Missing pieces

Remember all those good old shoot 'em ups?
They might still be fun, but old ones start to look old, even if they're still fun to play. So there's need for something to that you can show to your neighbours.

AstroMenace is able to prove that it's possible to make old fashioned shoot 'em up and use all the latest technology to make it look good. And it's not all good looks, gameplay is quite right too.

Game doesn't go straight in the action. There's shop like in Tyrian. There's number of different ships with differen't kind of armor and weapon slot combinations. Too bad finding right kind of ship can be bit tedious, so maybe even some kind of search would be nice.

It's also possible to improve various parts of the of the ship, for example generator, shields or targetting system. Without good generator, it's not possible to use some of the more powerful weapons with their fullest potential. Targetting system makes possible to target more than one enemy at once. Choosing right kind of shield at the beginning can be hard. Ship comes preinstalled with self repair system and it's possible to save from repair costs. But later on it's almost impossible to survive without proper shield, damage just comes much faster than it can be repaired.

In addition if arcade mode seems to be too easy, different kinds of engines come into play. I have played only arcade mode so far, so I don't know much about the differences.

Most important part is of course weaponry. Choosing right combination takes some planning as it's not possible to have all weapon slots filled with highest level weapons. Different ships have different combinations of weapon slots. Later on level 5 slot is must have, as it's so fun to clear whole screen with BabyDoll. But before that choice is between automatically targetted missiles and different kinds or beams and projectiles. Some of the beams can be quite effective, even despite of their short range, so laser and masers are worth trying out.

Actual gameplay has all that can be expected from game like this. Main difference is that it's possible to use mouse. Mouse wasn't popular in shoot 'em ups in the 80s, but works quite well. There's usually way out, no matter how small. And with mouse it's possible to even take advantage of that.

Enemies come in great numbers and at the beginning more durable ones are bit rare, until last few missions where smaller enemies can't really do much harm, but big ships come faster than it's possible to destroy them.

There's also plot, though it's all in mission titles. But who needs plot in games like these anyway?

AstroMenace is available for Windows, Linux and FreeBSD. As far as I know, Windows version is not free as far as I know, though I might be wrong. At least games source code is available under GPL 3. But even if it's free, it's always possible to donate some money to the project. There's not too many games that really show that Linux is not inferior system to play games on, if people are willing to make games for it.

When managing Windows, there's not too many options, but Unix/Linux has quite modular structure. In most cases window manager can ge changed from graphical login screen, in other cases by editing one row in config file.

But what's window manager? If you got operating system as premade package, you might no even realize that it's there (that's even point of Metacity, Gnomes window manager). First picture is plain Xorg without any window manager. It works as at least some programs have parameters to set window size and placement. But not very convenient, even for keyboard junkie. Though if you want to save some memory, this is option too.

Quite convenient for kiosk setup too, as whole screen is taken by the only running application and there's no minimize buttons, task bars and things like that. Exiting the application exits X too, so it's not secure setup on it's own. But using such setups would mean less funny blue screens and anti-virus notifications for public information displays.

Some features are provided by Xorg itself. Keyboard and mouse work, but with one terminal open, mouse is not that useful yet as there's no buttons to click on and windows can't be dragged around. Resolution can be also changed with keyboard shortcuts. In addition it's possible to launch programs from remote computers and display them on this screen. No need to install additional programs for that as X is designed to be networked. Though it's also security risk, so X doesn't usually listen for network connections by default, just connections from local computer. That can be circumvented securely with SSH, but that's another topic for some another time.

So what happens when window manager is launched? As you can see window suddenly has title bar and there's task bar and menu. I cheated a bit and added background image by hand.

Window manager in this screenshot is Fluxbox. Quite lightweight, though some themes are slightly heavier than others. Menus can have transparency and windows can be grouped together.

Theme is not the default one, Fluxbox includes just some more simple themes by default. I think the project is still alive, so some new features might be expected. Fluxbox supports also small applications that Window Maker calls dockapps. Configuration is done by editing configurations files by hand as almost everything else too. And of course, virtual desktops are supported.

Second window manager is Afterstep. This is the default theme and doesn't look bad for default theme. As can be seen from the picture, windows can be grouped too, but this feature is reserved for terminals.

