Avant Window Navigator: a Bazar of new funcionalityes!

Well, before I start this review, you sure know AWN, do you?

Since AWN moved to Bazaar, it started having a bunch of new outstanding funcionalityes. A lot of bugs have been solved and a lot of new bugs appeared. I’m bug hunting a great number of bugs there in Launchpad, you should download this wonderful dock for Linux and try bughunting yourself as many bugs as you can! Sure the developers will fix them out if they’re pointed out by users.

AWN is incredibly promising and IMHO it is going to be become the official dock for Ubuntu very soon if it keeps evolving at this rate. Outstanding.

Let’s point out some of the new features I love:

1) The applets. Well, applets already appeared in SVN but they became usable only in this latest releases, plus they where really few before…

2) So the stack applet is really something great. See it yourself in the youtube video above! Basically it is something resembling the new features added by Apple to its OSX Leopard’s Dock. Have a look here. I always use it, it helps me saving a lot of space and it looks really cool! Very easy to set up too, can show the content of any folder on your computer and also open a file browser for you.

3) The new preferences dialog is outstanding. Very polished, very intuitive and nice looking: I can already think of it evolving into something even better.

4) In the preferences dialog there’s finally the possibility to set the 3D look in the bar automatically: also the offset of the icons can be setted there! Wondefull, great work.

5) One of the features I love most is this, the ability to save Themes. I already created an Art Of Cappuccino Theme for AWN and am going to upload it soon! Stay tuned 😀 !

6) Another great revolution is the possibility to organize the launchers. Incredible to say, until now there was no real possibility of easily setting the order of the launchers in the dock. Now they are very easily settable with drag and drop from the newly designed settings manager! Outstanding work 😀 !

What else can I say? In this stage the bar works, with some bugs but it is absolutely usable. Known bugs I found are:

1) Text bubbles of the icons tend to keep staying on the desktop even if you move away from the bar. Moving to the bar again makes the bubbles disappear.

2) Several annoying bugs with the autohide function: for example, it isn’t easily possible to drag an item over the trash applet in the bar to delete: the bar won’t de-hide. Click on the link to see the details in launchpad.

Conclusions:

This bar is the future, there’s nothing that evolved out there and it’s gaining importance and attention by a great number of users. Almost every Compiz Fusion / Beryl user out there has AWN installed today, so participating to the development is important too. This bar is in full development stage by now but I already wouldn’t know how to live without it 🙂

See my Compiz Fusion and latest eyecandy things Guide to know how to install Avant Window Navigator. The guide has been updated. I rate this bar really high, the buggy stage is understandable since it’s in development…. if I could just add a suggestion, maybe the bugs should be deeply fixed before new features are added! Let’s work on it as much as we can (Bug hunting, for example) 😀 !