Let's start with the album art. I used to think I was as pretty visual guy, attuned to visual things, but viewing my entire music library as a massive grid of colorful albums seems like a good way to incite a seizure. The default view is alphabetical order, which helps, but getting me to actually recognize which album cover holds the songs I want underneath it? Personally, I've got a long way to go before I'll be navigating by album cover. At the same time, I appreciate the digital nod to album covers as an important statement as to the musical personality of an artist's music. I like that, just not for navigation.

And yet, I almost want to try to teach myself to navigate by album cover, because when you click on one -- boom -- you get a wicked-fast drop-down window that shows all the songs you have belonging to the album. You can click a play or shuffle button to start playing right away -- or even add the album your new "Up Next" playlist. And what's the Up Next playlist? One of the best features in iTunes 11, but I'll get to that later. There's more to say about the album view: When you click on an album and get the drop-down details, it's clear that someone at Apple had their thinking hat on because the background color behind the songs is a perfect match to the dominate color element of actual album art. It's a subtle and pleasing detail -- the sort of thing I love about Apple's best products.

Sorting by Artist view, you get album thumbnails with the songs that you own next to each album cover. It's visual and handy without being particularly efficient unless you are, again, an album-art visual thinker. It is fast, though, and that's its saving grace.

Consider Enabling the Sidebar

If you click on Songs to navigate, you'll get a more familiar spreadsheet sort of view of your music that's sortable by name, artist, album, genre, rating, plays, and even the length of time the track will play. You'll also likely see some little "download from iCloud" icons. In my case, I saw all the old music I previously bought from iTunes but now hate so much I tried to delete it from my life. With iCloud, that's hard to do. If I delete it here, will it show up next time I upgrade iTunes? I'll have to get into iTunes somehow and systematically try to hide these from view forever, if possible.

In addition, there are a lot of tracks that show up as duplicates for me -- I have a version that is on my hard drive in my library as well as the same track available for download from iCloud. I'm not sure what gives here. I used to be an iTunes Match customer, but did not renew my subscription -- I just don't have enough non-iTunes-purchased music that I need accessible via iCloud for US$25 a year. For a handful of songs, I can move them around manually.

The question you'll have right away is, "Where the heck are all my playlists!?"

Ah, there's now a top navigation item for Playlists. Click it and a left sidebar will appear with your playlists in it. But there's no way to click on elements of your Library, like Music, to see all your songs. To do that, you'll need to change your view scheme back to Songs with the top horizontal navigation bar. But what if you want to see all your TV shows? Ah, there's a selectable button for that at the top left, which, if you're following me, is on Music. Click it and you can select TV Shows, which drops you into the icon/album-like art view of your TV shows. Click on an icon and you also get the cool drop-down info, which gives you the episode list. You can also sort by Unwatched, Genres, and simply, a spreadsheet-like List view.

Movies functions in a similar way, but select Books, for example, and you get the pretty covers and little else. Why? You can't, for some reason I still can't fathom, read a damn iBook on your Mac. It is 2012, is it not? But iTunes will store them for you with a handy glass shield over the content. You can unlock it with an iOS device though. Handy? Hardly.

Meanwhile, the Nav Starts Growing on You

As I got used to the new navigation, there was still a sense of something missing. I didn't realize what it was until I tried to load up a bunch of holiday music on my old iPod nano: The left sidebar is gone, and when it's gone, it's hard to figure out how to find the right music to sync to the iPad nano. I was seriously lost for five minutes. Eventually, I created a new playlist, then found my list of big songs, then sorted by genre, then added the songs to the playlist, then synced it up with my iPod nano. Intuitive? Not like it was before. Maybe it was just as fast, but I'm not sure.

Either way, how can you avoid this? Show the old sidebar. Go to the View menu and select Show Sidebar. Whew! You get your familiar left side sidebar with easy access to all your stuff! Nice.

