Cairo-Dock in English!

Cairo-Dock / GLX-Dock 3.4 is now available

matttbe — Thu, 23 Oct 2014 00:45:07 +0000

Cairo-Dock 3.4 is finally released! One year after the 3.3 version.

Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc.
(For more details about the Cairo-Dock sessions and more screenshots, please have a look at a previous article: here)

TL;DR: main changes

Menus: added the possibility to customise them
Style: unified the style of all components of the dock
Better integration with Compiz (e.g. when using the Cairo-Dock session) and Cinnamon
Applications Menu and Logout applets will wait the end of an update before displaying notifications
Various improvements for Applications Menu, Shortcuts, Status-Notifier and Terminal applets
Start working on EGL and Wayland support
And as always ... various bug fixes and improvements!

Important note: We just switched from BZR to GIT on Github, feel free to fork! https://github.com/Cairo-Dock
And GTK 2 support has been dropped.

Screenshot of this version with 4 actions

Menus and unified style

The most visible change is the ability to customise the menus. You can change the background, the shape, etc. and even use your own css file (a menu.css file in your current_theme folder) for those who want to change every tiny details

Note that the dock now has the possibility to use an unified style. Either a custom one (on the left) or based on the current GTK3 theme (on the right):

.

You can easily change the style from the config panel:

(there are more options in the advanced mode of the configuration panel of the dock and you can choose to use the global style (or not) for many options of different applets)

The default theme has also been updated in order to use a custom style with a black background, it now looks like that:

These screenshots have been made with 'Default-Panel' and 'Default-Single' themes available in the Theme manager, but please remember that Cairo-Dock is fully customisable. You can easily change its look, simply have a look at the theme manager, your favourite search engine, DeviantArt, Gnome-Look, etc.

Other improvements

Many other tiny improvements and bugs fixes have added to this version in order to fix some details that can help the user, e.g.:

There is a better integration with your Window Manager, e.g.:

If it's the first time you're using our Cairo-Dock Session but your current dock only has one panel, you'll see a proposition to switch to the 'Default-Panel' theme.
When adding new desktops from the Switcher applet, a special case has been added for Compiz user to add workspaces instead of desktops (not the same concept) and save the new settings.
On Cinnamon, the dock will open more specific applications (e.g. to change sound settings, lock the screen, logout, etc.)

Applications Menu and Logout applets will wait for the end of an update of the system before displaying notifications, e.g.:

When installing a new software, the Applications Menu will propose to you to open this new application at the end of the installation of all applications (of course, you can disable this behaviour)
When upgrading your kernel (or a few other packages), you will see a notification only at the end of the upgrade of all packages which will propose you to reboot your computer. If you try to reboot your computer during an upgrade, the dock will show you a warning.

A few options have been added (e.g. in the Terminal applet) and other details have been improved. For a complete ChangeLog, please have a look to our commit messages

Note that GTK 2 support has been dropped in this new release. If you still don't support GTK 3, please install Cairo-Dock 3.3.

Switch from BZR to Git on Github

We just switched from BZR to Git on Github.
It's absolutely not because BZR sucks! BZR is a great distributed version control system, easy to use and intuitive. For example, by default you commit all you changes, no need to use a "stage" or add an option. If you want to send your changes to another branch, simply add the new name when you push it. If you want to do two things in parallel, simply duplicate your folder. If you want to undo your commit, simply use the understandable uncommit command. If you want to undo your current changes, simply use revert command (by default, it will create backup files). If you just need a snapshot of a branch and still have the possibility to be synced, there is an option to not clone the entire branch. And many other details!
Plus also all other tools to manage Ubuntu's .deb packages.

Of course, you can do all these stuff with Git but sometime it's not so easy and not so intuitive. For example, you can do many things with the checkout command, maybe too many things. You can have a better control of your remote repos but it's a bit more complex. You can add aliases, you can switch from a branch to another without duplicating any folder, there are a lot of options, etc. but it's maybe not so useful for projects with only a few contributors.

