Software Spot

Desktop Sidebar is a cool desktop accessory that provides a collection of dockable information panels supporting a wide variety of data feeds including weather, news, email, stock quotes, etc. Desktop Sidebar comes with a number of useful panels, plus additional extensions available for download. My favorite panel extensions are the RSS new reader and the Virtual Desktop panel. The 'Newsroom' RSS reader panel was my initial reason for trying Desktop Sidebar in the first place and for me this is the way RSS should be, a frequently updating panel of headlines on the side of the screen (or wherever you want to place it). The Virtual Desktop Panel is an added bonus, I've tried a number of alternative free virtual desktop tools and this is the one I've stuck with using for the longest time.

Gaim is an excellent open source IM client that supports the main messaging platforms (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM, ICQ etc). Gaim does not support all of the fancy new features available in the main IM clients, but when it comes to plain and simple messaging Gaim is a winner for me. I largly use Gaim as my messaging client at work where I don't care for audio and video features and animated emoticons. There are also a number of Gaim plugin extenstions available. My personal favorite is the Guifications plugin in conjuction with the MSN Guifications theme which provides MSN messenger style popup notifications in the corner of the screen.

My favorite image editing application is The GIMP : "The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed piece of software for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring. It works on many operating systems, in many languages." One limitation of GIMP is the lack of shape drawing tools, so I'm just taking a look at another promising drawing application called Inkscape : "Inkscape is an open source drawing tool with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, and CorelDraw that uses the W3C standard scalable vector graphics format (SVG). Some supported SVG features include basic shapes, paths, text, markers, clones, alpha blending, transforms, gradients, and grouping. In addition, Inkscape supports Creative Commons meta-data, node-editing, layers, complex path operations, text-on-path, and SVG XML editing. It also imports several formats like EPS, Postscript, JPEG, PNG, BMP, and TIFF and exports PNG as well as mul...