Well, this morning started rather cold. The building that I live in went out of oil Sunday afternoon, so today there was no heating or warm water. And as I wrote yesterday, we have real winter in Oslo. This morning it was minus 14 degrees. Thanks god we are playing hockey at work on Mondays, so I can take a shower there and hopefully the appartment will be warm when I get back this evening.

On the other hand I got quite excited when I turned on the computer to read some news before leaving for work. I am reading most of the planets (aggregators) every day, something that you might have guessed reading my blogroll on the left of my site. I follow the Planet Gnome closely. First out was some more news about Desktop 2.0 and then some information about a new application in the Gnome family: last-exit.

I am not quite sure what Desktop 2.0 will bring us in the end, other then it together with Deskbar Applet and Beagle will bring queries to Gnome users as we know them from BeOS/ZETA. But with a far more user friendly approach, more like Dashboard in MacOS X. I am simply drewling and can hardly wait trying it out. Desktop 2.0 will bring us an easy way to tag information (add attributes) and the Deskbar Applet will be the easy approach to find back to the files/information.

The talk about tagging brings me over to the second thing that I want to blog about today, last-exit. One of the projects that I find to be übercool these days is Last.fm (’social’ music streaming – that Web 2.0 thingy…). Last.fm has made available players for most platforms, that is platforms that have Qt libs. Last-exit will is making use of gstreamer. It is still in an early stage of development – v0.2, and it is reported to “might not work” with the most recent gstreamer. Something that turned out to be the case for me… . Here’s at least a screenshot:

last-exit a GTK last.fm player

The AbiWord developer Marc Maurer has released a screencast in Flash showing one of the new features in the upcoming version 2.6. The new feature is a collaboration plugin making use of XMPP. It reminds me a lot about SubEthaEdit in MacOS X, an application with bonjour support. I saw that one of the leading developers in the Ubuntu project Jeff commenting the new feature like this: “OpenOffice.org is not aggressively competitive with Microsoft Office – it’s playing to match the feature matrix instead of leapfrogging and defining new ground to fight on. That is not a winning strategy, particularly when the stakes involve the future of Software“. This is a really cool feature indeed, especially if you combine it with VoIP, but this will not make AbiWord compete with OpenOffice. This battle for now at least seems to be lost. I never liked OpenOffice much and have been using TextMaker instead, but I will give the new AbiWord 2.6 a shot!