Ubuntu / Linux news and application reviews.

ffdiaporama

ffDiaporama is a multi-platform application for creating videos from photos or movie clips. It supports various transition effects, titles/annotations, music and more.

ffDiaporama 1.2 introduces tags and chapters as well as lossless rendering. There are also more supported formats (flac, wma, etc.), performance improvements and bug fixes. Check out THIS page for a complete changelog.

Download ffDiaporama (There are no Ubuntu 12.04 packages yet)




GNOME Pie, a slick circular application launcher for Linux, has reached version 0.5. The new version introduces slice labels (a caption for each slice), making the slices more discoverable. The labels can be enabled/disabled from the GNOME Pie preferences.

Other changes:
  • a new theme
  • a wobble-effect was added to all existing themes
  • sub-pies are now opened at their parent’s location
  • slices which open another pie have a little arrow in front of their name, indicating that’s just a link but no final saction.
For more info, check out the official GNOME Pie 0.5 release announcement.

To install GNOME Pie in Ubuntu, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:simonschneegans/testing
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gnome-pie

For other Linux distributions, see the GNOME Pie page @ Github.




SMPlayer 0.7.1 has been released with improved YouTube support: the previous version has added support for playing YouTube videos and the latest SMPlayer 0.7.1 comes with a new tool that lets you search for YouTube videos too. This is done through an external application called SMTube, which should now be installed automatically with SMPlayer.

Other changes in the latest SMPlayer 0.7.1 include:
  • Now it's possible to change the opensubtitles server
  • By default the screenshots are saved in the user's pictures folder instead of the SMPlayer's config folder
  • bug fixes

To install the latest SMPlayer 0.7.1 in Ubuntu, use the following commands:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:rvm/smplayer
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install smplayer

For other Linux distributions and Windows, see the SMPlayer download page.


There were also some recent updates in the WebUpd8 PPAs, like Minitube 0.7.1 or gThumb 2.14.2 - check out ppa.webupd8.org for WebUpd8 PPAs updates.