A new version of Gnome-Do was released today – 0.8.2. However, don’t be deceived by the small change in version number, this new release contains plenty of new features as well as squashing quite a few bugs along the way. Here is a brief summary of some of the changes I’m aware of.
Docky ‘Intellihide’ Feature
Previously when using Docky at the bottom of the screen, you had two options. You could either have the dock open permanently or you could enable the auto-hide feature. Having the dock there permanently certainly facilitates speedy opening of programs but in reality, it is hardly ideal – what with it getting in the way of all your windows and not allowing you to click on anything at the bottom of the screen. The autohide option is probably the way most people went – but this means that the dock is never visible until you drag the mouse pointer down to the bottom of the screen – which makes opening programs using the dock rather cumbersome.
This contradiction has now been resolved with a new feature called ‘intellihide’. If selected, the dock will automatically hide itself when there are full screen programs open on the desktop or when windows are too near the bottom of the screen. However, Docky can still be accessed at all times by dragging the mouse down to the bottom of the desktop. If no programs are open on the desktop and nothing is blocking the bottom of the screen, Docky will pop back up again and stay at the bottom of your screen allowing you fast, easy access to your most used programs when you need them.
Docky Top and Bottom Orientation
Whilst previously Docky could only be placed at the bottom of your screen, you can now have your favourite dock floating around at the top of your screen now – giving you even more possibilities for desktop customisation.
Improved Flickr Uploading
The Flickr upload plugin now provides more feedback on upload progress. Unlike previously where there would simply be a Gnome-Do icon displayed in the system tray, the Flickr uploader now has it’s own window and tells you when the upload has completed successfully.
Better UI and Graphics Perfomance
Your mileage may vary depending on what hardware and drivers you are using but I have noticed that the dock animations seem much smoother than before. Furthermore, there are some lovely coloured lighting effects on dock icons for the application which is active in the current window. You can now also change the zoom and icon size settings with sliders rather than dragging “handles” on the dock itself.
Docklets
I’ve tried installing this feature with:
sudo apt-get install gnome-do-docklets
But it says that it can’t find this package or something along those lines. It sounds like an exciting feature but I’ll have to wait until I can get it working before I can provide more details. All I can find at the moment is information about a nifty looking Weather Docklet which is documented on the Do Wiki.
Apart from the things I mentioned above, there are now a lot of new plugins available for Gnome-Do and localisation is better than before – with most of the program and some plugins now available in other languages. There are probably plenty of other things that have so far gone unnoticed so please leave me a message in the comments if I missed anything important.
