After 6 months of hard work, GLX-Dock 2.3 is finally released!
This version is a huge step towards a credible alternative to other shells (Unity, Gnome3, KDE4, XFCE, etc).
We mainly focused on the integration of the dock with the other pillars of the Linux/BSD Desktop:
- Integration of the Compiz and Kwin effects:
when 2 or more windows of the same application are grouped inside the dock, clicking on the main icon will trigger the Exposé of these windows.
Also, the Switcher and the ShowDesktop applets can trigger the Exposé of all desktops, all windows, or the Widget Layer (where you can by the way place the Cairo-Dock's applets).
- Integration of Zeitgeist:
Zeitgeist is a new service that keeps traces of your recent activities.
GLX-Dock now has an applet dedicated to it; it lets you browse your last visited web pages, documents, videos, musics, etc.
It also adds to the launchers menu the recent files that can be opened with this launcher
(for instance, on right-clicking on the Gimp launcher, you will have a quick access to the recent images)
> The Recent dialog
http://uppix.net/1/d/6/919f7997373b4cc860b11135e8b76.jpg
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- Integration of the application indicators:
Finally, GLX-Dock has a nice Notification area (also called systray), which can display all the indicators directly inside the dock.
MeMenu and MessagingMenu are also supported.
> The Notification Area
http://uppix.net/2/b/5/f5d12d43c9b564e6226c6e2bad5ba.jpg
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- Integration of UbuntuOne into the "Drop and Share" applet (this applet lets you share any kind of files over the Internet, by simply droppong them onto the icon).
- The Logout applet warns you when the computer needs to be restarted.
- Integration of many applications with "smart launchers": these are small applets that can talk to the program, and display several information.
For instance, the "Transmission" applet will display the download rate, and let you see which
Again the integration of other desktops was taken into account, since we also have an applet for KTorrent and Deluge.
Various advanced menus can also be used inside the dock: GnoMenu, MintMenu, Cardapio, and Lancelot.
> The Transmission applet running.
http://img21.imageshack.us/img21/6281/transmission1.jpg
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> screenshot of the Mint-Menu
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Sign of its maturity, GLX-Dock now has its own framework to manipulate icons, docks, desklets, OpenGL animations, and so on.
It also provides a simple and yet powerful API in a lot of languages, to write applets very easily (Python, Ruby, Vala, Mono, Bash, etc).
A lot of new applets have been developped by contributors thanks to this API:
- a "Quote of the Day" applet
- a Translator applet
- a lot of "smart launchers"
- and many more are to come (Facebook applet, LifeArea applet, etc)
We can also note the following new features:
- better menus layout, easier to use.
- a new configuration window, where you can configure all the launchers/applets/docks/desklets at once.
- CPU and fan speed monitoring in the System-Monitor applet
- the image Slider loads much faster
- better dialogs placement
- new themes
- ...
The items configuration window.
http://www.glx-dock.org/mediacolor/album3/1295661705_aaf34c6e78.jpg
The MeeGo theme: clear and efficient!
http://www.glx-dock.org/mediacolor/album3/1295660551_edbecb8257_big.jpg
GLX-Dock runs on any desktop environment, on virtually any machine (including small netbooks and 8 years old PC).
To install it, please follow the wiki (we have our own repository):
http://www.glx-dock.org/ww_page.php?p=By%20distributions?=en
If you want to get the latest features, our weekly repository is available for any Debian-based distribution:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/weekly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins