So what's new in Talika 0.50? The most important changes have been made to the icons such  as custom icons for the launchers (right click a launcher (pinned app), and select "Change icon)), better default icons, option to use monochrome icons and so on. The "Pin" feature has also received a lot of attention and you now have pin options for pinnable applications, support for pinning apps via drag and drop and better pinning support for OpenOffice and WINE apps.

DockbarX is a taskbar with grouping and group manipulation which comes as a Gnome Panel applet, especially useful on Netbooks

DockBarX Version 0.30 has been released, and it brings window previews (just like Talika - these applications seem to go hand in hand) - feature which is still in beta, but also some other interesting features:

Tint2 is a lightweight panel/taskbar intentionally made for Openbox3, but should also work with other window managers such as Gnome.

Tint2 features:

* panel with taskbar, systray, clock and battery status
* easy to customize : color/transparency on font, icon, border and background
* pager like capability : send task from one workspace to another, switch workspace
* multi-monitor capability : one panel per monitor, show task from current monitor
* customize mouse event
* window manager's menu

Tint2 is very configurable, like I told you above, but this is done via config files meaning you have to use a text editor for customizing basically... everything, which might confuse 'non-geeks', but we will cover a way to do all the configuring via a GUI tool, so keep reading.

Windows 7 comes with a redesigned Taskbar which has a lot of improvements, one of them being the buttons which only show the icons in the taskbar. You can achieve something similar for Windows XP and Vista, by using Taskbaric (thanks to BlogsDNA for the tip), a small program with a simple purpose: to iconize Windows taskbar buttons.

Displaying Program icons instead full program name helps to save real estate of taskbar making is easier to switch between applications.

How to use Taskbaric

Firstly, you need to download Taskbaric and then run the appropriate executable for your Windows (XP or Vista). No installation is required and reverting the changes is really simple: just run the .exe file again. You may want to add the Taskbaric .exe to your startup items. But don't worry, once the program has been started, it won't stay loaded into your computer's memory.

Secondly, you need to run a .reg file created by Vishal which you can download from HERE. The purpose of this registry file is to shrink the buttons to the icon's width. The downloaded archive comes with two .reg files: one for applying the changes and one for reverting so anything you modify can be restored to it's original state!

That's it.

Task Dock Applet for gnome-panel organizes open windows in icons, just like Windows 7. To see what I mean, take a look at the screenshot below:

To install it in Ubuntu, simply download and double click the .deb package from HERE.

For other Linux distributions, download the source files from HERE, then:

1. Untar the archive

2. Navigate from terminal to the carpet

cd taskdock-0.0.1

3. Type

sudo make

4. Restart gnome-panel

killall gnome-panel

5. And finally just add Taskdock to the panel and its working

Previously we had written about a dock application for Windows - Sliderdock and here is another amazing dock application which looks very similar to Mac OSX dock. XWindows is the newest free Windows Vista and XP program of the class Application Launcher and Desktop Organizer (Dock Taskbar). It even works great with Windows 7. XWindows gives better UI experience than most of the other dock applications for Windows. It allows you to view the docs as 2D or 3D and also has the option to add new skins.
XWindows option panel has lots of customizations like size of icons, opacity, positions etc. XWindows Dock does not require a lot of resources and its optimized for memory usage.