 One of the things I love about Linux is that there are just a ton of applications out there, pretty much any type of application you can imagine it exists. And even if you can imagine it, it probably still exists. And I love searching for brand new applications that I've never heard of before because it just allows me to learn something new or find new exciting shiny things. And because I like doing that so much, it led me to the creation of a new series of videos that I call Top Apps of the Month. Now that we're in October, it's time for another one of these videos. So I have five really cool applications for you this month. Let's go ahead and jump in. So the first app on this list for this month is called Dialect. And basically what Dialect is, is an application that allows you to translate words and phrases from one language to another. And it's really cool. Now I will say that this does require the internet. So this connects to the internet and it gets all of its data from the internet. So just keep that in mind that anything you type in is being sent somewhere. I don't have a big problem with that because the fact that I didn't have to download all these languages to my computer in order for this to work is probably a good thing. But it works really, really well. So let's go ahead and give this a try. So I'm here in English and Spanish. Now if I just type in hello and then hit translate here, we get the answer of Hola, right? And really simple. And obviously you can get as complex as you want. So let's just say I wanted to say, where is the best pizza restaurant? And then translate this, it's going to give us the answer. So the best thing about Dialect is that there are a ton of languages to select. You can select Spanish, German, French, all those. These seem to be the ones that are like the main ones that it's telling you that it supports. But there are a ton of other languages here as well. And also, and now I won't be able to actually have you listen to this because I don't have the audio connected to the audacity recording. But down here at the bottom, there's this little speaker. And if you press that, it'll actually say the phrase in whatever language you've selected. So it just said, donde esta la mejor pizzeria. My Spanish accent is just amazing. And you should all bow down to my Spanish accent. It's horrible. I can't roll R's. I can't say the Z's, the J's, and the, you know, I can't speak Spanish, where the damn. But that's beside the point. If you're going to be learning a different language or you just need to know a phrase, the fact that it will tell you how it's supposed to be pronounced is kind of cool. Now I could probably sit here and actually learn how to pronounce this thing, but I ain't got that kind of time because I'm too much of an idiot to learn how to speak another language. Although I did take six semesters of Spanish in college, you would think that I would actually, you know, remember those things, but I don't remember any of it. Apparently I slept through those classes. I remember the verb dormir, I think that's to sleep, but I could be wrong. Anyways, actually, I'm going to find out. I'm very curious now to sleep. Let's see here. Haha, I was right. I do remember something from, from college, but the only thing I did through college was dormier. Anyways, that's dialect. It's really cool. And you can download that from flat pack. It's also in the AUR, but I will say that the AUR, for whatever reason, doesn't download it, download all the dependencies. So you'll get an error, or at least I did. So I would recommend the flat pack. Alright, so that is dialect. The second app on the list for this month is called yoga image optimizer. And basically, what this does is it takes an image and transforms it or outputs it to a different format. And that's basically all this does. Now it does a couple, it does do a couple other things, I suppose. It will allow you to set maximum size. It will allow you to change the output file. And in certain cases, it will allow you to change the image quality. I believe that's only for JPEG, but I might be wrong on there. So basically, this is a GUI front end for something like image magic. It's not actually associated with image magic, but it does at least some of the work that image magic would do, the convert option of image magic at least. And it's cool. If all you need to do is go through and do a batch of images and change them from, say, JPEGs to pings or whatever, or say you had a whole bunch of those really weird images that are WebPs, these things here. If you want these losses ones, a lot of applications don't actually read these things. So you actually have to translate, have to convert them to something different. You could go through and do a whole bunch of images all at once in this application. And it would, you know, it would just do them. Now I will say that it is slow. It is slow. So if I went up here and hit optimize and let it do its thing, it would take quite a long time. I will say that you can go through in the settings and change the number of threads that it will use to do the conversion. I'm not sure that it actually makes any difference. I haven't gone through and done a whole bunch of images. So I don't know if it will actually improve it but it is really good. Now I will say that this is similar to something that we covered a few months ago in one of these videos called conversing. This is not as full-featured as conversing because conversing will allow you to go through and change metadata and all that kind of stuff. This