So, why did we switch? Mostly to be on Github. Not because it's Github but we hope that it will improve our visibility, we hope we will have more contributors (because we're looking for new contributors, feel free to fork ). Many people are using Git, many people already have a Github account and there are a lot of documentations and tools about Git and Github. We can even use the web interface to edit file and create pull requests!
Another interesting thing is that we can easily review the code on Github by adding comments linked to some lines in the code. And we can easily use other services thanks to Git's Hooks (e.g. to automatically build and test the entire project on Travis when there are new changes, etc.)

Note that we will only use Github to host the code and your future pull requests. Please continue to report bugs/ideas/questions on Launchpad or on our forum
Also, if you still want to continue to use BZR (e.g. if you have scripts and you just want to compile the development version of the dock), you can continue to use BZR because these branches are now synced with our Git repositories: lp:cairo-dock-core, lp:cairo-dock-plug-ins, lp:cairo-dock-plug-ins-extras. But of course, if you were already using these BZR branches, you'll need to re-download them.

Hello EGL and Wayland

Cairo-Dock has now a basic EGL and Wayland support. For more details about that, please have a look to our previous article

How to install

Installation is very easy, simply follow the wiki, depending on your distribution: Wiki: installation
E.g. for Ubuntu users, you can simply copy/paste these 3 lines into a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then if Cairo-Dock is already installed:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

else:

sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

It's a community project, feel free to help!

If you like this project, please be nice and support it by reporting bugs or ideas, making applets, articles, videos, themes, or donations, sending patches, reviewing the code, etc.. Thank you !

Fabounet (Fabrice Rey) and Matttbe (Matthieu Baerts) for the Cairo-Dock team.

A dock for Wayland

fabounet — Sat, 21 Jun 2014 13:15:31 +0000

Cairo-Dock has now a basic Wayland support.
Don't jump for joy too fast, it's really as basic as you can get.
But it highlights some interesting points, as a developper and as an user.

Cairo-Dock in Weston 1.5, with some desklets

Cairo-Dock in Weston 1.5 with the Applications Menu

What's nice

The dock and the overall desktop is quite fluid with the free drivers.
For the end-user though, but Weston is more a proof of concept and not meant to be used as your daily environment.
For the developpers however, Wayland is quite attractive, mainly because the dreadful X server-client message mechanism has been replaced by a clean collection of proxy objects (which also means it's a lot easier to extend the protocol).

What's wrong

Window placement

The biggest concern I have is that there is no window placement on the client side: an application can't position its window(s) to a given place on the desktop.
This is a serious issue: for instance, desktop widgets can't be placed on the desktop, you have to move them manually each time you start a session.
For the developpers, it means we have to reverse-engineer the placement algorithms of every applications to use relative coordinates (for instance, to position a menu at a given place).

Which is leading us towards some ugly hack, like adding a 'set_panel_position' method, to allow a panel to be placed where it wants (at some predefined positions).

Also, no equivalent of strut partial (the zone that maximized windows can't overlap); Weston supposes that a panel automatically defines a strut given by its dimensions, which is obviously wrong in the case of an auto-hiding panel or a dock that can zoom.
Hence maximized windows being not placed correctly.

It seems Wayland wants to outsmart the applications developpers, and so far the result is not convincing at all.

The desktop shell

The other big concern is about the desktop shell.
It's the interface the compositor offers to applications wanting to interact with the desktop.
As much the compositor part is refined, as much this part is very much in-progress.

For instance, there is still no way to access the list of surfaces (=windows) and manipulate them from another application, which means no taskbar.
Or more precisely, only the Compositor can do the job.
And not only this job, but a lot of others too, like changing the resolution, adding/removing a workspace dynamically, etc.
Note also that having global shortkeys is impossible (as you can see on the pictures in the terminal).
A wayland compositor just doesn't expose enough of its internals (is it for security ? it's way too extreme then), making it a hostile environment for third-party tools.

Because of that, Mir may be ready for the desktop before Wayland (at least they have already planned to expose a taskbar API through BAMF), which makes their move much more understandable.

