The folks behind the popular KDE Linux desktop environment pushed out version 4.4 recently, complete with a new interface designed specifically for netbooks. Basically a desktop environment such as KDE or GNOME provides a user interface and a number of applications for Linux users.

The KDE 4.4 Plasma Netbook shell is optimized for mini-laptops with small screens. It has a full-screen application launcher and search utility. You can use widgets to display content from web sites in a newspaper-like layout. And there’s also an emphasis on integration with social networking sites.

KDE 4.4 is a desktop environment rather than a complete Linux distribution. That means you should be able to use it with a number of popular Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, or PCLinuxOS, although the installation methods will vary by Linux distribution.

via Engadget

I’ve had a bit more time to play with that Zune HD that I unboxed yesterday, and I think I’m going to have a love/mild annoyance relationship with this media player going forward. Here’s what I’ve noticed so far after using the Zune HD for about a day:

Pros:

• The user interface is incredibly slick and the animations are attractive without being particularly distracting.
• The desktop Zune Marketplace software is excellent for arranging media, downloading podcasts, and purchasing media for download. I might keep using it even if I don’t decide to stick with the Zune HD as a portable media player.
• The multitouch OLED display is bright, sharp, and vivid.
• I like the way Zune Marketplace features are integrated with the user interface so that, for example, you can find related artists to the musician you’re listening to, and download photos and biographic information on the fly over a WiFi connection.

Cons:

• There are only three hardware buttons: Power, Media, and Home. None of these buttons will let you do things like pause, fast forward, or skip tracks without looking at the screen, because all of the playback controls require the touchscreen.
• There’s no support for DiVX, or MPEG-2 or a number of other formats, for that matter. The Zune HD only supports WMV, H.264, and MP4/M4V files.
• While the user interface is sleek, it’s not particularly customizable. I’ve been using a Windows Mobile PDA as a music player (among other things) for years, and while WinMo gets a lot of flak, the fact that you can choose your own media players is kind of awesome.

And while it’s awesome that the Zune HD lets you transfer your 720p videos to the device without transcoding them, the fact that it has a 3.3 inch, 480 x 272 pixel display that can’t actually display HD resolutions is a bit ironic. Since the model I’m using has only 16GB of storage space, and since my video collection is in DiVX, I’m tempted to just transcode a bunch of my 720p video files to QVGA H.264 files to save space and cram more media onto the Zune HD, which kind of defeats the purpose of having an HD-capable portable media player.

That said, if your media collection is already in the correct format and if you don’t crave hardware buttons or the ability to tinker further with the user interface, the Zune HD still packs an awful lot of wow factor. And once your media is on the device, the Zune HD really does a nice job of playback. I’m still hopeful that the App section of the Zune Marketplace will open up to include third party apps though. Right now, there are only a handful of apps including a calculator, weather forecast application and a few games.

You can check out my video overview of the Zune HD user interface after the break. It’s a little blurry because it turns out it’s kind of hard to shoot this kind of video with my digital camera. But it should give you a general idea of what the user experience is like.

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KDE 4.2

Some of the folks behind the KDE Linux desktop environment are putting their heads together and trying to come up with a new interface designed especially for netbooks. The goal is to have something ready to go by the time KDE 4.4 is released (The latest version of KDE is KDE 4.2.2). According to developer Aaron Seigo, here are some of the goals:

• The interface will be specific to netbooks, and not just designed for computers with small screen displays (This could mean integration with web services, or something else altogether. It depends on what Seigo and his colleagues consider to be the purpose of netbooks).
• Support for the KDE Plasma interface
• There should be a full screen interface, presumably both for any sort of program launcher and for the applications themselves

In the comments of his own blog post, Seigo mentions that he sees netbooks as devices that are designed to run “specific types of tasks, usually one at a time.” Honestly, it sounds to me like Seigo is confusing netbooks with cellphones. As much as I’d like to see more people working on unique interfaces for netbooks, part of what makes them special is the fact that they are computers that can handle multi-tasking responsibilities better than any cellphone on the market.

If you want to listen to music while instant messaging your friends with Pidgin, checking your email with Thunderbird, and surfing the web with Firefox, you can do that on a netbook. There may not be enough screen real estate to comfortably accommodate all of those windows at once, but it should be easy to flip back and forth between running programs. That doesn’t have to mean using a Windows style taskbar or an OS X style dock. But I’m hoping that when Saigo talks about “one at a time” tasks, he’s not ruling out the possibility of easily running tasks in the background and flipping back and forth.

via Netbook News.de