1.21 Gigawatts!

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I received this picture today showing what happens when an application crashes in KDE4. Clearly it uses Beryl to make the pretty, but I have to be honest - if I was working on something and the application happened to crash, literally showing me what happened to x hours of work, I’d probably hang myself.

edit 05-06-2007: As a reader pointed out, KDE4 uses KWin Composite, and not Beryl.
edit 06-06-2007: Wesley from ubuntu-nl points out that this is merely a mockup, and not yet available in KWin. I guess KDE4 applications will crash beautifully, someday.

Google Gears is a browser extension for Firefox and Internet Explorer that uses JavaScript to store application resources and databases locally on your computer to allow you to view those websites when you (or they) are offline.

Gears consists out of:

* A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
* A database, to store and access data from within the browser
* A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background

The only thing is that sites need to be set up specifically to be compatible with Google Gears. The main market for this extension is most likely large sites that offer access to huge datasets and their clients who directly interface with these sites on a large scale, or it can be used to just download part of a website that you would need access to while travelling abroad.

A Gears tutorial is available here and some sample applications can be found here.

Google Gears is compatible with Windows XP (and higher), Linux and MacOS X, running Firefox 1.5 or higher.

edit: 02-06-0-2007 Google Reader now makes use of Google Gears. Very handy indeed.

Jokosher - A free and open-source multi-track studio! If you don’t know what that means, then bluh bluh bluh.

Jokosher makes it very easy to record sound/music, podcasts, mixing mutliple sound sources, splitting tracks or tracks to create audio worthy of being played on radio. You can import multiple formats (Ogg Vorbis, WAV, MP3, FLAC and more) and also allows you to export it to another format, should you wish to do so.

Unfortunately, this is only available for Linux distributions. Seeing as it’s still quite a new project, I wouldn’t rule out future Windows releases just yet. If you are looking for a Windows program that can do the same, take a look at Audacity