I'll let aside some other bugs I could see, like artefacts in the menus (visible on the pictures), wrong mouse position on Leave/Enter events, or EGL being linked to GLX only in the current packages; I'm confident that they will be fixed quickly.

Conclusion

We definitely need a replacement for X (it doesn't fit well on smartphones, cars, etc), but on the desktop Wayland is currently missing too many features. Let's not forget that the good reasons (like security) will be of no help if people don't use the product. And they will not if the user experience is not superior or equal as with X (and I'm not talking about having smooth transitions between the desktop and the tty consoles).

Also, let's hope that all these efforts put into porting everything to Wayland will not eclipse some other problems, cheaper and yet important, like Gnome adopting the StatusNotifier protocol, or having a portable global menu.

Want to test ?

Install the latest build of Cairo-Dock, Wayland and Weston.
Add your user to the weston-launch group, then go to tty1, and type weston-launch.
Open a terminal.
Now start a session bus if not already done (this is not required, but several applets make use of Dbus):

/usr/bin/dbus-daemon --session --address=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-session-socket&

and export the socket name:

export DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS=unix:path=/tmp/dbus-session-socket

Finally, launch the dock:

cairo-dock

Fabounet.

Cairo-Dock 3.3 release!

fabounet — Fri, 11 Oct 2013 00:11:49 +0000

Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative or addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel and even LXDE-panel for a light and sexy interface (details and example here).
It features docks, panels, desklets, a full keyboard control, tons of applets, themes, and much more.

A mix of 4 actions when using the Default-Panel theme on a Cairo-Dock session

The Light-Grey theme on a Cairo-Dock session

Cairo-Dock with Compton when using LXDE environment (details here)

Here is a quick tour of the main changes in the 3.3 version, 6 months after the previous one:

General

The Applications Menu has been improved: it has now a search entry that allows you to rapidly look for programs from their name or their description.

The results are cleanly integrated into the menu, making it a fast and efficient way to launch programs (or even commands).

The menu with the search entry on the top;
you type something and the results replace the previous menu

It also allows you to quickly launch a newly installed application.

The applet proposes you to launch the application you just installed

The dock now supports the StartupNotification protocol; it allows launchers to be animated until the application starts, and avoids an accidental double launch if you click twice on a launcher before its application starts.

A new third-party applet has been created: Notification History; it keeps the history of notifications (from the system or from any applications that send notifications), so that you never miss any of them.

The applet keeps the history of notifications sent by your applications

The Dbus API (a way send commands to the dock, and control it from a terminal or another application) has been improved, and allows to act on any object (Icons, Modules, Docks, Desklets, etc) with only a few methods.

This has been a huge work in parallel with rewriting the core to use Objects, making the code easier to maintain.

For a longer list of changes, see this topic

Environment support

We work hard to make Cairo-Dock run in any desktop environment.
The goal is to have a nice tool that can run along with the default Shell, or even replace it completely.

The Logout applet now supports Logind from Systemd, which is replacing Consolekit for managing the user session in more and more distributions.

The Logout menu is now working with Systemd

The dock can now use some abilities of the Cinnamon desktop (windows Exposé, desktops Exposé), as it already does with Compiz, Kwin and Gnome-Shell.

Windows of the same application can be displayed together by the dock, here on Cinnamon

How to install

Installation is very easy, simply follow the wiki, depending on your distribution: Wiki: installation
E.g. for Ubuntu users, you can simply copy/paste these 3 lines into a terminal:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then if Cairo-Dock is already installed:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

else:

sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

What to expect in the future ?

With the recent decision from GTK to remove icons in menus for all GTK-based programs (even the ones not linked to Gnome at all), it's a good occasion for us to rewrite the way menus are drawn in Cairo-dock, and make them more consistent with other objects (dialogue bubbles, docks, etc).
Also, with Wayland and Mir's interfaces becoming more and more stable, we can start thinking of supporting these new technologies.
We could have some new applets and new theming features too.

