1 <title>Happy Birthday, adesklets!</title>
3 <item title="It's been a year already?!">
5 <img src="images/cake.png" nocolor=""/>
7 <p>Initial public release of adesklets (version 0.0.1) has been made on
8 December the third, 2004, and the project has been a success beyond
9 the author's expectations.</p>
11 <p>So far, more than fifty people have contributed one way or another
12 to the project by writing code, reviewing documentation, contributing
13 patches or desklets, and we do not even count all theses who
14 submitted screenshots, talk to their friends and peers about adesklets
15 or took the time to report problems, comments or
16 questions -- many thanks to all, and congratulations for your involvement.
17 <img src="http://adesklets.sourceforge.net/forum/images/smiles/eusa_clap.gif" />
20 <p>adesklets is now supported one way or another by all the major
21 community-driven Linux Distributions, and is getting more and
22 more re-packaged in commercial ones. BSDs and commercial Unix are not
23 left aside either.</p>
26 <item title="An adesklets world">
27 <p>On average, more than height hundreds people a day visit adesklets site,
28 with a third of them coming back on a regular basis. If they were
29 representative of the world as a whole, it would means most computer-literate
30 folks live in Europe these days, principally in Germany, France, Italy,
31 Great Britain, Spain and Poland. In this world, South-America, especially Brazil,
32 is a major player as well, far ahead the third-world countries like
33 United States, Japan or Canada where people do not have access to computers
34 as much as they should; but how helping them?
35 <img src="http://adesklets.sourceforge.net/forum/images/smiles/icon_wink.gif"/></p>
37 <p>In term of operating systems, Unix and BSD derivatives are the norm (people
38 usually settling for what is better for them), but Windows is a
40 emerging force doing big inroads with a bold 15% market share, which is unluckily
41 a platform adesklets does not support. We also need to be concerned with
42 the near-monopolistic position of the Firefox Browser, used by more than
43 80% of users. Hopefully, Safari, Konqueror, Opera and others will be able
44 to balance things out in the future -- it is too soon to tell
45 how widely adopted will Internet Explorer be: with a 4% market share and
46 basically a single platform supported, its future is hard to predict.</p>
49 <item title="The road ahead">
50 adesklets is maturing and getting more recognition and support -- to celebrate, we
51 just released adesklets 0.5.0: check it out. The ever growing community
52 submit more desklets by the month, making it a more attractive program with
53 each new release, <em>with not a single API breakdown since the
54 beginning</em>, but only backward-compatible, incremental changes:
55 a single desklets was released initially, we now have more then thirty
56 of them. Who knows what will happen in the next year?