New Desktop
Nov. 11, 2004
I was tired of restoring Juk everytime I needed to pause my music. This irritation led me to notice that there were a lot of things about my current desktop that slowed me down, distracted me, or were just plain annoying. I decided to completely redo my desktop to solve this problem. As you can see, it borrows liberally from OSX, but Apple is known as the king of UI. We'll see how this works out.
Everything you see except the console window and the taskbar at the top come from Keramba, a flexible UI designer and monitoring tool for KDE. The bar on the left tells me the current CPU load, HD usage, network usage, and status of my mailbox. Soem of these are superfluous, but I often waste time while working checking my email or wondering whether my HD is getting too full. Its also nice to see whether my memory is being used by runaway processes. That widget includes a little applet for controlling my music player, Juk. It also tells me what song is currently playing.
The bar on the bottom is copied straight from the OSX applcation launcher. This one does the same thing. The only problem with it is that it is always covered by windows, and there is no way to hit a hot key and bring it to the top. I'm looking for a way of solving or working around this problem.
As a bonus to my new desktop, I installed a number of useful Firefox extensions including Adblock, an RSS reader, and one to control my music player, just in case.