Now, it's time to thank all 300.000 users of the 3.2 version; that's quite a big number, and we hope you'll enjoy this new version as well.

And as always, if you appreciate the project and want to encourage us, please feel free to contribute, report bugs, write some articles about Cairo-Dock or even donate

The Cairo-Dock team.

Cairo-Dock 3.2 release!

fabounet — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:07:41 +0000

Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc
After 6 months of hard work, a new version of Cairo-Dock is available.

The Default-panel theme on a Cairo-Dock session

Here is a quick tour of the main news:

General

Multi-screen support has been improved.
The new applet Screenshot allows you to take screenshot (it's purpose is to replace gnome-screenshot and its annoying effects).
The new plug-in Sound-Effects adds sound effects to some actions on the icons.
Distant folders (samba, FTP, etc) and encrypted disks are now handled in the Shortcuts applet.

Environment support

Cairo-Dock can run on any desktop, and is a good addition to the classic shells (Unity, Gnome-Shell, KDE, etc) or it can even replace them advantageously.
This version brings further support of the classic shells:

Gnome-Shell support: the dock can now use some abilities of Gnome-shell (windows Exposé, desktops Exposé), as it already does with Compis and Kwin.
GDM support for user switching has also been added, as it already has for ldm, kdm, etc
The dock now supports Systemd (Fedora, Arch, etc) for the session management within the Logout applet
All the Unity indicators are now supported through a generic Indicator applet (Printer-menu, Bluetooth-menu, etc)
The Note-taking applet can now work without Tomboy or Gnote.
And the dock now compiles and runs fine on FreeBSD.

Windows of the same application can be displayed together by the dock, here on Gnome3

Theming

Cairo-Dock has great theming features, and they have been enhanced:

More themes are available, more desklet decorations too

One of the new themes available, with 2 desklets (Clock and Note-taking).
When the dock is hidden, important icons stay visible and are transparent to clicks

All icons can have a background
The default theme is better integrated with KDE

default theme under KDE, here on Fedora 18

And of course, countless bug-fixes and improvements all over the code.
As you can see, this is a really big version, and if you like the project, please feel free to contribute. Donations are possible, and any help about the translations, theming or third-party applets is very welcome

How to install:

It's easy to install Cairo-Dock, simply follow the wiki, depending on your distribution: http://glx-dock.org/ww_page.php?p=Accueil&lang=en#0-Installation
Note that for Fedora users, we now have our own repository !

More details

For a complete changelog, see here.

For even more themes, have a look at the theme manager, your favourite search engine, DeviantArt, Gnome-Look, etc.

A screencast (3.1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2isiqVEcaio

Cairo-Dock 3.1 is now available!

matttbe — Sat, 20 Oct 2012 13:57:23 +0000

Cairo-Dock is a pretty, fast and customizable desktop interface. You can see it as a good alternative/addition to Unity, Gnome-Shell, Xfce-panel, KDE-panel, etc
Here is a short summary of the improvements and new features in this version 3.1.
(For more details about the Cairo-Dock sessions and more screenshots, please have a look at the previous article: here)

This version brings a tight integration with Unity: several indicators have been added (Sync-Menu, Print-Menu, and the latest Messaging-Menu), and the Launcher API is now supported. This allows applications to display useful information directly on the launchers (e.g.: the progression of a copy/download on the Nautilus/Firefox icon, the number of update on the Update-manager icon, all Gtk bookmarks on the 'Home' launcher, etc.). Note that Quick-list menu entries are also supported since the 2.4 version.

.

.

Following the same idea, progress-bars have been added in several applets (for instance, the Transmission applet can now display the current download progress). Progress bars are also available in the Dbus API (in Python or any other language), and are very customizable.

The configuration window has been improved (both simple and advanced modes). Especially, all configuration windows have been merged into a single one.

The Recent Events applets, which lets you quickly access the recently used files, now also presents the recently used applications.
A right-click on a launcher will also present you the recent files that you can open with this launcher.

The Twitter applet now supports Identi.ca (thanks to Eduardo).

For a complete changelog, see here.

