FOSSwire

KNetStats is a really simple network monitoring application for KDE.

You launch it, and it sits around in your system tray waiting for some network action. Much like the little network widget in Windows that sits in the system tray, the little computer icons light up to show incoming and outgoing traffic. In KNetStats' case, they flash green.

In addition to this, you can click the icon to bring up a statistics window, that looks something like this:

You can also use the details tab to view basic information about your network connection, like the IP address and MAC address of your machine.

To be honest, there's not that much additional commentary I can make on KNetStats. There's nothing particular special about it or any amazing features that stand out from the crowd. However, if you like having the visual feedback of what's going on with your network in your system tray, or want to monitor your network usage, KNetStats is a very lightweight application to do just that job.

Most modern graphical user interfaces place menubars underneath the title bar of each window. This approach works well for most people, but there is another concept that is often used.

The most obvious and memorable implementation is in Apple's Mac OS system. What am I talking about? Well, putting one global menu bar at the top of the window; the context of which changes depending on which application is focused.

You might not realise it, but KDE has had this functionality built in to it for quite some time. Enable the right setting, and all KDE applications will share a global menu bar at the top.

It's worth mentioning at this point that it only works for KDE apps, so anything such as Firefox or another application which uses GTK or another toolkit won't have this feature, which will lead to inconsistency.

To enable the feature, right-click anywhere on your KDE desktop and choose Configure Desktop. In the resulting window, click Behaviour on the left, then make sure the General tab is selected.

From there, click Current application's menu bar (Mac OS-style) and click OK. That's it - to reverse the setting, simply choose None in the same dialogue.

Just before I go, I should mention that at the present time there is a project to build in similar support for GNOME/GTK. Its website can be found here, however currently it involves manually patching bits of software and isn't nearly as simple to achieve.

Launcher applications such as LaunchBar and Launchy over on other platforms are becoming increasingly popular.

The idea is quite simple - the application springs into action when you hit a keystroke, and then you start typing an application's name. As you type, the list of applications filters, so you can type just a few characters and then press Enter to launch an app.

This is exactly how Katapult works. Press Alt-Space, and then just start typing the first few characters, such as konq for Konqueror.

Katapult then shows you what its best guess is with the characters you've given it, and then you press Enter to perform the Run Program action on the right, or type more characters to refine your search.

As well as launching applications from Katapult, it supports a limited set of other actions, including launching Konqueror bookmarks, opening files that are in your home directory, a simple calculator function and more.

Once you launch the application in the first place, it seems to pretty much disappear from view until you need it. In my Kubuntu install, there's not even a tray icon to notify you that the program is running.

This means it keeps out of your way, but unless you read the manual on the website, it's not clear how to actually get to the settings (which, for the record, is to press Alt-Space, then Ctrl-C to open the popup menu.

Apart from this, Katapult makes a simple, elegant and useful general purpose launcher for KDE systems.