There is an old joke about a programmer who got tired of having 10 tools to do a certain task and decided to end that by making a superwoman that brought together the best of the above. Now there are 11 tools.
I don't know if Linux needed a self-contained package format to add to the native formats of each distribution, but we have three so far, and a few more will probably appear.
Self-contained packages are applications that on their installation media include all the dependencies they need to function. That is, unless instructed to do so, they do not interact with the operating system. This is very useful to be able to update them without making modifications that affect the rest of the system.
From time to time I like to compile the programs that appear in the three different formats. In this case we are talking about the Snap format, which is the one used by Ubuntu-based distributions, although they can also be installed in the others.
Some shows on Snap for the weekend
Screencloud
More and more image editing tools are available in the cloud and use online storage services to access or store them. For those of us who take a lot of screenshots, ScreenCloud is the ideal application since it allows us to take screenshots using keyboard shortcuts and store them.
The program places an icon on the toolbar that allows us to access all the functions. We have three capture options
- Capture full screen.
- Capture selection.
- Capture window.
The keyboard shortcuts are:
Full screen: SHIFT + ALT + 1
Selection: SHIFT + ALT +2
Window: SHIFT + ALT +3
The storage options are:
- Google Drive
- dropbox
- imgur.
- OneDrive
- Storage to a custom server via FTP or SFTP.
- Call to a script in Bash.
- Clipboard
- Local storage.
Finally, the wizard allows us to determine if the program starts with the session or not.
The program installs with
sudo snap install screencloud
Translation
In my opinion it is the best translation application for desktop computers. It allows the conversion between more than 100 languages and, at least as far as I could prove, together with Deepl it achieves the best results in transferring texts from English to Spanish.
The text to be translated can be entered directly, copied from the clipboard or in image format. In the case of images, it is not necessary to have them previously saved, you can take a screenshot at the time you need the translation. A very useful feature is the option of phrase books, in which we can save the translation of entire sentences.
Translatium supports hardware acceleration, keyboard shortcuts, and automatic translation of clipboard content.
Installs with:
sudo snap install translatium
Rambox EC
For those of us who cannot support having multiple browser tabs or application windows open at the same time, Rambox is very useful. It is a dashboard that gives access from a single window to multiple applications Web. The letters CE indicate that it refers to the community version (Free) since there are two other paid versions.
Among the applications included are some of the most important web services for sending and receiving email, digital marketing, chat and social networks:
Some of the services included are:
- WhatsApp Messenger / Business: Requires authentication and maintain connection with the service via mobile phone.
- Outlook (personal and business version: Online version of Microsoft email client and calendar software.
- Simplenote: Web version of the application to take cross-platform notes.
- TweetDeck: The Twitter web application to manage multiple accounts at the same time.
- Telegram: The great competitor of WhatsApp with an emphasis on privacy and that you do not need to have your mobile connected.
- Mighty Text: Application to send text messages from your number and Android mobile.
- Mastodon: The decentralized social network based on open source.
Rambox CE allows you to protect the board with a general password and the interface can be translated into our language in the properties.
It is installed with the command
sudo snap install rambox
Ubuntu, Manjaro and KDE Neon bring support for Snap packages. If you want to know how to install it in your distribution, here you will find all the information.