After a few months of hard work (mostly by Isaiah, as of lately), Caffeine for Linux has now reached adulthood with its 1.0 release! With this release, we finally feel like Caffeine is stable enough to be used on a day to day basis, and should fix most situations where the screensaver is being mischievous. It is our hope that this release will somehow make it into the official Ubuntu repositories, but of course maintainers of other distributions are more than welcome to include Caffeine in their repositories as well.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, Caffeine is a tiny little applet that sits in your system tray and uses magical caffeine to keep your computer from going asleep or activating the screensaver. This could be helpful when you’re giving presentations, playing full-screen games or when you’re watching flash videos.

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This is old news! Caffeine 1.0 has been released. Go check it out!

I know you have all been waiting impatiently for this ever since we released Caffeine 0.2, but now it is finally here - Caffeine 0.3!

For those of you with short memory, Caffeine is a coffee cup that sits in your system tray, waiting for you to click it. Once you do, it fills up with coffee and keeps your computer from going to sleep or activating the screensaver. This could be really useful for when you’re playing fullscreen games that don’t inhibit the screensaver, or when you’re watching a long flash video.

This has been in the making ever since we released 0.2. The biggest change for me is that we now have another - extremely productive and skilled - developer working with us. His name is Isaiah Heyer, and he has really been the driving force behind this release. Many, if not most, of the new features are written by him.

What’s new in Caffeine 0.3?

Our main goal with this release was to completely rewrite the code in a neater fashion - to make future development easier. Because of Isaiah’s work, this was completed rather quickly, and thus we decided to include some more features that we were originally planning to release in version 0.4.

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About ten days ago, I released a couple of “Made on Ubuntu” badges to put on websites made in Ubuntu. Now I have decided to make some general “Made on Linux” buttons, and I’ve decided to rename the project “Made on Linux” - as that includes Ubuntu as well.

So far, these are the changes I have made:

• Added four more badges featuring Tux.
• Added some nice JavaScript effects to show and hide the sample code.
• Changed the text to reflect that this is now not only for Ubuntu.
• Changed the URL to blastfromthepast.se/linuxbadges
• Added a redirect so that people who visit the old URL get sent to the new one.

Things still to do:

• Add more badges for various distributions.
• Make it easier for people to just copy’n'paste a little code into their website and have the badges be displayed.

Be sure to visit the site now, and please email me if you’re planning on using any of the badges!

“Made on Linux”

A couple of days ago, I announced that I would be giving away the entire Penumbra trilogy for Linux as a prize for winning my puzzle concept contest. After having been in contact with the author of the games, they have graciously decided to let me trade in my code for the Linux versions if the winner of the competition would rather have the games for Mac. Sadly I can’t give away the Windows versions.

The competition is still going, so if you enter now, you have a pretty good chance of winning this great series of games. For more information on how to enter, go check out my announcement post.

Android is, as many of you no-doubt already know, an operating system designed to be run on mobile phones. Originally it was developed by Google, but now development is being handled by the Open Handset Alliance - a consortium of 48 software, hardware and telecom companies. Currently I know of  that at least some of the HTC phones are using Android as their operating system.

Even though Android has been out for a few years now, you have only been able to run it in an emulator of sorts, unless you own one of those smartphones. However, now for the first time, you can run it directly on your computer!

I have tried it out on my laptop, and now I’m going to give you a quick tour of Live Android and see if it’s worth using on your netbook.

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