These screenshots have been made with the 'Default-Panel' theme available in the Theme manager, but please remember that Cairo-Dock is fully customisable. You can easily change its look, simply have a look at the theme manager (3 new themes have been added), your favourite search engine, DeviantArt, Gnome-Look, etc.

If you like the project, please be nice and support it by reporting bugs or ideas, making applets, articles, videos, themes, or donations. Thank you !

A screencast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2isiqVEcaio

Fabounet (Fabrice Rey) and Matttbe (Matthieu Baerts) for the Cairo-Dock team.

Cairo-Dock 3 is now available!

matttbe — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:01:29 +0000

Cairo-Dock 3.0 brings a slick user-friendly desktop interface.

Cairo-Dock sits in the centre of your desktop, allowing you to monitor and control your favourite apps: music players, chat messengers, twitter, torrents downloaders, RSS feeds, calendar/tasks, weather, mail checkers, etc, and a powerful taskbar.

It presents you the information and controls in form of docks, desktop widgets and panels, and lets you customize them as much as you may wish, so that your desktop will be definitely unique and fits your needs.

Customization is very easy, and a lot of themes are already available.

Strong points:
Unlike some new "modern" shells, Cairo-Dock comes with the usual features you expect on a desktop

A powerful taskbar that lets you group and reorder windows in the dock, close and open a new instance in one click, switch between windows of the same application using the mouse scroll, etc.

Empathy windows are groups in a sub-dock.

A click on the main icon triggers the Scale (Compiz/Kwin), a mouse scroll switches between the 2 windows

An Applications Menu, containing all your programs ordered by categories, that you can add inside the dock with a simple drag and drop

A classic and yet efficient way to get all your installed apps in 1 click

A simple calendar which lets you manage events and warns you before the date.

Clicking on the Clock applet brings the calendar ; double-clicking on a day lets you enter events for this day

Switch between users, lock your screen when you go off your PC, hibernate or restart, all these basic actions are in 1 applet.

Clicking on the Logout applet brings a menu with all the actions ; it will also warn you if your system needs to be restarted after an update

A powerful switcher, to switch between desktops, but also between windows; it displays the windows present on your different desktops, lets you rename them to have a better organisation, and provides a quick switch between windows to improve your work efficiency.

Middle-clicking on the switcher brings a menu that lists all your windows, sorted by desktops.
But you can also trigger the Expose or the Scale (Compiz/Kwin) from the applet, and you can place these actions on right-click, middle-click or to a shortkey

A list of all your devices (hard-disks, USB storages), and bookmarked folders (the same as in Nautilus).

All the volumes are listed on top, with free space indication, and all the bookmarks are listed at the bottom.
You can eject a device by middle-clicking on its icon

Integration of the Ubuntu indicators: one of the best creation of Ubuntu recently is the indicators, and Cairo-Dock allows you to have them inside your docks.

The Messaging Menu regroups mails and chat messages, as well as your current status, and warns you when a new message arrives

The Sound Menu lets you control the sound and the music player; mouse-scrolling on the icon changes the sound volume

Instant access to recent events, including: recent documents, recently watched videos or listened musics, recently visited web pages, etc

The recent events dialogue; you can search for a given word, and choose the application you want to use to open the file.
You can also delete the history to protect your privacy

Various applets are available, from the clipboard history which records text you select/copy to applet that instantly shares online any file you drop on it.

The Weather applet displays the current conditions and the forecast in a sub-dock

The docks are entirely controllable from the keyboard

Press a shortkey to trigger the keyboard navigation, then press the number of the icon you want to select.
You can also navigate with the arrows, trigger right/middle clicks, etc.
Several applets also offer shortkeys for their main actions
(ex.: <Super>+L to lock the screen, <Alt>+F1 to pop up the Applications menu, etc)

And many other nice features like smart auto-hide, 3D animations, placement on any side of the screen, clipboard history, stack of files, weather forecast, system monitor, etc
Cairo-dock works with any Window Manager, runs on any hardware (even old netbooks), can use the graphic card to be very smooth or a fallback mode if the drivers don't support it, is very well integrated with the most common desktop environments, and is actively developed.