Except, what happens? If you show this sidebar, you effectively erase two new navigation elements -- the left horizontal selectable content button and the far right iTunes Store button. Yes, these links are now available in the old-school left side column, so they aren't redundant. But what happens? Learn to navigate the new way? Or stick with the old? I'm of the mind that important software programs like iTunes should nudge users into the new styles of navigation the creators believe is important moving forward. Give us the redundant buttons and hope that we'll start using the right-side iTunes Store button and move with the future. Simple as that.

The New Store

There's not a lot to say here. It's definitely faster, which in itself in a fantastic improvement, as well as a little prettier. Is it fundamentally better or easier to navigate? Not really. Take, for instance, your Wish List feature. Say that you see a movie that you want to rent and watch, but just not now. Can you put it in your Wish List? Nope! Oh wait, you can if you want to buy the movie but you can't if you want to rent it. Apple has been asleep at the wheel with the Wish List for years. Even Amazon.com has this down. I can dump something into my shopping cart at Amazon.com then save it for later where it's handy to me. But what if Amazon stops selling it? No problem. They leave it there for me and say it's no longer for sale or that price changed from when I first put it in. Easy. Nice. Handy. But with Apple? No freaking way. You either buy it now, rent it now, or forget it ever existed.

Ah, but isn't there a new feature for this? In the upper right, there's a "History" icon list button. Click it, and it'll show you the items you bothered to preview in iTunes. So a song that you previewed a week ago but didn't actually buy, but now that you've hear it on the radio a few more times, ok, you're ready to find it again and buy it. You can find it easily through this little History feature. I like it. Does it solve the evaluation-before-you-buy need? No. How about the save-for-later need? No.

With features like this, I get the feeling that iTunes is marvelous for customers with unlimited iTunes buying budgets.

So What's Right About iTunes 11?

Despite the disappointments, iTunes 11 remains an improvement, first and foremost because it's much faster than the old iTunes. It's snappier in navigation and the elements load up and transition more quickly. I love this.

The iCloud integration seems better, too. You can, for instance, set it up so that if you buy a TV show on your MacBook Pro, it'll download to your iOS devices, too. Like my iPhone. So I can download an episode of "Homeland" on my Mac, start watching it, and if my iPhone had enough time to download it, I can pick up where I left off in the episode on my iPhone.

You can also use Apple's more visual navigation scheme if you can -- and revert to old helpers, like the sidebar, if you need to. That's smart. That will go a long way to helping guys like me out. iTunes is fundamentally decent, of course, especially given the wide variety of things it's able to do reasonably well.

Plus, if this isn't obvious to you now, it should be: Apple is "touchifying" its Mac applications, and iTunes shows a glimpse of the future: While you get irritated with the visual nature of the new iTunes 11, consider iTunes 11 on a touch-sensitive iMac screen. Suddenly the ability to touch and flick and select is much more intuitive and user-friendly.

If I were reviewing the new iTunes 11 on a touchscreen-based iMac, I'd be gushing.

Last of All, the 'Up Next' Playlist

With iTunes 11, Apple delivered on fantastic new feature: The Up Next playlist. Basically, this is a dynamic playlist that you can create or clear on the fly as you navigate through music. Say you have a big playlist but only have time or want to listen to a dozen work-friendly songs. You can step through the playlist and add those items to your Up Next playlist on the fly. Mess around with it, get used to it, and I'm guessing you'll start liking it. I do.

At the same time, a word of advice: Notice the little circle button with the ">" symbol inside of it. This little button gives you a popup window that lets you add items to Up Next as well as jump to other views. It's handy and important to your experience with the new iTunes 11. If you get on board with that little button, as well as appreciate Up Next, it'll jumpstart your appreciation for iTunes 11.

By Chris Maxcer
MacNewsWorld 
Part of the ECT News Network

source :www.technewsworld.com

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All Things Appy: Top 5 Android Shopping Tools

Scan barcodes from your groceries and pantry items. Fivefly's Shopping List app then provides a master list with check boxes, and you simply check a box when you've replenished supplies. Simple. TechNewsWorld thinks this checkmark system is superior to apps that make you scan or enter the product label text each time.

Welcome to All Things Appy -- infoa2z.net  analysis of the best apps proliferating on our devices today.

