More News Tidbits

Gnash
If you've ever used Macromedia's Flash plugin on Linux, you'll know it leaves something to be desired. It's a version behind the plugin for Windows, it's slow, and has caused more than a couple of browser crashes for me. Fortunately, there's been fairly heavy development into an open source replacement for the Flash plugin. Gnash is this open source replacement. Recently, they released some new test packages, and there's been a decent response. Gnash can't yet handle interaction, but it can play Flash 7 stuff fairly well. If the pace of the development keeps up, hopefully we'll see a feature-complete replacement for the Flash plugin sometime next year.

Wine Doors
Ripped from the Wine Doors site:

Wine doors is an application designed to assist users in obtaining, installing, uninstalling and working around the caveats associated with wine applications. Although wine doors is intended to be a replacement for winetools it is not limited to release cycles for the applications available to install, instead a web service will be provided, this web service will serve XML Pack Lists and Application Packs as well as various other resources.

As soon as I stumbled across this, I got pretty excited. Winetools is a really really really disorganized application that makes it somewhat easier to install Windows apps through WINE. (It's a crappy Tcl/Tk app with a terrible UI. There's also been lots of controversy over whether it does good or evil in the WINE community, as it installs some DLLs and sets up some settings that can cause problems for WINE users and make it harder to track down WINE bugs.) Fortunately, it appears that Wine Doors is likely to be the successor to Winetools, as it implements a bunch of really good ideas, as well as good UI that follow's GNOME's Human Interface Guidelines (HIG). If you want to get a better idea of the features of Wine Doors, check out the screenshots or the main page.

Jokosher
If someone walked up to me on the street and asked me, "What's the best thing Linux has going for it in the next 3 years?", I would respond with two words: Quality applications. Jokosher is a great example of the types of quality applications that have been springing up lately. Jokosher is a multitrack audio editor/recorder that's pretty simple to use. These screenshots do a fairly good job at explaining what it can do. Again, this is definitely another application to keep an eye on in the future.