Afterstep takes some time to get used to as all three mouse buttons seem to have different function with every button. Dockapps are also supported and some of them are launched by default. Again, configurations is done by editing configuration files by hand. I think there was some graphical configuration tool for older Afterstep, but I have never used it. By default there's few virtual desktops that are divided in four parts.

And then my favourite, Window Maker. No, theme in the screenshot is not the default theme. Default theme is not completely plain though, it has some gradients.

Nice thing about Window Maker is that there's really no need to edit configuration files by hand, there's graphical utilities for configuring most of the things. If the default configuration tool is not good enough, another alternative configuration tool can be installed.

Window Maker does things differently, or at least differently than Windows does things, so there's slight learning curve, but reading the manual is not mandatory to get things done.

Another nice thing is that things can be dragged around. Rearranging dock (that's where dockapps live, on the right side of the screen in this screenshot) can be done by dragging dockapps around. It's also possible to enable dragging of windows from one virtual desktop to another.

Development seems to be slow, so new features can't really be expected.

And now something slightly different. WMII is one of the tiling window managers. That means that each window gets it's own tile of the screen. Usually that means too that themes are plain and mouse is not necessary. WMII is easiest to learn so far of window managers of this type that I have found.

Usual problem with window managers like these is that some programs don't behave well when stuffed in small tiles. WMII supports floating windows too, so those misbehaving applications can be used normally too. Though I would like to see window manager that's not so strict with tiling princibles. For example giving requested window size for application is not that bad with some applications. Dockapps like to have 64x64 pixel space usually for reason. Though there should be dock for Ion, but I haven't been able to enable it.

Last one in this article is Enlightenment, more precisely E17, version that's not released yet. That still doesn't stop it from being popular and some distributions offer development snapshots and if yours doesn't, there always Elive (too bad there's no free download). E17 isn't strictly only a window manager, it's more like lightweight desktop manager. It has graphical configuration tools, file manager and its own toolkit.

Another thing that could be said about E17 is that it's artistic window manager, even bit too much in some places with the default theme. Theme in this screenshot is not the default one, but default one doesn't look bad either. All kinds of desktop effects are supported. For example animated backgrounds, rain and snow. 3D acceleration is not supported, so no 3D effects like in Beryl or Compiz.

If these window managers are not enough for you, there's more of them. Impartial, but still good list of them can be found from http://xwinman.org/

As I mainly use FreeBSD, two of these programs don't work with Windows at all. Though Google finds few reviews for you, if you want to find more readers that work in Windows. But for the rest of us, here's review of few free RSS readers. And if you're wondering what RSS is, I wrote post about it some time ago.

This is not going to be comprehensive list of all readers, I have left some readers out that didn't seem to have features I want, so I haven't even tried them out. I use keyboard heavily and go through number of feeds daily, so that affects reviews too.

Let's start with the integrated readers

Opera

Operas implementation is extension to the integrated M2 mail client, though there's separate menu for feeds now. That's about only feature that isn't used in reading mails too.

It's possible to sort feeds to different categories via mail filters, but that's lot of work. Though I must admit, it's quite flexible solution once its working. Keyboard navigation works nicely, though accessing mail filters through panel is not as easy as it could be, but that's the price to pay for multipurpose panel. So the actual downside is that there's no way to render feeds as a page, only way is to browse one item at a time.

Opera Mini has already that feature (though it's only way that doing it makes sense with mobile phone), so maybe there's hope for Operas feed reader in the future. Opera is still great for less frequently updated feeds.

Browser and feed reader go so well together, but once the flood of new feed items really starts, there has to be some way to skim through the items more quickly. So, as a feed reader it has room for improvement and that was why I started looking for other choices.

Firefox

I would guess that Firefox has most widely used feed reader among Linux users. Though its default implementation is bit odd. It shows feed items as bookmarks and calls then Live Bookmarks. I'm not so happy with that kind of implementation as I don't want to miss anything. In addition, it's not possible to mark items as read, though at least it's possible to open all items at once. I'm sure almost everything is possible with add-ons and I think I have seen feed reader add-ons.

That's not the best part though. Firefox lets you choose to subscribe with any program and has web services as Google Reader in the list too. In addition, it shows preview of the feed and that's handy as sometimes it's hard to guess what's included in the feed without subscribing to it.

Default reader might not be good enough for everybody, but at least Firefox makes it easy to use any other reader.