That means you can use Cairo-Dock as a shell with your current configuration, your current apps, your current theme; you don't need to change everything, or even learn new paradigm. Make the dock works as you want, not the opposite

Here is 4 differents actions in one screenshot

If you like it, feel free to contribute (development, news, third-party applets (coded in Python, Bash, Vala, Ruby, Mono, etc.), translations, themes and donations are very welcome ! ).
=> How to help us

A screencast:

without annotations:

with annotations:

PS: If you want to have the same desktop, simply install Cairo-Dock 3.0.0 (from our repository) on Ubuntu 12.04, log-out and log-in in a Cairo-Dock session:

(screenshot from iloveubuntu.net++
(if you already have installed Cairo-Dock, you can load the 'Default-Panel' theme -> Right click on the dock / Cairo-Dock / Configure / Themes)

GLX-2.3 released !

fabounet — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 00:52:37 +0000

After 6 months of hard work, GLX-Dock 2.3 is finally released!

This version is a huge step towards a credible alternative to other shells (Unity, Gnome3, KDE4, XFCE, etc).

Integration into the Desktop

We mainly focused on the integration of the dock with the main components of the Linux/BSD Desktop:

Integration of the Compiz and Kwin effects

when 2 or more windows of the same application are grouped inside the dock, clicking on the main icon will trigger the Exposé of these windows.
Also, the Switcher and the ShowDesktop applets can trigger the Exposé of all desktops, all windows, or the Widget Layer (where you can by the way place the Cairo-Dock's applets).

Integration of Zeitgeist

Zeitgeist is a new service that keeps traces of your recent activities.
GLX-Dock now has an applet dedicated to it; it lets you browse your last visited web pages, documents, videos, musics, etc.
It also adds to the launchers menu the recent files that can be opened with this launcher
(for instance, on right-clicking on the Gimp launcher, you will have a quick access to the recent images)

The Recent-Events dialog

Integration of the application indicators

Finally, GLX-Dock has a nice Notification area (also called systray), which can display all the indicators directly inside the dock.
MeMenu and MessagingMenu are also supported.

The new Notification Area

Integration of many applications with "smart launchers"

These are small applets that can talk to the program, and display several information.
For instance, the "Transmission" applet will display the download rate, and let you see the current downloads status.
Again the integration of other desktops was taken into account, since we also have an applet for KTorrent and Deluge.
Various advanced menus can also be used inside the dock: GnoMenu, MintMenu, Cardapio, and (again for KDE users) Lancelot.

The Transmission applet running

Integration of UbuntuOne

the "Drop and Share" applet lets you share any kind of files over the Internet, by simply droppong them onto the icon.
It now supports UbuntuOne, as well as DropBox and many other sites.

Integration of the restart signal

The Logout applet warns you when the computer needs to be restarted.

The new API

Sign of its maturity, GLX-Dock now has its own framework to manipulate icons, docks, desklets, OpenGL animations, and so on.
It also provides a simple and yet powerful API in a lot of languages, to write applets very easily (Python, Ruby, Vala, Mono, Bash, etc).
A lot of new applets have been developped by contributors thanks to this API:
- a "Quote of the Day" applet
- a Translator applet
- a lot of "smart launchers"
- and many more are to come (Facebook applet, LifeArea applet, etc)

Other new features and improvements

We can also note the following new features:
- better menus layout, easier to use.
- a new configuration window, where you can configure all the launchers/applets/docks/desklets at once.
- CPU and fan speed monitoring in the System-Monitor applet
- the image Slider loads much faster
- better dialogs placement
- new themes
- ...

The items configuration window

The MeeGo theme: clear and efficient!

Installation

GLX-Dock runs on any desktop environment, on virtually any machine (including small netbooks and 8 years old PC).
To install it, please follow the wiki (we have our own repository):
http://www.glx-dock.org/ww_page.php?p=By%20distributions&lang=en

If you want to get the latest features, our weekly repository is available for any Debian-based distribution:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/weekly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

GLX-Dock 2.3 enters beta

fabounet — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 02:11:38 +0000

3 months after its previous release, GLX-Dock 2.3 enters beta !

