The coolest thing out there right now is still Amarok an itunes-ish clone. Version 1.3 was buggy as well and would crash every second song. Version 1.4 is a massive improvement, has a professional sexy UI (with great fonts), actually interesting dynamic playlists and is just fun to navigate and have open. Its python based scriptable interface makes it even cooler, just add amarok shouter to stream your music to your friends. Its kinda of like itunes except not shithouse.
Somehow Tomboy has been getting a lot of press at the moment, a note taking tool. To be honest it finally does a simple thing reasonably well. Its not amazing but it does exactly what it says it does in a straightforward manner. The only thing I would like with this tool is if it handled really large numbers of notes in a better way. As it stands you really want to be deleting notes which really defeats the purpose of the tool.
Beagle is progressing nicely. Beagle is kind of like google desktop for linux. Its integration with Tomboy and Gaim is really cool, instantly searching conversations I just had or notes I just took might sound really stupid but what beagle allows me to do is to get an overview perspective of everything I know about a particular keyword. I didn’t even know I had that need but now it has saved me a lot of time and rather than helping me find lost documents it rather helps me factor and re-think what I know. I have two gripes with this tool – the memory requirements are absolutely through the roof. It pushes the benefits of nice-ing a process to the limit I have found it to take up 1gb of RAM on my system which is just stupid. I think that is connected to mono being immature at this point. The second is that it really integrates poorly with Thunderbird, seeing as you can’t just open a single email in any nice way. In many ways everything integrates badly with Thunderbird which is a shame because its a good tool otherwise.
Firefox 2.0 is out. Yay all my extensions broke for some small visual improvements. Luckily TabMixPlus (the tool that makes tabs really usable), Colorful Tabs, IEView (view the page in IE) and greasemonkey are over to it. Unfortunately SwitchProxy is not. Did you know that you can record youtube videos with an extension (I haven’t tried this yet)? Cool.
Finally Diko makes building DVD’s from AVI files so easy. I actually was somehow really surprised that it worked and just worked. Nice one.