Akregator

Akregator is the official KDE feed reader. So no Windows version right now, but that might change. It embeds Konqueror, so some of its features work when rendering feeds as a page, namely shortcut keys for links (press ctrl to see them). Too bad shortcut keys for links run out quickly. Another thing that is missing is shortcut for selecting next folder with unread items

Categories work as they should. Drag and drop works and arranging feeds to categories doesn't take much time. Even subfolders are possible, so there's not really complaints about that. Only nitpicking could be that it's not possible to add tags to feeds, but right now I'm happy with working categories.

Most annoying feature is that by default Akregator switches mode to all messages, so browsing feeds takes some time as rendering page with many items takes some time. And there's no way to tell which items are unread, so only way is to swithch back to mode that shows unread items. Though there is option (look under advanced in Akregators preferences) that prevents Akregator from resetting the mode each time feed is changed, so it's much faster to browse feeds when it shows always just unread items.

Akregator has tabbed interface, so if you want to read the actual articles straight from Akregator (with the embedded Konqueror), it's possible in separate tab.

As for default feeds (that seem to be mandatory feature for separate RSS feed reader), Akregator has some KDE and Akregator related feeds.

Liferea

Liferea seems to be featurewise good reader. It has easy way to categorise feeds and can render the feeds as a page and has support for two different rendering engines (GTKHTML and Gecko if you're interested in technical details). Only thing I'm missing is way to open links with keyboard, other shortcuts seem to be available.

When rendering feeds as page, feed items are bit more stylized than for example in Akregator. Every item has feeds logo in item headline, so when browsing multiple feeds simultaneously, it's easy to see which feed the item is from.

Though there are some flaws. I didn't see any way to display only unread items. Maybe rendering page with 100 items take that long with faster computer, but with slower it clearly hurts. But at least read items are clearly marked in rendered page too.

I prefer Akregator bit more right now, but Liferea doesn't seem to be bad choice, though I got it to crash once. It didn't see be tolerant for my impatience and decided to quit when it received too many commands that it had no time to fulfill. Though it might not happen to you, I'm not even sure if I can make it happen again.

Liferea has some Linux and open source related feeds as default feeds, which is not bad choice to get you addicted.

RSSOwl

RSSOwl is feed reader written in Java. It works with Windows too. As for features, it seems to be serious about them. I'm not sure if I'm able to spot every single one. I managed to get it to render feeds as page and display it in external browser (if you want to read feeds from PDF file, that's possible too). I didn't get embedded browser to work as I don't have Mozilla installed and Firefox didn't work. Windows users can use Internet Explorer.

One of the features is autodetecting feeds from web page, it even has separate feed search. I'm not sure how it works, but I managed to find few feeds with it.

One interesting feature that I didn't try out is AmphetaRate integration. It's service that lets you rate feed items and then tries to give you better articles based on your taste.

There seems to be keyboard for most important functions, though few of them are not defined by default.

By default it has huge amount of feeds. Keeping up to date with every single one of them could take some time.

For managing so many feeds, it's nice to be able to update just one folder. It took some time to realise, that it's named "reload favorites". I guess I had made that category favorite earlier.

There seems to be something going on with these favorites. It seems like that it's possible to dump every possible feed in RSSOwl and then mark favorites and keep reading those. Default actions seem to support that conclusion, no feeds are updated automatically, but it's possible to make RSSOwl do that for some feeds in addition to all favorite feeds.

RSSOwl seems to be good enough reader, though problems with embedded browser don't make it attractive alternative right now and U'm too lazy to fix it right now. Though using Opera to render the page is interesting idea.

Some kind of conclusion

I can't say this is completely fair review, as I have mainly been using Akregator now and I know more about its quirks (and of course Operas). Your way of using RSS feed reader might be completely different. Browsers are good at integration, they're already available if you're using that particular browser, so it's easy to start using them. Though separate readers are more ambitious. All three separate readers seem to be trying to be the best reader around. Akregator seems to get the most important things right, but Liferea displays rendered feed page nicer. RSSOwl tries really to be stand alone reader which doesn't need help from browser for subscribing to feeds.

Feeds are useful in other programs too. For example Amarok can get podcasts from RSS feeds. And there should be some programs to download TV shows, for example PenguinTV.