The Linux Ninja

This weekend, I decided to check out GNOME Do’s latest 0.8 release with the new Docky task bar. As someone who has managed to avoid all the launcher hype bestowed on programs such as Launch Box, Quicksilver and Ubiquity, I have to admit that in the beginning, I was more than a little bit skeptical about GNOME Do. How useful can this program really be? I mean, all it does is allow you to use keyboard shortcuts for common tasks. I can use the the mouse for that. Right? Wrong. After using GNOME Do for only a few days, it has quickly risen to the top of my must-have applications list.

Installation in Ubuntu started out pretty straight forward and similar to most other applications – add the GNOME Do repositories to the software sources list and run Synaptic or apt-get. However, after that, problems started. If you are running Ubuntu 8.04 and follow the install directions on GNOME Do’s website, it will only install the 0.6 version which contains many more bugs than 0.8 and does not come with Docky. So, after upgrading to 8.10 (I know, I know…I should have done that long ago) I was finally up and running.

GNOME Do comes configured by default without any plugins enabled, which isn’t all that useful because the plugins are what make (and in some cases break) GNOME Do. The list of included plugins, both official and community, is impressive; however, some are more useful than others. I was most excited about the Google Contacts, Evolution, Pidgin, Microblogging (Twitter and identi.ca), Google Search, Google Maps, and Terminal plugins as these correspond to actions I carry out on a regular basis. Obviously, I can’t cover all the plugins available, so I will stick to the ones I liked best.

This makes Twittering way too easy.

I have struggled to find a good Twitter client for some time now, so I was surprised to find that GNOME Do’s Twitter plugin actually worksquite nicely. If you enable the taskbar icon, GNOME Do pops up conversation balloons whenever someone you are following has a new post. In addition, posting to your Twitter account is very easy. Simply invoke GNOME Do with your set hot-key and type “Twitter” , hit tab, and then type your post and hit enter. Rinse, repeat, etc. That’s it. You can also send direct messages just as easily by hitting tab after your message and selecting one of your contacts using the keyboard arrow keys.

The Google Search and Google Maps plugins work pretty much as you would expect them to. You can either have GNOME Do serach/map your selected text or enter new text directly. Seeing as how there are plenty of

Time to get your map on.

Firefox add-ons that do more or less the same, these are definitely nothing new, but it was nice being able to simply type in an address or search term and have it launch my browser and take me straight to the results. That saves some time when you sit down and think about it. This is the same story with the Pidgin and Terminal plugins – you can type messages or commands directly into Do without having to start the associated application first.

While the previous plugins worked without any problems, I was disappointed to find out that the Google Contacts and Evolution plugins have some bugs which make them more or less worthless to some people. In theory, the Google Contacts plugin should index all of my Google Mail contacts and allow me to send them an email or copy their information to the clipboard straight from Do. However, a very annoying bug prefixed all of the email addresses with “///”, so they appeared as “///foo@bar.com”, making the emails unsendable. Clearly, it doesn’t take much effort to remove the /’s manually, but it does knock down the seamlessness of the application. The Evolution plugin suffered from a different problem as I could not get it to index my contacts properly. At first, I attributed this to Evolution using my Exchange contacts (we all know how Exchange can throw a monkey wrench in things), so I copied them all over locally but was equally unsuccesful. There was probably a substantial amount of user-error in this issue (so if you know how to fix it, please comment), but after being so terribly disappointed in the Google Contacts bug, I decided to give up and move on to GNOME Do 0.8′s best feature – Docky.

Docky’s goal is to be as much like the OS X dock as possible and to this front it succeeds admirably. While there have been lots of OS X-like

Who put this in here?

docks for both KDE and GNOME in the past, Docky seems very well polished and comes as a theme option to GNOME Do. Enabling Docky and getting it to work well is a different story. As I mentioned, Docky comes as a theme option to Do, which seemed a bit unintuitive as I didn’t think to look first at the themes while trying to enable Docky. I also ran into some problems with Docky being very sluggish which ended up being a problem with my Nvidia 177 drivers. A quick upgrade to 180 completely solved the problem and I was finally able to play around with my new dock.

First impressions are important, and Docky looks great from the start. Similar to the OS X dock, Docky is divided into application shortcuts on the left and active applications which don’t have shortcuts on the right.

Docky looks pretty nice.

However, Docky isn’t limited to only application shortcuts. You can add Gnome Do actions to the dock as well, making those actions even easier to execute. For example, if you frequently email a particular person, you could add their contact info to the dock so that when you click on the icon, Do will automatically open up an email to the contact. By default, Docky populates the dock with your most frequently used actions from GNOME Do, but you can easily remove them and add your desired shortcuts. Just like the

OS X dock, Docky also places a dot under active applications and even bounces the icon for notifications. Right-clicking on an icon shows you the windows associated with that application as well as several other options such as minimize, maximize, and close all. My biggest complaint about Docky is that while you can control the overall size and color of the dock, there are no other configuration options for magnification level, bouncing, etc.

Overall, Gnome Do 0.8 with Docky is an excellent solution for someone looking for either a launcher application, a dock application, or both. The vast selection of plugins for Do make it a very customizable application and something that almost anyone can find a use in and Docky proves itself as a competent task bar that even the non-Apple fanboys can love. Hopefully future revisions will see some of the bugs worked out of the plugins (I want my Gmail Contacts!) and the addition of some more configuration options to Docky. Give it a shot here.

Update: I should have been clearer in my review, but to set the record straight, the two bugs mentioned above are not bugs with GNOME Do itself. As David kindly points out in the comments below, the Evolution bug is attributable to libevolution-cil and the “///”‘s bug is a problem with xdg-email (I linked to the launchpad discussion about this in the article above). Thanks David.