does not do that. All this does is change image and size. That's all it will do or format and size I should say. That's all it does. So that's yoga image optimizer. The third application on this list for this month is not actually an application. It's a website so I'm kind of cheating but they say if you're not cheating you ain't trying. So we'll just ignore the fact that this is not actually something that you can install. The quote unquote application is called snap drop. Now I was looking for something like this because recently I switched to iOS for my main mobile device and for those of you who know you can't actually very easily connect your iPhone to your Linux machine without doing some hocus pocus and it's not a very easy thing to do. So what I needed to do was find a way to transfer files from my Linux machine to my iPhone and that's where snap drop comes in. Because I was looking for something that would kind of emulate airdrop which is Apple's proprietary device to device transfer protocol and that's where I came up with snap drop. Basically what snap drop does is allow you to transfer files from one device to another as long as they're on the same network. And it's really as simple as that. Now it doesn't have to be iOS to a Linux machine. It can be literally any device to any device as long as they both have a web browser and they're on the same network. So I could go through and just drag a file from my computer and it would show up on my iPhone as long as I had the website up on both devices or I could do it vice versa. It doesn't matter and it would like I said it would work on any device that has a web browser. So that is snap drop. Now if you're into hosting things yourself snap drop does have a Docker image that you can host yourself. Now the documentation for learning how to do so is utter garbage. So you're pretty much on your own. If you decide to do that you'd probably have to have quite a bit of expertise in order to actually know how to do it. I do not have the expertise. So I just use the website that snap drop net by the way that's the the link to the website that you'll need to actually open up on both your devices. So that's net drop. Now the fourth app on this list for this month is called Pencela Pen Sela. And I spelled it because I always keep wanting to call it Panacella or some other variation on something else which I don't even know what it is. It's Pencela Pen Sela. And I'm going to show you this but just know that this does not work for me and I'll explain the reason why here in a but overall it's actually a really cool app. So what it is if I open this up here again remembering how to spell it basically what Panacella is I'm going to butcher the name every time is an annotation application. So basically what this does is allows you to draw on the screen. So I can pick a color here. I can pick a line so I can draw a line and I can go through and do let's see a check mark. So here's some check marks. I can do a star. There's some stars. I could do I don't know an arrow. It's you know you take some getting used to and you can text and basically that's what Pen Sela does. Now and then you could go through and hit this screenshot button right up here and it would take a screenshot of what you annotated on your screen. Now it does not work very well in a tiling window manager. That's one thing. It does work but it's not great because it's trying to mess around with the monitors. Right now it's kind of hovering over both monitors. It's kind of a mess in a tiling window manager. It worked fine in terms of the annotation and stuff and the windowing and stuff in a regular desktop environment. I used it in Plasma for a little while. It was fine. The one thing I will say is that if you do not use the conventional places for your pictures folder your pictures directory. So slash home slash username slash pictures. This will not work. So if I actually hit this I'm going to get an error. So this error here basically is just telling me that home slash drmdub slash pictures does not exist and that's because I don't use that location for my pictures directory. I have it in some place else. Now I do have set the xdg directory structure for my actual directory so that the computer really does know where my pictures folder is but whatever reason pansella does not follow those rules. So this doesn't actually work for me which is kind of disappointing because it's kind of cool because you can go through and draw on your screen. It's really neat. I believe that this would work better on a touchscreen device because I think that's what it was meant for but if you can get this to work when you have the proper directory structure it actually is really cool. That's pansella. As with all the rest of these the links will be in the video description where you can download these or use them such as they are. Now the last application on the list for this month is called nimble note and pretty much every month I include a note taking application because I'm always on the hunt for really cool ways of taking notes. I'm pretty much entrenched now into VimWiki but I do enjoy trying out new note applications and when I saw this one come up on its FOSS I believe is where I found this application it caught my attention because it claims to be a keyboard driven note taking application and pretty much anything that's keyboard driven is something that's going to catch my attention because I enjoy using applications that primarily use the keyboard to navigate. So I downloaded it and I was mostly disappointed so I've