Neomantra.org

So as many of you know there is this really cool contest going on right now called the Plasma Javascript Jam Session.   Hopefully lots of you are already putting together some amazing entries.  But maybe some of you haven’t started yet because you don’t know what you want to make?  Well if you’ve got programming skills and are just looking for a good idea maybe this post will help you out a bit.  Recently I pollled the KDE User group on LinkedIn to see if any other non-coding types like myself had any ideas for plasmoids they would love to have.  Below is some of the feedback I got from the group.  Hopefully it inspires some of you out there who are still trying to decide what to do.

• Facebook plasmoid (the commenter mentioned the existing one is buggy and doesn’t work well)
• An eBay watch list plasmoid
• A clock plasmoid that displays multiple time zones (I think the existing one does support multiple time zones but only shows alternate times on mouseover)
• BBC iplayer plasmoid
• A plasmoid that uses iGoogle gadgets/widgets. This will put whatever iGoogle provides is directly on the desktop.
• A subliminal plasmoid: something which briefly displays text on screen and  then disappears (helpful if, for instance, you want to stop smoking)
• A kAddressbook lookup plasmoid:  Something which would allow copying of either a vCard or specific parts, e.g. email address or street address
• A last.fm plasmoid with details from artist for the current played track
• A desktop file search plasmoid

Here’s a few more ideas of my own:

• Social media mashup – it would be neat to have a single plasmoid that tracked all my identi.ca, twitter, facebook, opendesktop, and google buzz feeds from one UI so I don’t need to have Choqok + facebook web page + gmail web page open all the time.  Plus a lot of people (myself included) syndicate posts to multiple services so it’d be even cooler if this thing could detect that and ignore duplicates when you’re following a person on more than one of these services.
• Netflix – queue management, search, etc.
• Beer related – maybe some kind of data entry plasmoid for sites like ratebeer.com that let you review beers…hell anything that has to do with beer would be cool
• Google Calendar – I rely a lot on google calendar to keep my life in order and have several different ones on there.  I’ve never had any luck getting the one that exists currently to work so I’d love to see one that works well and supports multiple calendars, etc.