As of this week, Gmail has reached perfection: You no longer have to be online to read or write messages. Desktop programs like Microsoft Outlook have always been able to access your old mail. There is a certain bliss to this if you’ve got a pile of letters that demand well-composed, unplugging the Internet can be the fastest way to get things done
Several powerful open source software frameworks aim to bring mapping and geolocation capabilities to the Linux platform. Ars takes a look at this emerging technology and how it is being used in several popular desktop applications.
One of Gmail’s most requested features – offline support – is now available in testing. In other words, you can now use Gmail without an Internet connection, just like you can with desktop mail clients like Outlook.
January 27, 2009. The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of “The Answer”, (a.k.a KDE 4.2.0), readying the Free Desktop for end users. KDE 4.2 builds on the technology introduced with KDE 4.0 in January 2008.
Harris goes on to claim “Windows 7 is the final nail in the desktop Linux market’s coffin. Unless Microsoft gets stupid on pricing, it is game over for Linux netbook market share.” Wait … is Linux losing the desktop market, or the netbook market?
Verunks writes “Ars takes the KDE 4.2 release candidate out for a test drive on Windows. The popular open source desktop environment has moved beyond Linux and is becoming increasingly robust on other platforms. Even KDE’s Plasma desktop shell is now Windows-compatible.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gedit is the default text editor for most of the Linux distributions using Gnome as the desktop environment. As it turns out and as we shall see shortly Gedit supports plugins and there are some very useful plugins for Gedit.
Born at a time when people assumed desktop computers were all about text, the primarily visual Macintosh is marking its 25th anniversary on a mostly high note with some of its best-ever sales and influence beyond just desktop computers.
Ben Cahan wishes he hadn’t damaged his old snapshot of a person in a prosthetic alien suit sitting with his Macintosh. Luckily, he still has a late-1980s picture of actor Kurt Russell with his boxy Mac desktop.
GigaOM writer Stacey Higginbotham blogged yesterday that “Mobile Computing Is Killing the Desktop PC.” But that’s not what’s happening. Not exactly. If anything, the “mobile computing” concept itself is likely to be killed off as we move to everywhere and anywhere computing.