included it on the list because it is kind of cool but it has some provisos let me just say and I'll cover those at the end but first let's talk about the good stuff. So first you get to notes or create new notes by typing in a name for the note so I've already created one here called new note and it just takes me to a note that I created earlier and this follows the traditional markdown syntax kind of. I say kind of because it's not perfect so it's not it doesn't have multiple levels of like headings this is a heading if I can type and so if I try to do two this is a heading it shows up the same now sometimes markdown requires you to do the hashes at the end as well but that doesn't actually change anything so if it also seems to do odd things with the spaces so you can notice the color change for the text if you don't put a space there and again it doesn't matter how many hashes you put before that it stays basically the same size same text color everything so it doesn't follow markdown completely but it does most of the markdown stuff now it does lists so oops I actually exited this it does list so if I did alt enter it would actually do this checkmark checkbox thing here that's really cool it does the traditional regular list so like dashes or asterisks will actually do a list it'll also do it'll also go through and colorize when you do a numbered list as well the downside is that if I started out a new numbered list here and then a lot of markdown applications I actually go through and once you hit enter it'll put two here automatically and then three four five six uh nimble note does not do that you have to type everything yourself which is uh quite disappointing it also apparently has link capabilities similar to what something like zem wiki would do but or even then wiki I guess but I couldn't get it to work so if you do alt enter on this it's supposed to take me to a new page or something it doesn't so that kind of leads me to the first provides though the documentation for this application is utterly crap it's really really bad this is literally all there is that's literally all there is I mean there's no other documentation out there at all and basically all it does is tell you how to open up a new note and how to do the markdown actions which is basically checkboxes that's literally again all the documentation there is which is disappointing because for keyboard centric note taking application having it so that you can actually you know see all the keyboard shortcuts it's kind of a necessary thing so that's uh that's disappointing now I usually on these application ones I try to keep the positive positively going but this app has been on my list since last month I really wanted to feature it because it's supposed to be really good and it is perfectly workable and if you're into the keyboard centric workflow it does do really good but you're going to have to be mostly on your own in terms of figuring things out because the documentation is trash I will also say if it matters to you this is not an open source application it is proprietary according to its snap store page and that's the third proviso is that this thing here is only available through snaps you cannot download this thing anywhere else so that might be a turnoff for a lot of people I know it would be for me I was very shocked I shocked I say to find out that this is not in the AUR like I don't understand like I was you should have seen my face when I tried to download this from the AUR and it came back package not found like I think this is the first time in like three years of using the AUR that I've not that I found a package it's just not there it's not there and it was very shocking so yes I had to download it from snaps so those are the three provisos like normally I want to be very positive about applications and overall I think this is an application that has a lot of potential but you should know going in those three provisos and I say that just because I really like the word proviso so those are the top five apps of the month for this month and there's some really good stuff there I really really like dialect I like messing around with languages even though I can't speak any of them you know so I can see how that can be really really useful especially seeing how it's a gtk app so if you're on a linux mobile device so if you're on something like a boom to touch and you download that what you can do because it is like responsive or whatever you could actually have this on the go with you and you know when you need to ask someone who only speaks Spanish where the toilet is you can do so so that's really cool that's my favorite one of the month so in the comments below let me know what your favorite one of the month is and if you have any suggestions for applications for future iterations of this series leave those in the comments below but I will not do not leave a link in those comments because YouTube will just delete them and I will never see them so if your comment gets deleted because you put a link in there don't blame me I didn't do it so that is it for this month you can follow me on Twitter at the Linuxcast where you can also submit application suggestions if you want you can support me on patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast before I go I'd like to take a moment to thank my current patrons Devon Chris east coast web gentuus funtude patrick l marcus maiglin jackson eftool steve a mitchell art center merrick camp josh really j dog and the bsd is rock thanks everybody for watching i'll see you next time