Submitted by The Avant Window Navigator (Awn) project has released version 0.3.2 of the dock for the Free Desktop, and its applets. This represents a year’s worth of bug fixes, performance improvements, and new applets. The developers are actively working on getting updated packages to various distributions. The source code tarballs for both the dock and the applets are available on Launchpad.
With this release under their belt, the developers are now focusing their attention on their next major milestone, version 0.4.0. This is a complete rewrite of the dock internals, enabling such features as a user-positioned dock, improved autohide support, a more feature-packed task manager, and better handling of applet crashes.
After using this new release of the Avant Windows Navigator it becomes clear that this is one of the first non-Mac OS X docks that actually seems to be any good, and that doesn’t come with the usual flaws that other non-Apple docks carry. Usually, these docks are riddled with bugs, drawing errors, crashes, bad icon scaling, jittery animation, and my number one pet hate: a separate icon theme. This release of AWN picked up my GNOME icon set without any problems – even though the project’s FAQ says it shouldn’t do that. Well, you don’t hear me complain.
Best of all, however, AWN doesn’t feel like a slapped-on afterthought; it really feels as part of my GNOME desktop. The applets it comes with, such as the applications menu replacement and the weather applet, are well-designed, stable, and look very good. Especially the weather applet stands out in that regard; I love the “fan display” of the forecasts. Very well done.
It’s not without its problems, of course. The biggest problem was that I couldn’t get the system tray applet to work; it kept on complaining about another system tray being in use, even though I had killed the GNOME tray already. It also comes with this weird reflection that looks really crappy, but I can’t seem to turn it off.
In any case, if you want to give it a go, you can get it now.
Here is mine with the latest Avant…
http://i145.photobucket.com/albums/r240/ddonley/mydesktop.png“>…
well that confirms it. At least 1 person is using it
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I tried the earlier version just last week (I have lousy timing) and put it away. It’s a nice idea, but looks aren’t everything. There is something similar for Windows and it’s a pain to use, also. For me at least, it’s as good to go with the GNOME menus.
What, in your opinion, makes Awn a pain to use? This is purely out of curiosity. I’m always trying to make Awn more usable.
I find the whole concept of a dock annoying as hell. It has half the functionality of a second taskbar for launching programs and, in the case of OS X, bullshit functionality for task management.
Could you please expand upon this?
I agree, my wording was rather poor. What I meant is: The only functionality a dock has is to launch programs. A second taskbar can have application launchers, menus, system trays, and all sorts of useful stuff. I don’t use traditional desktop environments anymore (I’ve dropped them all for awesome 3, and tiling window managers are just that, awesome), but when I used both GNOME and KDE 3.5, I used to have a top taskbar with a menu, application launchers, a desktop pager, and the system tray, and a bottom taskbar to keep track of open windows and applications.
Had I swapped the top taskbar for a dock, I’d be missing out on my system tray, my desktop pager and my menus, which would promptly fill up the bottom taskbar and take vital space from the functionality that needs it the most. Granted, that could change a bit with plasma widgets in KDE 4, but still, a dock is not half as useful and versatile as a taskbar, and the latter can achieve much more functionality with 50% less screen real estate.
For what it’s worth, Awn’s sibling project, Awn Extras, provides system tray, desktop pager, and menu applets (among others). So, if you replace both taskbars with a dock, you wouldn’t necessarily lose screen real estate and keep all the functionality you have. Plus, you can change the height of the dock to whatever you want.
Looks like lots of wasted desktop for some eye candy.
I find it actually really quite useful. Easily the most usable dock like thing to come to Linux as far as I’m concerned. And with shrinking and auto-hiding it doesn’t actually have to take up any desktop space when you’re not actually using it.
However it does use a lot of resources. It is, for example, slightly too slow for me to use on x41 Thinkpad. Hopefully they’ll be able to optimize some things in future releases.
Hi Thom,
Thanks for reviewing Awn/Awn Extras for us! I’d like to address some of the issues that you brought up.
To clarify, the FAQ entry you linked to refers to a problem that some people have with task icons. Some applications don’t follow the icon theme standards and so their icons may look out of place if you have a substantially different icon theme set. There is also a similar application-specific problem in which apps don’t provide a high-resolution icon for their “app icon”, and so it looks blurry (I’m looking at you, OpenOffice.org).
Which system tray applet did you try to run? We have two now: Notification Area (not to be confused with the libnotify-related Notification Daemon applet) and PyNot.
To get rid of the offset, open “Dock Preferences”, click on the “Bar Appearance” tab, and set the icon offset to 0.
By the way, there is a slight typo: “Avant Windows Navigator” should drop the “s”.
Thanks again for the publicity!
-malept (Awn/Awn Extras Developer)
Ah, that indeed clarifies a lot. Yeah, I’ve seen some icons that look weird on the dock.
Both of them refused to work, but for some weird reason, when I tried it a few hours later, they suddebly did work. A bit odd, but hey, it works now, so I’m happy.
Yes, but I would like to get rid of the reflection, without lowering the icons. Maybe it’s a good idea to include a checkbox for this (assuming it’s not theme-specific)? Especially if the icons contain text (for instance, the weather applet) the reflected text is a little too sharp, making the actual text hard to read.
Then again, maybe I’m the only one complaining about this
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I have been told that this is indeed part of the configuration, except that it’s an advanced option that is only available via GConf. Modify the key /apps/avant-window-navigator/app/reflection_alpha_multiplier so that it’s 0.
I’ve been using AWN since it first came out (replacing the difficult to configure Kiba-dock) on my desktop. I like it much better than cairo-dock or the newer GnomeDo dock. I find AWN to be stable and quite useful in place of a second gnome-panel on the bottom of my screen. I don’t know why people think it wastes space; it takes up precious little room on a larger screen. AWN even works nicely in KDE 3.5.x on my laptop. AWN notification daemon is elegant and looks much nicer than Gnome’s native notifications with Compiz enabled. My only real complaint about AWN was the bug in AWN preferences where every launcher had the same icon and name. Great work!!! I can’t wait until the new version makes its way into Debian!! Keep it coming.
I haven’t used neither of these two docks but how does Awn compare to Do/Docky?
Thom, in your review you mention none of the other docks are as good as this one. Does this include Do/Docky?
Ok I just installed AWN and I don’t like it. It is because (unless I am mistaken) the most basic desktop integration seems to be missing.
Why can’t I drag icons from my desktop to the dock? You should be able to drag icons onto the dock and the dock automatically expands and adds the icons. — Ubuntu Jaunty —
Edited 2009-02-11 08:43 UTC