GNOME has launched an alpha of the GNOME Shell Extensions website. Like Firefox, GNOME Shell allows extensions to modify and extend the user interface. The site allows you to browse and install extensions written by third parties, but reviewed by GNOME before being made available. There are already many extensions to bring back elements of GNOME 2.

To try GNOME Shell Extensions, you’ll need to be running GNOME 3.2. Ubuntu 11.10 only has GNOME 3.0, but the GNOME3 Team PPA provides packages to update it. I added this PPA on my netbook to update my existing GNOME Shell installation in Ubuntu 11.10.

Extensions are installed using a plugin, included with GNOME, that currently only works with Firefox. When it’s working, an extension’s page has a large switch to enable and disable the extension. Flip the switch, select Install in the confirmation dialog, and the extension almost immediately activates. Disabling an extension is just as easy. Here’s the Applications Menu extension in action:

I’d like to see an extension that maximizes screen space on my netbook by hiding the title bar of maximized windows like Unity does.

Could GNOME Shell extensions become a killer feature for GNOME 3?

Since my last post about finding a graphical Git client for Ubuntu, I’ve been using the excellent gitg. But here’s four more that I’ve come across since then, most recommended by comments on the previous post:

The screenshot tool Shutter has been updated to version 0.88, adding upload support for many more services, including Dropbox. Shutter offers advanced screen capture modes, a built in image editor, image editing plugins, and the new upload plugins.

The new upload plugins seem to be very well implemented. To upload to Dropbox for the first time, all I needed to be was click a button in my browser to authorize Shutter’s access to my Dropbox account.

I’ve had Shutter installed for a while, but I haven’t been using it much. However, after taking another look I seem to have solved all my problems with it:

Ubuntu 11.10 and 11.04 both have an older version of Shutter in their repositories. To get version 0.88 with the new upload plugins, you’ll need to follow the directions to add the official Shutter PPA.

Command line Git can pale in comparison to fancy web interfaces like GitHub and Bitbucket. Using these sites lead me to look at some of the graphical Git clients available in Ubuntu. I’m far from a Git expert, and I haven’t spend much time playing with these yet, but here’s what I found:

gitg is the most promising tool for my purposes. It combines both gitk and git gui-style interfaces in one program. I wish it it had an easy way to push to a remote repository – and there’s only a fetch button that’s tucked away in the File->Repository Properties dialog. [Update It's possible to push after all: right clicking on a branch label in the commit log will show more actions. The branch labels can also be drag-and-dropped on each other.]

My Eee PC 901 is more than powerful enough to play back 480p video, but not when it’s playing though Adobe Flash Player. 408p YouTube videos drop frames and don’t play back at full framerate. YouTube has an experimental HTML5 video player that should offer better better performance than Flash. I enabled it, but it seems that very few videos support it because advertising will cause a fallback to Flash.

VLC media player supports network streaming from a YouTube. Select Media->Open Network Stream, paste a YouTube URL, and click Play. This seems to work for any YouTube video, and plays back noticeably smoother than Flash on my netbook.

VLC isn’t a perfect solution. First, there’s the inconvenience of copying and pasting a URL for each video. Second, there doesn’t seem to be a way to change the resolution (but it defaults to 480p, which happens to be what I want). Third, VLC doesn’t seem to handle buffering as well as Flash does. While YouTube can play continuously, VLC sometimes has to stop and buffer more video. Selecting Show more options and increasing the cache size to something like 20000 ms seems to help a bit.

I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.10′s VLC for this. While Ubuntu 11.04′s VLC seems to support YouTube, I’ve only been getting VLC can’t recognize the input’s format errors with this version.