Recently I wrote about Synapse, a replacement for GNOME Do. It was excellent. However, it had a weak point - it did not remember my preferred applications. For example, I have both Chromium and Chrome installed. Typing "chrom" always brings up Chromium first instead of Chrome although I always ended up typing an extra "e" and picking Chrome.

No more! With the update Synapse (0.2.2.1) keeps track of the user's most frequently used applications and offers them first. So, no more typing "chrome" to get to Chrome - just typing "ch" is enough now. This is the single most important and useful new feature in Synapse 0.2.2.1.

Synapse 0.2.2.1 also has some other new features. Users can now override the default theme with a custom gtkrc file. Synapse also supports basic transliteration when searching for applications now. This means users no longer need to type accents. An optional application indicator has also been included as well.

In addition to new features, the update brings three new plugins - OpenSearch (used to start a web search from Synapse, currently comes with Google and Google Maps plugins), Locate (runs locate to find files on your filesystem), Gnome screensaver (adds lock screen action).

How To Install Synapse

To install Synaspe in Ubuntu 10.04 and Ubuntu 10.10, open the Terminal and execute the following commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:synapse-core/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update

$ sudo apt-get install synapse

Many of the awesome features in Synapse requires Zeitgeist. So, if you have not installed it, open the Terminal and execute the following commands:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa

$ sudo apt-get update


$ sudo apt-get install zeitgeist-datasource-bzr zeitgeist-datasource-emacs zeitgeist-datasource-eog zeitgeist-datasource-geany zeitgeist-datasource-gedit zeitgeist-datasource-rhythmbox zeitgeist-datasource-totem zeitgeist-datasource-vim