Do 0.8: Rock out with your dock out

Today is a big day for all Do users and developers, cause 0.8 a.k.a “Rock Out With Your Dock Out (ROWYDO)” is finally released!

As some of you have already known from the alpha/beta testing, the biggest highlight of this release is this awesome new UI — “Docky”. Docky is another interface for Do, yet it introduces an entirely new way to use Do. It preserves all Do’s original functionalities and keyboard-based interaction philosophy while it provides a smooth dock with parabolic effect which introduces mouse-based interaction to Do and makes it very enjoyable to play with your most frequently used applications, directories etc. You can find more information about Docky here at this wiki page.

The new Do also has a lot of improvements over the previous version. Many bugs have been fixed and a new architecture has been applied, which make Do more stable, consume less memory and have the potential to be cross-platform in the future.

There are certainly also improvements to plugins and many more new plugins become available. Twitter plugin has been renamed to “Microblogging”, with the new ability to post to Identi.ca; Remember the Milk and Ping.FM plugins are also included as communicty plugins in this release :). You probably would be surprised while looking through the list of all these useful plugins — almost 70 of them :).

If you want to find more more about this release, please check out David, Jason, Alex, Cimi, Kalle or Michael's blogs. To start using the new Do, add Do’s PPA to your software package repositories, and update/install “gnome-do” and “gnome-do-plugins” . If you don't use Ubuntu, check out the download page for more specific information for your distribution. You can also compile it yourself from the source code according to the installation guide. If you encounter any problem while using Do, please report it via the bug track at Launchpad (while if it’s a plugin bug, you should file it here instead), or discuss it with other Do user and Do developers at the IRC channel (irc.freenode.net, #gnome-do).

For all these awesomeness, I want to thank everyone who has contributed to and supported this project, especially our core developers! David, Jason, Alex, you guys really make Do one of the best apps in my system and an essential program to my every day use! I’m also very happy to contribute some code to Do, it just feels so right to do something useful to an app that brings so much convenience to my life.