What's new?

This version was the occasion to refactor a fair amount of the core.
GLX-Dock is now built on top of libgldi (for GL Desktop Interface), which will also be used for another project: GLX-Desklet. Having a minimalistic core ensure better stability and performances, and less bugs.

New features

Of course a lot of new features come along with this new version:
- The System-Monitor applet can now monitor CPU's temperature and fans speed.
- The Logout applet now warns you when the computer needs to be restarted.
- The menus have a better layout and if you lock the dock, most of entries are hidden.
- The Slider is much faster to load a huge number of images.
- A unified icon settings window helps configuring all the launchers/applets/docks/desklets in a short time.
- ...

The items config window.

New interface

But the most important one is probably the arrival of a new interface for applets.
Interfaces allow you to write an applet in many languages. Currently, Python, Ruby, Vala, Mono and even Bash are supported. Java and Perl could be added easily as well. Now writing an applet for GLX-Dock is so easy that it will take you only few lines of code and few minutes!
Note that the applets will work for any program based on libgldi.

This has lead to a huge boost in the number of available applets. We now have:
- applets for all the menus: GnoMenu, MintMenu, Cardapio, and even Lancelot for KDE users
- applets for most of the bittorrent downloaders: Transmission, Deluge, and - once again KDE users have not been left behind - KTorrent
- a "Quote of the Day" applet
- a Translator applet

The Transmission applet running.

Third-party

The project has even set up its own applet repository; you can install new applets by simply dragging and dropping them onto the dock.
These applets have several advantages: you don't need root password to install them, you can only install the ones you need, you can easily modify them, and they will never crash the dock or even freeze it.
So, there applets can be seen as "super launchers", that can talk to the application they represent, and display the info to you inside the dock.

New themes

2 new themes are also available: Japan-2 and MeeGo. You can try them from the Theme Manager. But a few other themes has to be added on our servers!

The MeeGo theme: clear and efficient!

A video

Check out this video for a short demonstration of the latest beta!

Do you want to give it a try?

To try this beta release, you can use our Weekly ppa or by compiling the latest revision with the sources From BZR

EDIT: if you want to try our new plug-ins extras: launch this command after having installed bzr package

cd ~/.config/cairo-dock && rm -r third-party && bzr checkout --lightweight lp:cairo-dock-plug-ins-extras third-party

(only with the beta release)

GLX-Dock 2.2 reaches the beta state

fabounet — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 09:30:55 +0000

An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

An official beta release of the 2.2 version of GLX-Dock is available.

The main goal of this version is to approach the usability of the <your desktop environment here>-panel.
To reach it, we aimed at making an "Unity" theme, based on the recent interesting remarks of Canonical.

What's new?

4 points were targeted :

Be unobstrusive :

GLX-Dock now has 2 new visibility modes: "hide whenever the dock overlaps the active window" and "hide whenever the dock overlaps any window".
The dock will hide itself anytime it could get in your way, and will be visible otherwise.
You can choose between several smooth hiding animations: fade-out, semi-transparent, move-down, etc.
To make things better, icons that should draw your attention (like a message in the Pidgin applet or an alarm in the Clock applet) are visible (and animated) even when the dock is hidden.

Desklets (applets that are detached from the dock) can also be placed on your desktop without preventing you from clicking on what's behind.

Here is a short demo:

sources (webm)

Be useful

Some new key functionnalities make the dock a swiss-knife : possibility to manage tasks in the Clock's calendar, possibility to lock the screen in the Logout applet, possibility to use tiny URLs in the Drop-and-Share applet, the Dustbin applet handles all the drives, etc.
The Me-Menu and Messaging-Menu applets developed by Canonical for the gnome-panel can also be added to the dock in 1 click.

