Latte-dock
Version: 0.7.3 Web: http://bit.ly/latte-dock
It’s been quite a while since we last reviewed LatteDock – in LXF223, as it turns out. Back then it was just a cool-looking piece of eye-candy that was fun to play with, but very few people would have dared to put lattedock in their autostart list and use the program on a daily basis. Since then the application has been seriously revamped and now is much more stable and usable.
We discovered that the new version of LatteDock0.7.3 is quick, rock-solid and packed with all essential features for managing tasks and apps. If you like the design approach of a Mac-inspired bottom panel with smooth magnification, you’ve probably know about Plank, the default dock in ElementaryOS. Although LatteDock has always offered more settings and capabilities than Plank, it was more “laggy” and tended to crash from time to time – unhelpful!
We’ve been using the new Latte Dock for a week or two, and even launched it alongside Plank to compare the speed and stability of the program. Both docks worked super smoothly and speedily, although you can’t do lots of advanced things with Plank that you can do with LatteDock.
As before, you can add any plasmoids to your dock, in the same way you do with ordinary Plasma panels. You can also switch between different pre-configured layouts, group tasks, change lots of visual effects, including visibility, widgets size, glow style and more. It’s easy to create your own perfect LatteDock setup with stackfolders, sensor outputs, clocks and any other objects that exist for Plasma. Automatic task sorting and grouping now works perfectly, and the dock itself doesn’t slow down your desktop at all.
Although Latte Dock is a utility from the KDE world, it only depends on the KDE Framework libraries and doesn’t pull any of the Plasma parts with it, so you can run the dock as a standalone app on your custom-built minimalistic desktop and have fun!
“Automatic tasks sorting and grouping now works perfectly”