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Ten time-saving apps for KDE 4 productivity

Jack Wallen Tech Republic

Published: 02 Jul 2009 12:58 BST

...having a widget on your desktop to allow you to pop off microblogs in a nanosecond. For that, you will need the Twitter Microblog widget. It is insanely easy to use and simple to connect to.

Notes
This little widget hardly needs any explanation. Once it is on your desktop, you can add simple notes, configure them with different colours, change the fonts and even enable a spellchecker. A nice little feature is that if you copy your note and paste it into OpenOffice, it will paste in not just as text, but as a note as well. The copy/pasting goes both ways for this application.

Color picker
If you do any type of design work, you know how important it is to be able to get certain values for colours instantly. With this handy little widget, you can pick any spot on your desktop — be it the wallpaper, panel, widget or a colour within any running application — and instantly see the hex or RGB value of the colour. This widget also keeps a history of the colours you have chosen, so you can go back and see what you have used before.

Plasmoid spellcheck
If you use spellcheck religiously, you do not always want to fire up an app with a spellchecker to see whether a word is correct. For that, you need the KDE 4 widget that serves this single purpose. With this widget on your desktop, you can check manually entered text or the contents of the clipboard. Either way, it is far easier than launching OpenOffice.

Logview
This is a widgets that allows you to set up a log on your desktop to keep track of your systems. Yes, you can open a terminal window and use the tail command to follow that particular log entry, but why not have a widget available to do the job within the confines of your desktop?

This way, the log will not get in the way of your everyday work and will be readily available for you to see just what is happening on your machines/servers.

Server status
This one is exactly what it sounds like. You can use it to configure servers and have them respond to a ping check.

As long as they respond to the ping check, they get a green light. The first time they do not respond, they get a red light, which means you better check out what's going on. This is a simple way of keeping tabs on the availability of your servers.

Other choices
These are 10 handy widgets to have on your desktop — although probably not all at once. Take note that they may or may not be found by default on your particular installation of KDE 4. If you do not find them, most likely you can at kde-look.org.

Credit: 10 KDE 4 desktop widgets to make you more productive from TechRepublic.com