The beauty of an open development platform is that anyone can take a stab at creating an application. KDE, which is built upon the Qt application and UI framework, is a shining example of this. A quick look at KDE-Apps.org reveals that new apps are added daily. I periodically browse through the latest KDE apps to see if anything stands out, and I found these five, some of which are in early development.
1. Minitube
A pure Qt application, Minitube is cross-platform and integrates well with KDE. Plainly put, it is a desktop YouTube client. Rather than opening a web browser and watching YouTube videos from the website, this little app allows you to watch up to 1080p streaming YouTube videos, just by entering a search term. The app is great for lower-powered devices, such as netbooks and tablets, that may lag when viewing Flash-based videos. Minitube is available for Linux and Mac OS X.
2. Skrooge
Pinching pinnies tends to be associated with negative, stingy people, but with today’s economy, most people are struggling financially. Skrooge is a KDE Extragear app that helps you manage your personal finances. It allows you to add multiple bank accounts, balance your checkbook, schedule bill payments, import bank statements, and run reports, complete with helpful graphs and charts.
3. Konvertible
With the multitude of devices many people have these days, you may need to convert audio files on a regular basis. Aside from dropping to the command line, there are not a lot of options for converting media files in Linux. Konvertible makes it easy to convert a wide variety of audio codecs: Mp3, Ogg Vorbis, and anything else supported by your version of ffmpeg.
4. PlaybaK
Former known as KDE Media Player, PlaybaK is a full-featured media player that aims to provide comprehensive media management and playback support, including music, videos, and more. It is still in early development but already supports many formats and has received very positive ratings and reviews on KDE-Apps.org. Both source code and some Linux distribution binaries are currently available for download.
5. Silence
I am not even sure if I fully get Silence, but the features and possibilities make it an app to watch. The developer describes it as an “information management tool” that allows you to store your data, search through it, and view it in an hierarchical way. It supports plain text, rich text, images, and programming code (with syntax highlighting), making it ideal for note-taking, coding, and just about anything else you can think up that requires organized information. It is light, fast, and free.
Finding KDE Apps
The best way to find these apps and others like them is to search KDE-Apps.org. The ones I have mentioned are those that I find useful, but you may find many others that better suit your needs. KDE-Apps.org includes ratings and comments from users, a helpful search tool, screenshots, and provides the ability to contact the developers directly. As developers update their apps, they usually post their updates to KDE-Apps.org, making it ideal for tracking apps in early development. Like all KDE applications, these work in other desktop environments, such as Gnome and LXDE, and most are available for multiple operating systems.
Tavis J. Hampton is a freelance writer from Indianapolis. He is an avid user of free and open source software and strongly believes that software and knowledge should be free and accessible to all people. He enjoys reading, writing, teaching, spending time with his family, and playing with gadgets.
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