Product Picks: Tasque, Wine 1.0, Epiphany, Komodo

Getting Things Done with Tasque

Linux has a lot of excellent task managers, but if you’re looking for something lightweight and really simple, you should take a look at Tasque — a to-do list manager written in Mono for the GNOME desktop. (Though, of course, it works just fine on KDE as well.)

Tasque is a simple application that runs out of your taskbar notification area. It’s dead simple to use to add and manage the to-do list, and keeps track of just the info you need to avoid being too complex to use easily.

Even better, Tasque syncs up with online applications and other backends, so you can use Tasque in conjunction with sites like Remember the Milk the Evolution Data Server, or just a plain SQLite data store if you don’t use a separate data store. For more info on Tasque, check out the website.

Wine 1.0 Approaches

Believe it or not, the Wine team is actually heading towards a 1.0 release. The Wine team has scheduled a 1.0 release to coincide with the 15th anniversary of the project this June, and a 1.1.0 release soon after to pick up bugs from the 1.0 release.

The release criteria for Wine 1.0 are pretty simple — Wine 1.0 must run Photoshop, Microsoft’s Powerpoint Viewer, Word Viewer, and Excel Viewer 97 and 2003. While it may seem like a very short list, the idea is to address a small and well-understood group of bugs while heading to 1.0, and to prevent regressions.

While not every Windows application will run flawlessly under Wine 1.0, the project is making significant progress. The Wine db now lists more than 1,200 applications certified at” Platinum” status, which means that they’ll run as well under Wine as under Windows. For more on Wine, visit the website.

Have an Epiphany!

If you’re looking for a browser that’s a little better integrated into the GNOME desktop, it’s time to have an epiphany. Well, to use Epiphany, anyway. Epiphany is the GNOME browser that’s based on Mozilla’s “Gecko” engine and using a shell especially designed for the GNOME desktop that’s less cluttered and better integrated with GNOME.

This latest release adds the option of using the Webkit (used by Safari and Konqueror) backend, though it’s not complete at this time. Epiphany 2.22.0 also adds a single dialog to allow you to clear your cookies, cache, and other items to help boost privacy while using the browser. Another fun feature, Epiphany’s history now shows the date and time of last visits to pages, not just the URL and name.

Epiphany is an official part of the GNOME project, and is released with GNOME — so if your distro packages GNOME, you should have Epiphany at your fingertips already! For more information on Epiphany, see the website.

Komodo IDE 4.3 Released

ActiveState has released a new version of its Komodo IDE with a number of new features of interest to open source and Linux developers. Komodo is an IDE built on top of a heavily modified Mozilla codebase.

This release includes a number of improvements, including new search features to locate code sections easily, advanced find and replace features, and a new abbreviations feature that allows you to insert code snippets easily. This release also has better support for source code control, including CVS, Subversion, and Perforce.

ActiveState offers a free trial of Komodo, but the full version runs $295. Komodo IDE is available on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. ActiveState also offers a free IDE called Komodo Edit, based on the same codebase, but with fewer features. For more info, see the website.