For those who want to write applets easily and in an language, the Dbus API has also gained some new functions. Write a DBus Applet

Be simple:

All the themes (including the default one) have been polished, they are pretty and functionnal after you select them.

The simple config panel now lets you set up most of the parameters you'd like to change in the first 5 minutes.
The advanced config panel is still present for those of you who want to tweak their theme, but you probably don't need it any more for a basic usage.

Unity

For this purpose, a new view has been added : the "panel" view. It turns the Dock into a pretty panel.
Also, since netbooks have a small screen footprint, it's a good idea to spread icons over several main docks. Therefore, it's now possible to create as many docks as you want, and to configure them independently (position, visibility, view, background).

Here is a short demo:

sources (webm)

To try it:
---------
If you're under Ubuntu >= 9.04 :

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/weekly
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

otherwise :

echo "deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/cairo-dock-team/weekly/ubuntu $(lsb_release -sc) main ## Cairo-Dock-PPA-Weekly" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys E80D6BF5
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cairo-dock cairo-dock-plug-ins

A weekly repository is also available for Debian (and other forks like Linux Mint) users (Weekly ppa). For any other GNU/Linux & BSD distributions, you can also compile it with sources code From BZR

It is already very stable, but as any beta, it can contain some bugs.
The work is now focusing on fixing them all.
We appreciate any kind of contribution: bug reports, feedbacks, videos, themes, translations, patches, applets, etc

PS: Follow us on identi.ca (http://identi.ca/cairodock) or Twitter (http://twitter.com/cairodock) ! Or speak with us on #cairo-dock or #cairo-dock-fr on irc.freenode.net

Cairo-Dock 2.1.0 : faster, easier, better

matttbe — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 00:12:43 +0000

While 2.0 was introducing OpenGL, version 2.1 is getting more robust.
Here is the result of 4 months of hard labour :

Some "annoying bugs" from the Taskbar, PowerManager, Clipper and the keyboard indicator have been squashed.
The dock at the same became more stable and faster especially when OpenGL is activated (the applet Clock or Cairo-Penguin are now virtually using no CPU resources).
A news that should please many is that OpenGL now works with the very latest OpenSource drivers for ATI and Intel video card !

The dock is evolving thanks to you all ! Lots of comments made after the launch of 2.0 where noted and acted on.
The configuration panel has been polished (the presentation as improved and the options are better grouped, etc)
The pictures ratio is now correct (windows thumbnail and Switcher, etc)
It is easier to create a new main dock or to move the icons from one dock to another.
A new mode "extended dock" has appeared (the dock will fill up the all side of the screen).

Themes have also been reviewed and now have an user friendly interface : you can sort the theme by name, rating or simplicity. You can even rate them yourself once you have downloaded them !
Thanks to all of the contributors !
A complete tutorial is available here.

Applets have also gained in the process :

Shortcuts and Notes now have a improved desklet mode, which will allow you to display on your Desktop the icons normally drawn by Nautilus as well you "post-it".
The digital clock has a better rendering.
The applets 'Rhythmbox' and 'XMMS' merged to form a new applet MusicPlayer, It now allows to control just about any player.
'Cpusage', 'Ram-meter' and 'Nvidia' also merge into the System-Monitor applet, which offers basic system information (CPU, RAM, Nvidia card temperature, etc)

On the very new side we are introducing Dnd2Share, an file sharing applet. It will allow you to send your files on a server of your choice by simply dragging and dropping them on the applet ! you will not be able to live without it.

You will also notice that open effect of the Slide view is looking a bit more like its Mac OSX equivalent.

On the project side itself, we migrated to LaunchPad !
This means that:

there is a 'weekly-build' Ubuntu users.
a manual 'daily-compiled' (Mav' script has been updated)
Easier tools for the translators (it's here)
The possibility for everyone to contribute to the project thanks to bazaar.
A complete documentation of Cairo-Dock's API available at this address : http://doc.glx-dock.org.

As usual your comments/remarks are most welcome.
Enjoy this new version of Cairo-Dock !

The Cairo-Dock team.

Translated by ppmt