Peter told you about Katapult for KDE. It’s a general purpose launcher made to launch applications by typing them.

To fuel the KDE vs. GNOME debate further comes GNOME Do. Just like Katapult, applications are launched simply by typing the name. A quick key press of Super+Space (Windows+Space) brings up the dialog, at which point anything can be typed in:

You’re not limited to simple actions. GNOME Do’s plugin interface allows for many different actions to be added. For example, you could search Wikipedia.

You can even do track management of media players like Rhythmbox. Pressing the down arrow pops up a menu of alternate choices.

Other types of actions include Twitter, connecting to SSH, system actions, among others.

If you’re a Katapult user, you can see it looks very familiar. You can get it from the author’s website, and some newer distribution releases also have it available in their archives.

Microblogging service Twitter is ever popular, and is a great way for keeping in contact with your friends in real time and seeing what they are up to. What makes Twitter what it is though, is the ability to update your status and receive messages on all sorts of devices, as well as the web interface.

Twitux is a native GTK/Gnome client for Twitter.

It is now apparently in Ubuntu, Fedora and Debian repositories, install it through the package name twitux, or you can download the source here. In my case, I’m installing through the Fedora repositories.

Read the rest of Twitux - a GNOME Twitter client

Screencasting is the process of taking a video capture of what’s happening on your screen. It is a great technique for doing tutorials, or explaining something you’re doing on the computer visually to someone when you’re not geographically close. In a sense, it’s like inviting someone to look over your shoulder at your computer screen, while you explain what’s going on.

There are tailor-made applications for both Windows and the Mac designed specifically for this purpose, but for a long time it has often been much more difficult to create a screencast such as this in Linux. recordMyDesktop changes that.

recordMyDesktop has both a command line tool, and graphical programs (for both GTK and Qt) which make screen capture really easy to do. The command line program is nice and intuitive, provided you’re reasonably proficient using the command line already, but the graphical program stands out for me and is the simplest way to quickly record a demo of your screen.

In a somewhat ironic twist, I’ve used recordMyDesktop to record a brief screencast on how to use recordMyDesktop, which you can view by clicking Watch Video.

I do want to mention and say thanks to heathenx for his help getting my video workflow for FOSSwire moved over to using recordMyDesktop and 100% open source tools. I also highly recommend his video tutorial, An Introduction to Screencasting in Linux which goes into a lot more detail and takes things a lot slower than I do in my video that accompanies this post.

recordMyDesktop is by far the best screencasting solution for Linux that I have used yet, and makes the capturing process a real breeze, especially compared to using older solutions such as xvidcap.