Category: Technology

FC6 – WOW

I just have installed the Fedora Core 6 on my laptop and the only thing I can tell at the moment is: WOW !!!

Since the first this after installing a new distro for me is to see new fancy stuff – I was just amazed by all those nice desktop effects I found out. And the best thing is they do work very fast even on my generic video card ;)

Fedora Core 6

Waiting for FC6 to come out. I was waiting for it too long and it was announced to be delayed a couple of times (a heart attack almost got me at each of this announcements). I really like Fedora distro and I always install a new major release as soon as possible.

While waiting, I was looking around and it seems that they have changed a lot in this release. I think I will post my small review here when I get and install it :)

Friendship with Google

I have been checking a lot of Google services for the past days and it seems that I just felt in love with all of them. I have moved all my emails to Gmail, my calendar to Google Calendar, RSS feed to Google Reader and bookmarks to Google Bookmarks so let me just make a couple of points about each of the services:

Google Mail (Gmail)

I liked even from before, but never had chance to play more with this thing. Finally I did and I even redirected all my other email accounts to Gmail. It works very fine, but there are still some thinks missing (which I have submitted through Google Feedback form):

– Multiple signatures. This is very important feature when more that one account is used from inside of Gmail. I would like to have multiple signatures and an option to specify a signature per account

– \”Send on behalf\” identity is always there. When you send out a message from additional (non gmail) account through Gmail, it writes down something like \”Sent on Behalf of externall@address.com from gmail@gmail.com\” and I really don\’t like it. I would better have a normal \”externall@address.com\” in From since I have already verified that the external address belongs to me.

The rest works pretty fine through. Maybe filters should be a bit improved to make it possible to specify the order of application of filters as well as an option to stop executing filter check against message if it matches a particular filter – but this is minor stuff.

Google Calendar

Very, very nice tool. There are a lot of nice things there and everything works good. The only thing that I would also like to see is:

there is an option for downloading a calendar with iCal file which can be then set up on KOrganizer or similar desktop software, but then it works read-only. I would like to see something like posting the iCal back to Google Calendar to sync the desktop client with Google. But this is also minor since I usually use a web interface to interact with calendar and do receive reminders for events with SMS to my mobile.

Google Reader

This is the part which has significantly improved since the last time I have checked it. Now it gives me a nice interface where my RSS feeds are like in a folders and I can read them like in forum format (conversations?) or I can have a list of headings and go over one by one. Now I like Google Reader much more that BlogLines, but still – I found one missing point for me: the folders/labels in a left hand side are not sortable as well as feeds inside. I would better have an option to organize them there with particular order. But anyway – I like Google Reader and will stick with it for the time being.

Google Bookmarks

This is what I like and what I\’ve been missing. I don\’t really like del.ici.us or technorati by some unknown reasons. I just needed something simple. Google Bookmarks is exactly what I need. Simple add bookmarks and categorize them with tags :)

This is it for now, maybe I will find some more of interesting stuff at Google :)