Last evening, I stumpled upon two interesting projects:
The first was Lotus Symphony: A free Office suite from IBM (yes, IBM!) that is a
direct challenge to MS Office. It is based on an older version of OpenOffice, but comes with a complete different look and feel and many improvements from IBM.
It is available for Linux and even Windows.
Although it is not as feature rich as the latest OpenOffice 2.4, let alone the coming 3.0, it might be very apealing to companies and government agencies as IBM is behind it and offering (paid) support and services. Symphony also integrates nicely with Lotus Notes.
The other project is Gnome DO: A kind of a taskbar and launcher for the desktop, comparable to AWN but obviously more versatile, and mainly used with keyboard-shortcuts. It is quite different and somehow unique in its feeling as you command it with the keyboard but without commands.
It might be very helpful especially in desktop environments with limited space like in the new “Netbook” class (EEE PC et al.). It looks VERY promising - such little things sometimes make the
difference - just remember the OS X dockbar which might OSX so famous.
In Hardy, you can install Gnome-DO 0.4 from the repositories.
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