Indicative of the superiority of portable geo-friendly apps over Web search and Web browsing is the Shopping genre.

Here are infoa2z.net's suggestions for the top five store-agnostic free killer tools on the Android platform.

About the Platform

Google's Android OS is a mobile environment geared toward multitouch. Apps can be downloaded from the Google Play store.

From the device's app drawer, click on the Play icon. Then perform a search for the desired app.

No. 1: Barcode Scanner

The Zxing Team's Barcode Scanner boasts 50,000,000 to 100,000,000 installs, according to Google Play. It has an average rating of 4.2 out of a possible five from 305,129 reviewers.

Keep things simple with Barcode Scanner.

Scan the product barcode wandering the aisles and read up on the product via a Google Web search or Google's shopping Web pages.

That's it.

It's super useful when showrooming, in-store browsing, price-matching, or looking for independent reviews and specifications.

Barcode Scanner is No. 1 on our list because it's the fastest way to gather product intelligence, and it provides something previously unattainable.

No. 2: Shopping List

Shopping List from Fivefly is a shopping list manager with 500,000 to 1,000,000 installs, according to the Google Play store. It has a 4.3 average rating out of a possible five from 7,448 reviewers.

Scan barcodes from your groceries and pantry items. Fivefly's Shopping List app then provides a master list with check boxes, and you simply check a box when you've replenished supplies. Simple.

TechNewsWorld thinks this checkmark system is superior to shopping list apps that make you scan or enter the product label text each time.

Shopping List also features sharing and syncing, so family members don't duplicate purchases.

It's No. 2 on our list because it provides syncing and paperless efficiency.

No. 3: Coupons & Shopping -- GeoQponsShopping List

Coupons & Shopping -- GeoQpons is a coupon aggregator from publisher Most Useful Shopping App with 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 installs, according to the Google Play store. It has an average 4.4 rating out of a possible five from 6,655 reviewers.

GeoQpons is a highly comprehensive selection of retail and restaurant coupon links, as well as weekend newspaper-style specials ads. Don't go pounding the sidewalk locally without checking this app.

It contains many of the classic ads and coupons that clutter up our snail mail boxes and newspapers -- but with the advantage of app-driven favorite store alerts, search and geo-functions.

It's No. 3 on our list because this app saves you cash. However, be aware that some of the ads may need printing out.

No. 4: ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner

ShopSavvy Barcode Scanner from publisher ShopSavvy boasts 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 installs according to Google Play. It has an average rating of 4.2 out of a possible five from 89,590 reviewers.

This app provides super-fast scanning of product barcodes with instant online prices. It's not so great on local store price comparisons, but it's a superior barcode look-up nonetheless.

It earned a runner-up position, because unlike Barcode Scanner, its product descriptions and specifications are poor.

No. 5: GasBuddy - Find Cheap Gas

GasBuddy - Find Cheap Gas from GasBuddy boasts 10,000,000 to 50,000,000 installs and has an average rating of 4.6 from 387,245 reviewers.

With gas prices varying wildly, even around the block, GasBuddy provides geo-tagged gasoline prices graphically represented on a map.

Press one button and the app shows you the nearest gas prices. Sort by price and you can save money by picking the nearest cheap gas. It's crowd-sourced data and a killer app for traveling.

It's a runner-up because TechNewsWorld thinks cheapskates already know where their local discounted gas stations are.

source:www.technewsworld.com

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BEST SITES FOR DOWNLOADING FREE SOFTWARES

Best websites for downloading free softwares

By LOGESH,

Softwares have become a part & parcel of our lives , for whatever it may be with regardance with the pc or laptops or any other digital system there are softwares to minimize our work and so obviously the demand has also raised .
So I thought of helping u guys to get the softwares u need with ease .Just u need to go to any this website mentioned below & you may download your software for free.

1.download.com

2.soft 32

3.zNet downloads

4.open source iphone software

5.gear download

6.file hippo

7.open source mac

8.free ware files

9.softpedia

10.file cluster

I guess this must have helped you :):):)

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