a screenshot of kreetingkard

Kreeting Kard is available in the repositories. When you search for it in your distribution’s repositories, look for kreetingkard and kreetingkard-templates. Installing it with your Linux distribution’s package manager should be a breeze.

Once you have it installed, you could now begin using it. When you’re using Kreeting Kard, you need to choose a template first before you could do anything. If you don’t have a template you can’t make any card. When you select a card in the “Templates” section, you get into the “Designer” section already. If you have a picture you want to use, you could insert it into the card in this mode. For those who will make postcards, make sure you have selected the side where you want to put your picture. You just need to click on the icon with the mountains. That’s what you need to trigger the dialog for inserting images. You could also add text. The icon with the letters a and b is the one you need for that. Of course it will be best to install fonts first for an awesome text.

In Kreeting Kard, you could already store the names and addresses of the people who will be the recipients of your greetings. There’s an address book function that’s built in.

Personally, this application could be useful for those times that I just want a quick postcard or two. But I think that it’s still lacking in terms of templates which are available for users. Another issue I have when it comes to using this is that the application doesn’t seem to have a way to import addresses from your mail client. I think that would have been a more practical approach. In any case, it’s still useful but of course, you may also want to check out other options. This application doesn’t really give me a one-stop solution yet but who knows what its developers will do someday.

Post from: New Linux User

• Tweetdeck
  
  Interestingly enough this seems to have a lot of nifty features. One of them is creating groups of people to follow, manage conversations with @ replies and direct messages, manage multiple Twitter accounts, view photo thumbnails from Tweetdeck, avoiding Twitter spam via the Spam button.
• Twhirl
  
  This runs on Adobe Air. You could find it easier to use this to connect to your Twitter, laconi.ca, Friendfeed and Seesmic accounts plus cross-post your updates via ping.fm to boot. This also allows searching of tweets via Twitter Search and Tweet Scan.
• Choqok
  
  Choqok is the KDE microblogging client and it currently supports laconi.ca and twitter. It supports multiple accounts too. One nice thing for those who prefer keyboard shortcuts to launch this: Ctrl + Meta + T does the trick.

I’m more of a GNOME user so I might have not been posting much KDE apps here but I am glad that this blog entry pointed out one KDE app for Twitter. I wouldn’t know about it if not for this. It seems that Choqok is still relatively new so it looks like interesting to follow if you’re a KDE user.

May you find a good Twitter client for you to use!

Post from: New Linux User

The screenshots look fantastic and quite consistent. I am not into really fantastic UI themes so I don’t use Beryl and others. Just plain Gnome (or Openbox sometimes) so I think I shouldn’t have much troubles when I try it out next week.

Download from: Trolltech Labs SVN repository
Detailed review seen on: Ars Technica’s Open Ended blog

Edit: Hrm, I was wrong in calling Beryl a theme, that’s true. I was careless but I just hope that I got emailed about it and not reading it in a rant. I wouldn’t mind getting educated and corrected. Beryl isn’t a theme. It’s a window manager. And I am regret to post that I don’t prefer it over the others. And that makes me biased, in a way, hence the carelessness of lumping it with the other themes I know of.

Post from: New Linux User

Plasma is KDE’s way of making the ‘desktop’ a better user experience by letting users decide what ’shape’ it is. I think that KDE wants to empower its users by making the panel, the desktop and other components customizable in so many ways and yet make them work together seamlessly. The concept is quite different from the usual desktop because you will have plasmoids and stuff which you can tweak so that they will behave according to what you prefer.

Some people say that FOSS apps are not usable and I think that projects like this one moves progressively. They don’t want to make apps that work, they want to let users have a better experience in interacting with the app and get their tasks done. I may not be a big KDE fan but this move is way cool, if you ask me.

Post from: New Linux User